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Nice PR move, tacking onto a lawsuit from a year ago in support of free speech. That aside I personally think Reddit has far more serious speech challenges to

Nice PR move, tacking onto a lawsuit from a year ago in support of free speech. That aside I personally think Reddit has far more serious speech challenges to overcome than Twitter. It's too easy to manipulate certain viewpoint to always appear on the front page. Especially blatant during election years. Too weird for me to visit.

nilkn 6y ago
I enjoy Reddit when logged in and unsubscribed from all the large default subreddits. I’m always shocked at how different it is when I accidentally view it logged out. The home page feels almost like a piece of carefully curated political performance art in order to somehow get a result allegedly from folks across the nation that is so perfectly aligned with a very specific agenda and advertising platform.
- martiuk 6y ago
  It's so different you immediately think it's orchestrated from behind the scenes, other subreddits with politics banned are so much more bearable.
  - foota 6y ago
    I assume you believe it to be left orchestrated. My guess? The overwhelming majority of young people (and people overall, though not by nearly the same margin) are left leaning or very left. It's probably just a demographics thing.
    - tasogare 6y ago
      Sure, bans such as the board dedicated to support the current US president is "due to demographic".
      - sgift 6y ago
        It is due to systematic rule breaking even after multiple warnings. If you break the rules of HN you get banned after a while. And if there were sub-HNs here and one would take almost all the moderation time it wouldn't exist for long. Also, if it is about a board usually called "TD" that one is quarantined, not banned.
    - nilkn 6y ago
      I would argue this is precisely the impression they’re trying to manufacture. There’s a vast and stark difference between the Reddit of today and the Reddit of 2016. The viewpoints of tens or hundreds of millions of people have been systematically removed from the site in the last 4 or so years in one of the most aggressive and vast campaigns of censorship and manipulation I’ve ever personally seen on the internet.
      - creato 6y ago
        Maybe the reddit of 2016 was more manipulated? How would you tell the difference between new manipulation and change of manipulation?
        nilkn 6y ago
        That's really simple in this case. The space of expressible opinions has been strictly contracted. If it had shifted in some other more complex way then I think you could have a point. In this case though the contraction was very clear, rapid, and enforced through a variety of visible and prominent site-level changes (e.g., introducing extreme quarantines or bans of many subreddits or re-engineering the frontpage to hide content [like introducing r/popular, which selectively only shows certain political content]).
    - dextralt 6y ago
      >The overwhelming majority of young people (and people overall, though not by nearly the same margin) are left leaning or very left for some reason that phenomena only manifests itself on heavily moderated platforms. on unmoderated (chans) or barely moderated (youtube) platforms, you get a much more diversity of thought.
      - simlevesque 6y ago
        It's not more diverse on unmoderated platform it's the opposite. Unmoderated platform (like chans) mostly attract those who despise any censorship, that's far from everybody.
        martiuk 6y ago
        It would depend on what you would define as a diverse opinion, problem is who should define that and whether they took their own biases into account.
        Karunamon 6y ago
        It's impossible to have a diverse opinion when the range of acceptable opinions is enforced from on high on threat of banishment. At least the worst that will happen on an average chan is that people will yell at you.
      - sli 6y ago
        And you get a whole lot of people leaving for moderated platforms because they're tired of arguing with white supremacists.
        concordDance 6y ago
        I have never heard of anyone doing this.
        AgentME 6y ago
        I used 4chan a lot and got to know a lot of people of a subcommunity that started there nearly a decade ago, and "4chan has become an alt-right hellhole and I don't go back because of that" became a common enough position among them over the last few years. I get the impression from a few of the progressive online communities I've dipped into that there's a number of ex-4channers that got sick of the culture shift at 4chan, but it's hard to quantify. A lot of people on Mastodon use it specifically because it has more protective rules than Twitter. I don't think people like to talk too much about why they leave online hangouts, because it's like admitting defeat, because people still at the place won't sympathize with you because they either disagree with your criticisms or think you're slandering the place (or else they'd have already left too), and because outsiders who agree with your criticisms of the place may have other criticisms of the place and judge you for being associated with or expecting differently of the place.
    - martiuk 6y ago
      I'm not one for conspiracy theories but if I'm told to watch my unconscious biases in check then maybe social media sites, their admins, and their moderators should do the same in regards to conservative thought on their sites.
      - AgentME 6y ago
        >but if I'm told to watch my unconscious biases in check Assuming this phrase is about biases about race, then this is a dumb comparison. Biases about race and minorities are different than biases about political positions and opinions. Political positions aren't a protected class.
- panpanna 6y ago
  Certain subs are heavily curated. You will immediately get banned if you go against the mods view of the world. And they do this to even the most innocent posts. If you are used to these subs, as soon as you leave your perfect bubble you will see a Reddit full of (to your eyes) lies and deception. Of course the same applies to outsiders visiting your sub, they will be shocked by the amount of lies casually presented as facts. That's why everyone should subscribe to at least two subreddits they don't agree with.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - bitcharmer 6y ago
