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Reddit mods wantonly abuse their power and I'm not even talking about politics. Ever been to r/science? 8/10 comments are deleted and those posts can't be read

Reddit mods wantonly abuse their power and I'm not even talking about politics. Ever been to r/science? 8/10 comments are deleted and those posts can't be read ever again (I'm understating that number, if anything). Honestly, half the reason I come here is because you can still view dead comments - censorship is a surefire way to get me to leave your community.

hart_russell 6y ago
Agreed. I hope hacker news doesn't become what reddit became. Contrary to the link, Reddit admins/mods actively police its content to be left leaning. Silencing/hiding content has the opposite intended effect on those being silenced, to those wondering why it's a bad thing.
- JoeSmithson 6y ago
  The most popular mod teams are almost universally the ones with the most aggressive moderation policies. This include /r/the_donald. The subreddits with laissez-faire moderation policies invariably get taken over by nasty interactions.
- hckr_news 6y ago
  Right wing discourse tends to incite racism, violence and hate against minority groups and people of color. How do you moderate such without regular mod teams intervening, or users moderating each other if you want to provide a welcoming environment?
renewiltord 6y ago
It's only a UI problem that displays the deleted threads with the deleted annotation. In truth, that sub is better for it. I'm sure everyone wants to share that their grandma doesn't follow the pattern in a paper and everyone wants to enlighten us about correlation and causation and everyone wants to tell us what sample size is reasonable off the top of their heads but it's sooo boring to read that.
mcintyre1994 6y ago
There used to be a bunch of sites that could display deleted comments but they all seemed to stop working at some point.
attilakun 6y ago
While I'm sure accidents happen, many of those comments are deleted because they are joke comments/shitposts not pertaining to science. In my experience, that kind of content is not tolerated on HN either, probably for the better.
- Sharlin 6y ago
  Indeed. If HN were to become as popular as Reddit, and wanted to retain the current quality of discourse, you can bet that the mods would have to delete 80% of comments as well.
chomp 6y ago
>Ever been to r/science? Bad example - people frequently go to r/science posts when they hit the front page and toss in non-scientific anecdotal evidence, or they will argue with the post using bad science, or they will offer their non-scientific 2 cents on the politics of a study. The reason why content-heavy subs r/science and r/AskHistorians haven't devolved into the cesspool that is the rest of Reddit is specifically because they keep everyone on topic. You know, actually moderating the discussion.
- Sharlin 6y ago
  Indeed. Hitting the front page is really a punishment to any subreddit that desires to maintain high-quality discussion.
thelean12 6y ago
Honestly, the number of deleted comments on r/science is probably a good representation for how garbage most comments on reddit are. The main rule that gets comments deleted: "Comments that only rely on a user's non-professional anecdotal evidence to confirm or refute a study will be removed". It's just not useful to have those types of comments on a science based thread. Of course, it's hard to audit the moderators. We don't know if they're deleting comments outside of their rules as well.
forbiddenlake 6y ago
> Ever been to r/science? 8/10 comments are deleted and those posts can't be read ever again Note that this is clearly spelled out in the subreddit rules, and is by design. 8/10 comments on reddit as a whole are jokes, anecdotes, off topic, or simply low quality. /r/science tries to promote high-quality discussion of actual science, does so by heavy moderation, and doesn't pretend they're not deleting most comments. Personally, I am very happy all the cruft is deleted there. I'm not saying there's no abuse of power, but /r/science is bad example to put forward when the rules are clearly spelled out and enforced.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  > 8/10 comments on reddit as a whole are jokes, anecdotes, off topic, or simply low quality. I would guess that is a significant underestimate. I had one post become reasonably popular, and I was amazed at how awful, low quality, and incredibly redundant the replies were. 99% of all the top level replies were some version of the same low-effort comment.
  - function_seven 6y ago
    This is what I miss from the old Slashdot. There you didn't just up- or down-vote comments. You specified if it was "funny" or "insightful" or "redundant" etc. [0] I could then filter comments by what I was looking for. Between that and the meta-moderation, they did a great job. I would love to see something similar on reddit. Instead of mindless updoots. Or maybe let me filter out comments that aren't at least n characters long? (Or, maybe train a classifier to detect puns and hide them :) [0] https://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml https://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml
    - dunnevens 6y ago
      I liked the old Slashdot moderation system. I wonder how it would scale to Reddit's traffic. My gut feeling is that it wouldn't scale well at all, but I could easily be wrong about that. The biggest problem would be bad actors. Internet discussions in the late 90's probably had more good faith participants. People chosen for moderation would be more likely to take it seriously. In ways both good and bad, the culture was very different then. I (possibly naively) still think the majority of people online are acting in good faith according to whatever they believe. But, with the massive online population increase comes an increase in the absolute numbers of people acting in bad faith. Even if they're still a small percentage of the whole. A Slashdot moderation system would give those trolls, bots, and astroturfers some considerable power to shape the direction of a discussion. Probably would increase the number of bot or sockpuppet accounts in order to snag a greater percentage of the randomly assigned moderation slots. But, that's just my assumption. Would be interesting to see it tried as an experiment. Maybe for the next Reddit April Fool's project.
Sharlin 6y ago
The best subreddits are those that are either a) very tightly moderated or b) obscure enough for the Eternal September not (yet) having happened to them. Most of the rest of the content is extremely low quality.
- jimbob45 6y ago
  4chan only removes illegal content and I enjoy it just fine. Reddit’s voting system pushes down low-quality content well enough on its own.
  - Sharlin 6y ago
    Well, good for you! Myself, I enjoy places like r/AskHistorians or r/sex which absolutely would not exist in their present high-quality form without very active moderation.
  - ddoolin 6y ago
    I completely disagree with your latter statement. Redditors constantly push garbage replies to the top of nearly every post. So, so often I come across top comments which are attempted witty one-liners which contribute next to nothing are followed by _tons_ of equally useless comments OR it is clear the top comments didn't read the article or are pushing their anecdotes as evidence to the contrary, etc (the irony of that is not lost on me right now). I don't think all forums need to operate the same, and it's beneficial that they don't. There should be places for people to say whatever the heck they want, and places that are moderately moderated (heh) and places that are tightly moderated.
  - a_t48 6y ago
    4chan /b/ only removes illegal content. The rest of the sections are filtered and restricted by topic.
saos 6y ago
Woah. Agreed. Reddit could do way more in that area.
tenebrisalietum 6y ago
> Who still uses reddit? Any "top-level" subreddit that is a single-word topic becomes overrun with too many people and also subject to Reddit cultural enforcement, like r/news, r/science, r/pics, etc. If your experience in Reddit is formed mostly by r/all, the popular subreddits, or browsing defaults, you'll suffer.
dmoy 6y ago
I don't moderate r/science, but I do help moderate a pretty big sub that is unrelated to politics that similarly tries with varying success to be polite and on topic There's a lot of bot and other obvious spam that we catch with programmatic moderation The vast majority of comments we manually remove fall into one of four categories: * Stuff that is just random off topic, nothing to do with the sub * Stuff we redirect to another sub (politics, relationships, etc) * Stuff that is scammy, or straight up soliciting * Stuff that is outright insulting ad hominems. The bad end of this category makes you lose faith in humanity, so you kinda have to turn off your soul when moderating. So if I had to guess, a good chunk of those deleted r/science comments aren't just "scientific opion with no basis" or "flat earth!", but also things closer the form " \\\\ you \\\\ing \\\\, your \\\\ing mother too, I hope you all \\\\ing burn in hell you \\\\ \\\\\* \\\\\*".