    I came here to say this. Mods on most major subreddits exercise their own politics and force their views on everyone. What makes matters even worse is that there is a very narrow group of users being mods on the most influential subs. These are perfect conditions for creating world view bubbles and what always baffled me is that reddit admins don't seem to care. It looks like Reddit wants their platform to be like this.
  - throw_m239339 6y ago
    > That's why everyone should subscribe to at least two subreddits they don't agree with. Certain subs will automatically ban you if you ever participate in another sub mods of the former sub do not like. r_offmychest will automatically ban you at the first comment for instance. This very thing does prevent good faith people from participating in subs that are antagonistic. It's against reddit rules but admins do no care. Admins do not care about brigading either (a sub encouraging the harassment of another sub or person), unless some specific subs/users are victim. r_ch* p* tr* ph* * s* regularly engaged in the bullying of users and subs until they attacked the wrong person and got quarantined. I don't care what the rules are, only that they are enforced very differently depending on who violates them and who is the victim.
    - panpanna 6y ago
      > Certain subs will automatically ban you if you... Reddit obviously needs to fix this, that's a whole different problem.
- godzillabrennus 6y ago
  Not to mention that reddit basically pushed the_donald to its own website by removing all the mods and only allowing new ones they help handpick. Which has been zero to the best of my knowledge. I’m actually surprised with how good the software powering theDonald dot win has become. I stalk them to see what kind of bananas they are throwing around and it’s a more pleasant experience than reddit is these days.
  - alwayseasy 6y ago
    It's a monolith in terms of ideology and content, they face no challenges in terms of managing tensions within its community of users.
  - panpanna 6y ago
    To be fair The_Donald was not really the champion of free speach themselves. They did absolutely everything they could to silence anyone who did not 110% agree with their views. This post pretty much sums up T_D: https://www.reddit.com/r/BannedFromThe_Donald/comments/6thnoa/banned_for_linking_a_t_d_post_on_t_d/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BannedFromThe_Donald/comments/6thno...
    - TMWNN 6y ago
      /r/The_Donald did not pretend to be anything it is not. /r/BernieSanders operates in the same way. The problem is when /r/politics, /r/news, /r/worldnews, etc. do so as well.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- raverbashing 6y ago
  Ah yeah, the biggest subs are a mixture of Astroturfing + Eternal September + Power Hungry Mods + (the cheapest form of) Meme Culture I get much more value out of medium to small subs.
ashtonkem 6y ago
That’s certainly a good argument for not using Reddit, but there is absolutely no requirement that Reddit be neutral in the law or in the first amendment.
- syshum 6y ago
  That is the debate over Sec 230 though, with many people saying that if a platform wants to enjoy the immunity granted under sec 230 they need to be neutral, failure to do so means they lose that Sec 230 Immunity. This would mean any moderation makes them liable as a publisher as under current law if you do not have Sec 230 immunity then the only other way to avoid liability to not do any moderation at all of user generated content (or to prohibit user generated content)
  - pjc50 6y ago
    > any moderation makes them liable as a publisher Quite a lot of moderation is required either by law or other forms of liability. And then you have the international jurisdiction question: if a social media platform removes posts to comply with French or German anti-Nazi law, or UK defamation law, does that make them liable under s230?
    - syshum 6y ago
      >> international jurisdiction question: Those should only apply to users accessing from those nations It is a complex issue for a global company for sure, but I do not want the internet to be censored down to the lowest common denominator of Government regulations. A Person in nation X should not have to be censored under the laws of nation Y
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    > with many people saying that if a platform wants to enjoy the immunity granted under sec 230 they need to be neutral, failure to do so means they lose that Sec 230 Immunity. Who's saying that? That's very much not what section 230 says. And as a change to the law to do this would eliminate all social networks (along with newspaper comment sections and similar) it is highly unlikely to ever go anywhere.
Darmody 6y ago
Reddit is the biggest echo champer I've ever seen. You can literally see hundreds of posts and thousand of comments about a certain topic and when you get out, you see that they take the bits of information that pushes their agenda. The last big example I've seen is during the democratic primaries. I didn't really care at all about it but everyday I could see how Bernie was killing it. Then I saw somewhere else that Biden was the candidate getting the most delegates and was probably going to be the nominee. Not a single word about this in none of the main big subreddits.
devilmoon 6y ago
Also consider the fact that 5 mods control 92 of the top 500 subreddits. https://www.reddit.com/r/awfuleverything/comments/gjafqw/5_people_control_92_of_the_top_500_subs_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/awfuleverything/comments/gjafqw/5_p... Now imagine if a handful of people controlled 1/5th of the top 500 twitter accounts, instagram accounts, facebook pages

nilkn 6y ago

I enjoy Reddit when logged in and unsubscribed from all the large default subreddits. I’m always shocked at how different it is when I accidentally view it logged out. The home page feels almost like a piece of carefully curated political performance art in order to somehow get a result allegedly from folks across the nation that is so perfectly aligned with a very specific agenda and advertising platform.

martiuk 6y ago
It's so different you immediately think it's orchestrated from behind the scenes, other subreddits with politics banned are so much more bearable.
- foota 6y ago
  I assume you believe it to be left orchestrated. My guess? The overwhelming majority of young people (and people overall, though not by nearly the same margin) are left leaning or very left. It's probably just a demographics thing.
  - tasogare 6y ago
    Sure, bans such as the board dedicated to support the current US president is "due to demographic".
    - sgift 6y ago
      It is due to systematic rule breaking even after multiple warnings. If you break the rules of HN you get banned after a while. And if there were sub-HNs here and one would take almost all the moderation time it wouldn't exist for long. Also, if it is about a board usually called "TD" that one is quarantined, not banned.
  - nilkn 6y ago
    I would argue this is precisely the impression they’re trying to manufacture. There’s a vast and stark difference between the Reddit of today and the Reddit of 2016. The viewpoints of tens or hundreds of millions of people have been systematically removed from the site in the last 4 or so years in one of the most aggressive and vast campaigns of censorship and manipulation I’ve ever personally seen on the internet.
    - creato 6y ago
      Maybe the reddit of 2016 was more manipulated? How would you tell the difference between new manipulation and change of manipulation?
      - nilkn 6y ago
        That's really simple in this case. The space of expressible opinions has been strictly contracted. If it had shifted in some other more complex way then I think you could have a point. In this case though the contraction was very clear, rapid, and enforced through a variety of visible and prominent site-level changes (e.g., introducing extreme quarantines or bans of many subreddits or re-engineering the frontpage to hide content [like introducing r/popular, which selectively only shows certain political content]).
  - dextralt 6y ago
    >The overwhelming majority of young people (and people overall, though not by nearly the same margin) are left leaning or very left for some reason that phenomena only manifests itself on heavily moderated platforms. on unmoderated (chans) or barely moderated (youtube) platforms, you get a much more diversity of thought.
    - simlevesque 6y ago
      It's not more diverse on unmoderated platform it's the opposite. Unmoderated platform (like chans) mostly attract those who despise any censorship, that's far from everybody.
      - martiuk 6y ago
        It would depend on what you would define as a diverse opinion, problem is who should define that and whether they took their own biases into account.
        Karunamon 6y ago
        It's impossible to have a diverse opinion when the range of acceptable opinions is enforced from on high on threat of banishment. At least the worst that will happen on an average chan is that people will yell at you.
    - sli 6y ago
      And you get a whole lot of people leaving for moderated platforms because they're tired of arguing with white supremacists.
      - concordDance 6y ago
        I have never heard of anyone doing this.
        AgentME 6y ago
        I used 4chan a lot and got to know a lot of people of a subcommunity that started there nearly a decade ago, and "4chan has become an alt-right hellhole and I don't go back because of that" became a common enough position among them over the last few years. I get the impression from a few of the progressive online communities I've dipped into that there's a number of ex-4channers that got sick of the culture shift at 4chan, but it's hard to quantify. A lot of people on Mastodon use it specifically because it has more protective rules than Twitter. I don't think people like to talk too much about why they leave online hangouts, because it's like admitting defeat, because people still at the place won't sympathize with you because they either disagree with your criticisms or think you're slandering the place (or else they'd have already left too), and because outsiders who agree with your criticisms of the place may have other criticisms of the place and judge you for being associated with or expecting differently of the place.
  - martiuk 6y ago
    I'm not one for conspiracy theories but if I'm told to watch my unconscious biases in check then maybe social media sites, their admins, and their moderators should do the same in regards to conservative thought on their sites.
    - AgentME 6y ago
      >but if I'm told to watch my unconscious biases in check Assuming this phrase is about biases about race, then this is a dumb comparison. Biases about race and minorities are different than biases about political positions and opinions. Political positions aren't a protected class.
panpanna 6y ago
Certain subs are heavily curated. You will immediately get banned if you go against the mods view of the world. And they do this to even the most innocent posts. If you are used to these subs, as soon as you leave your perfect bubble you will see a Reddit full of (to your eyes) lies and deception. Of course the same applies to outsiders visiting your sub, they will be shocked by the amount of lies casually presented as facts. That's why everyone should subscribe to at least two subreddits they don't agree with.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bitcharmer 6y ago
  I came here to say this. Mods on most major subreddits exercise their own politics and force their views on everyone. What makes matters even worse is that there is a very narrow group of users being mods on the most influential subs. These are perfect conditions for creating world view bubbles and what always baffled me is that reddit admins don't seem to care. It looks like Reddit wants their platform to be like this.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  > That's why everyone should subscribe to at least two subreddits they don't agree with. Certain subs will automatically ban you if you ever participate in another sub mods of the former sub do not like. r_offmychest will automatically ban you at the first comment for instance. This very thing does prevent good faith people from participating in subs that are antagonistic. It's against reddit rules but admins do no care. Admins do not care about brigading either (a sub encouraging the harassment of another sub or person), unless some specific subs/users are victim. r_ch* p* tr* ph* * s* regularly engaged in the bullying of users and subs until they attacked the wrong person and got quarantined. I don't care what the rules are, only that they are enforced very differently depending on who violates them and who is the victim.
  - panpanna 6y ago
    > Certain subs will automatically ban you if you... Reddit obviously needs to fix this, that's a whole different problem.
godzillabrennus 6y ago
Not to mention that reddit basically pushed the_donald to its own website by removing all the mods and only allowing new ones they help handpick. Which has been zero to the best of my knowledge. I’m actually surprised with how good the software powering theDonald dot win has become. I stalk them to see what kind of bananas they are throwing around and it’s a more pleasant experience than reddit is these days.
- alwayseasy 6y ago
  It's a monolith in terms of ideology and content, they face no challenges in terms of managing tensions within its community of users.
- panpanna 6y ago
  To be fair The_Donald was not really the champion of free speach themselves. They did absolutely everything they could to silence anyone who did not 110% agree with their views. This post pretty much sums up T_D: https://www.reddit.com/r/BannedFromThe_Donald/comments/6thnoa/banned_for_linking_a_t_d_post_on_t_d/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BannedFromThe_Donald/comments/6thno...
  - TMWNN 6y ago
    /r/The_Donald did not pretend to be anything it is not. /r/BernieSanders operates in the same way. The problem is when /r/politics, /r/news, /r/worldnews, etc. do so as well.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
raverbashing 6y ago
Ah yeah, the biggest subs are a mixture of Astroturfing + Eternal September + Power Hungry Mods + (the cheapest form of) Meme Culture I get much more value out of medium to small subs.