hart_russell 6y ago

Agreed. I hope hacker news doesn't become what reddit became. Contrary to the link, Reddit admins/mods actively police its content to be left leaning. Silencing/hiding content has the opposite intended effect on those being silenced, to those wondering why it's a bad thing.

JoeSmithson 6y ago
The most popular mod teams are almost universally the ones with the most aggressive moderation policies. This include /r/the_donald. The subreddits with laissez-faire moderation policies invariably get taken over by nasty interactions.
hckr_news 6y ago
Right wing discourse tends to incite racism, violence and hate against minority groups and people of color. How do you moderate such without regular mod teams intervening, or users moderating each other if you want to provide a welcoming environment?

renewiltord 6y ago

It's only a UI problem that displays the deleted threads with the deleted annotation. In truth, that sub is better for it. I'm sure everyone wants to share that their grandma doesn't follow the pattern in a paper and everyone wants to enlighten us about correlation and causation and everyone wants to tell us what sample size is reasonable off the top of their heads but it's sooo boring to read that.

mcintyre1994 6y ago

There used to be a bunch of sites that could display deleted comments but they all seemed to stop working at some point.

attilakun 6y ago

While I'm sure accidents happen, many of those comments are deleted because they are joke comments/shitposts not pertaining to science. In my experience, that kind of content is not tolerated on HN either, probably for the better.

Sharlin 6y ago
Indeed. If HN were to become as popular as Reddit, and wanted to retain the current quality of discourse, you can bet that the mods would have to delete 80% of comments as well.

chomp 6y ago

>Ever been to r/science? Bad example - people frequently go to r/science posts when they hit the front page and toss in non-scientific anecdotal evidence, or they will argue with the post using bad science, or they will offer their non-scientific 2 cents on the politics of a study. The reason why content-heavy subs r/science and r/AskHistorians haven't devolved into the cesspool that is the rest of Reddit is specifically because they keep everyone on topic. You know, actually moderating the discussion.