ashtonkem 6y ago

That’s certainly a good argument for not using Reddit, but there is absolutely no requirement that Reddit be neutral in the law or in the first amendment.

syshum 6y ago
That is the debate over Sec 230 though, with many people saying that if a platform wants to enjoy the immunity granted under sec 230 they need to be neutral, failure to do so means they lose that Sec 230 Immunity. This would mean any moderation makes them liable as a publisher as under current law if you do not have Sec 230 immunity then the only other way to avoid liability to not do any moderation at all of user generated content (or to prohibit user generated content)
- pjc50 6y ago
  > any moderation makes them liable as a publisher Quite a lot of moderation is required either by law or other forms of liability. And then you have the international jurisdiction question: if a social media platform removes posts to comply with French or German anti-Nazi law, or UK defamation law, does that make them liable under s230?
  - syshum 6y ago
    >> international jurisdiction question: Those should only apply to users accessing from those nations It is a complex issue for a global company for sure, but I do not want the internet to be censored down to the lowest common denominator of Government regulations. A Person in nation X should not have to be censored under the laws of nation Y
- rsynnott 6y ago
  > with many people saying that if a platform wants to enjoy the immunity granted under sec 230 they need to be neutral, failure to do so means they lose that Sec 230 Immunity. Who's saying that? That's very much not what section 230 says. And as a change to the law to do this would eliminate all social networks (along with newspaper comment sections and similar) it is highly unlikely to ever go anywhere.

Darmody 6y ago

Reddit is the biggest echo champer I've ever seen. You can literally see hundreds of posts and thousand of comments about a certain topic and when you get out, you see that they take the bits of information that pushes their agenda. The last big example I've seen is during the democratic primaries. I didn't really care at all about it but everyday I could see how Bernie was killing it. Then I saw somewhere else that Biden was the candidate getting the most delegates and was probably going to be the nominee. Not a single word about this in none of the main big subreddits.

devilmoon 6y ago

Also consider the fact that 5 mods control 92 of the top 500 subreddits. https://www.reddit.com/r/awfuleverything/comments/gjafqw/5_people_control_92_of_the_top_500_subs_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/awfuleverything/comments/gjafqw/5_p... Now imagine if a handful of people controlled 1/5th of the top 500 twitter accounts, instagram accounts, facebook pages