Sharlin 6y ago
Indeed. Hitting the front page is really a punishment to any subreddit that desires to maintain high-quality discussion.

thelean12 6y ago

Honestly, the number of deleted comments on r/science is probably a good representation for how garbage most comments on reddit are. The main rule that gets comments deleted: "Comments that only rely on a user's non-professional anecdotal evidence to confirm or refute a study will be removed". It's just not useful to have those types of comments on a science based thread. Of course, it's hard to audit the moderators. We don't know if they're deleting comments outside of their rules as well.

forbiddenlake 6y ago

> Ever been to r/science? 8/10 comments are deleted and those posts can't be read ever again Note that this is clearly spelled out in the subreddit rules, and is by design. 8/10 comments on reddit as a whole are jokes, anecdotes, off topic, or simply low quality. /r/science tries to promote high-quality discussion of actual science, does so by heavy moderation, and doesn't pretend they're not deleting most comments. Personally, I am very happy all the cruft is deleted there. I'm not saying there's no abuse of power, but /r/science is bad example to put forward when the rules are clearly spelled out and enforced.

rootusrootus 6y ago
> 8/10 comments on reddit as a whole are jokes, anecdotes, off topic, or simply low quality. I would guess that is a significant underestimate. I had one post become reasonably popular, and I was amazed at how awful, low quality, and incredibly redundant the replies were. 99% of all the top level replies were some version of the same low-effort comment.
- function_seven 6y ago
  This is what I miss from the old Slashdot. There you didn't just up- or down-vote comments. You specified if it was "funny" or "insightful" or "redundant" etc. [0] I could then filter comments by what I was looking for. Between that and the meta-moderation, they did a great job. I would love to see something similar on reddit. Instead of mindless updoots. Or maybe let me filter out comments that aren't at least n characters long? (Or, maybe train a classifier to detect puns and hide them :) [0] https://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml https://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml
  - dunnevens 6y ago
    I liked the old Slashdot moderation system. I wonder how it would scale to Reddit's traffic. My gut feeling is that it wouldn't scale well at all, but I could easily be wrong about that. The biggest problem would be bad actors. Internet discussions in the late 90's probably had more good faith participants. People chosen for moderation would be more likely to take it seriously. In ways both good and bad, the culture was very different then. I (possibly naively) still think the majority of people online are acting in good faith according to whatever they believe. But, with the massive online population increase comes an increase in the absolute numbers of people acting in bad faith. Even if they're still a small percentage of the whole. A Slashdot moderation system would give those trolls, bots, and astroturfers some considerable power to shape the direction of a discussion. Probably would increase the number of bot or sockpuppet accounts in order to snag a greater percentage of the randomly assigned moderation slots. But, that's just my assumption. Would be interesting to see it tried as an experiment. Maybe for the next Reddit April Fool's project.

Sharlin 6y ago

The best subreddits are those that are either a) very tightly moderated or b) obscure enough for the Eternal September not (yet) having happened to them. Most of the rest of the content is extremely low quality.

jimbob45 6y ago
4chan only removes illegal content and I enjoy it just fine. Reddit’s voting system pushes down low-quality content well enough on its own.
- Sharlin 6y ago
  Well, good for you! Myself, I enjoy places like r/AskHistorians or r/sex which absolutely would not exist in their present high-quality form without very active moderation.
- ddoolin 6y ago
  I completely disagree with your latter statement. Redditors constantly push garbage replies to the top of nearly every post. So, so often I come across top comments which are attempted witty one-liners which contribute next to nothing are followed by _tons_ of equally useless comments OR it is clear the top comments didn't read the article or are pushing their anecdotes as evidence to the contrary, etc (the irony of that is not lost on me right now). I don't think all forums need to operate the same, and it's beneficial that they don't. There should be places for people to say whatever the heck they want, and places that are moderately moderated (heh) and places that are tightly moderated.
- a_t48 6y ago
  4chan /b/ only removes illegal content. The rest of the sections are filtered and restricted by topic.

saos 6y ago

Woah. Agreed. Reddit could do way more in that area.

tenebrisalietum 6y ago

> Who still uses reddit? Any "top-level" subreddit that is a single-word topic becomes overrun with too many people and also subject to Reddit cultural enforcement, like r/news, r/science, r/pics, etc. If your experience in Reddit is formed mostly by r/all, the popular subreddits, or browsing defaults, you'll suffer.

dmoy 6y ago

I don't moderate r/science, but I do help moderate a pretty big sub that is unrelated to politics that similarly tries with varying success to be polite and on topic There's a lot of bot and other obvious spam that we catch with programmatic moderation The vast majority of comments we manually remove fall into one of four categories: * Stuff that is just random off topic, nothing to do with the sub * Stuff we redirect to another sub (politics, relationships, etc) * Stuff that is scammy, or straight up soliciting * Stuff that is outright insulting ad hominems. The bad end of this category makes you lose faith in humanity, so you kinda have to turn off your soul when moderating. So if I had to guess, a good chunk of those deleted r/science comments aren't just "scientific opion with no basis" or "flat earth!", but also things closer the form " \\\\ you \\\\ing \\\\, your \\\\ing mother too, I hope you all \\\\ing burn in hell you \\\\ \\\\\* \\\\\*".