57 ms·

Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use. There is con

by ve55 6y ago

Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use. There is constantly tremendous pressure on you to perform opposing actions, and even making no decision at all will cause you significant mental stress and harassment, regardles of what the issue is. You have to pick who you want to cave to, and to what extent, and no matter how good of a job you try to do, a lot of people will really really hate you. This is even more apparent when you see that Reddit has been taking action against a lot more subreddits recently, some of which are listed in the article, and many of which clearly have little to do with the president. The attitude of some of these communities may be abhorrent, but they are still communities, and people do not react well to their communities being deleted, whether a company had the legal authority to, or was justified in doing so, or not. It's very tough and I wish that we didn't have to go through these things to begin with, and could have more federated and decentralized platforms, or at least more client-side filtering inside of centralization curation. I can always dream.

duxup 6y ago
Would something decentralized help? I don't think people want that. The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc. Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content? I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. The sheer volume of users at its height seemed to involve a huge amount of brand new accounts you never saw again / never posted again (except when they show up as a group again), and etc. Or those without brand new accounts show up and post strange dishonest lead in type posts that sort of try to lead folks down a bigoted path ... that you can blatantly see in their post history. So you'd be in your other community and one day they all show up and down votes and the vitriol begins... it was no mystery that this happened, it was spoken of openly in The_Donald for a time. Who wants to deal with that?
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > So you'd be in your other community and one day I don't think so? So if TD was a mastodon community, many others would blacklist their content, but unless members of TD go and make accounts elsewhere that'd be the extent of it, no?
  - ryankemper 6y ago
    I believe they mean other communities in the sense of "other subreddits", although I can't speak for them.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      Maybe? But we're in a subthread about decentralized solutions, so I feel like it makes sense.
  - floatingatoll 6y ago
    No, they send 'envoys' to other social media sites to argue with and harass those who speak up against them anywhere on the Internet. Think "flash mob" crossed with "sealioning^", and look to Gamergate for being first to that particular line. For example, there's a lot of green accounts posting comments here about where to find their new community. ^ Sealioning: https://wondermark.com/1k62/ https://wondermark.com/1k62/
    - Jetrel 6y ago
      That's honestly one of the Big Questions™ about stuff like Mastodon; is how resilient it is against that sort of behaviour. On a lot of levels, it seems to be designed to allow multiple groups to share blacklists, so that if a given target is a bad actor anywhere, as long as other groups trust the group they initially burned, word is allowed to get around and close the door in their face before they even say a word somewhere else. That's really the sign of our times when it comes to internet communities - almost all communities have this "innocent until proven guilty" stance for random strangers. Having been a moderator before on at least one internet community, it's almost like you're a police detective "building a case". You don't just get a whiff of "gee, this person's probably acting in bad faith, let's just ban them" - you have to gradually build up a strong dossier of sorts proving that they're genuinely bad, otherwise (at least in the old-school communities I grew up in) it reflects extremely poorly on you. But because of this, they're susceptible to all sorts of really rudimentary social hack vectors, some almost feeling as silly as "the same guy coming back five minutes later wearing a Groucho Marx mask and a slightly altered name - and fooling everyone". ----------- I feel like that's really the novel thing about Mastodon et al - being able to ditch these social norms lets people unload a whole raft of scorched earth tools - like pre-emptive IP bans that follow people around and are in place before they even arrive. They're dangerous tools - we could easily make ourselves susceptible to attacks where trolls get people kicked out of their own communities by impersonating them elsewhere, but it feels like the pendulum's been swung way to far in the "gentle and understanding" direction for decades, now.
- ryankemper 6y ago
  > I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. It was very clearly a real community, as you can see evidence from the fact that they migrated to thedonald.win when Reddit made it clear that they wouldn't be treated fairly. > So you'd be in your other community and one day they all show up and down votes and the vitriol begins... it was no mystery that this happened, it was spoken of openly in The_Donald for a time. > Who wants to deal with that? And yet Reddit happily ignores vote brigading and other negative externalities from any subreddit that toes their party line, so it seems bizarre to single T_D out. And as far as I know that wasn't the reason Reddit gave, rather they said something about supporting violence which in my opinion was a pretty clear "we're fishing for a made up reason that lets us boot you guys"
  - spaced-out 6y ago
    >And yet Reddit happily ignores vote brigading and other negative externalities from any subreddit that toes their party line, so it seems bizarre to single T_D out Do you have evidence for this, or is it just your gut feeling?
    - simple_phrases 6y ago
      I am a member of several non-conservative political and non-political groups that were banned because of the bad behavior of members of those subreddits. Users of The_Donald regularly got away with behavior that got other communities wiped off of Reddit entirely.
    - 1MachineElf 6y ago
      r/AHS staged a massive public brigading campaign in 2018 to get as many right-wing subreddits banned as possible.
      - dlp211 6y ago
        > r/AHS staged a massive public brigading campaign in 2018 to get many HATE subreddits banned. FTFY.
- jlkuester7 6y ago
  IMHO decentralization (via federated protocols) is the most viable option here. Taking Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/) as an example, people are able to connect globally with each other, but you also have a moderation framework that allows for true decentralized control over content. You can join an instance with moderation policies that align with your ideals or even host your own instance.
  - deegles 6y ago
    Who does the moderation? Some really messed up stuff gets uploaded to basically every social media platform [0] and I sure as hell do not want to deal with that. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
    - numpad0 6y ago
      It’s server admins’ responsibility, so if it’s run by individuals the admin bans when he has time, if it’s run by a company then it’s done at company expense, and if moderation standards of two instances conflict then either operator takes it as offense and blacklist the other one. My understanding of Mastodon federation is that the Europe/American instances generally play along, some alt-rights oriented are cut off, and then there is group of predominantly Japanese instances running incompatible legal ideology on completely incompatible language so European admins generally reject those as horrible dark corners of internet(?)
  - berkes 6y ago
    In addition, mastodon, and even the protocol, has a lot in place to mitigate targeted harassment by a community. Individual Instance blocks, where a user can block an entire instance are in place. Instance blocks on your instance, where an admin blocks another instance for all the users of that instance. And, community driven, blacklists where an admin can copy paste from. Even more interesting, is that some instances block any instance that in themselves don't block another instance. In practice, this means that if you don't block Gab, there are a lot of instances that don't want to talk to you. This works. This gives people the freedom to pick and choose or to move somewhere where they have more or less freedom to listen to others.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  > I don't think people want that. The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc. > Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content? No, but I think people want equal, consistent, and predictable enforcement. Notably, lots of other communities are allowed to exist despite having much more and more overt bigotry including celebrations of political violence and even concerted attempts to slander people and get them fired or harassed. The difference is the groups they target and the transparently BS justifications for targeting them ("well actually, racism doesn't mean 'hating a person or group because of their race'" or something like that).
  - duxup 6y ago
    >lots of other communities are allowed to exist despite having much more and more overt bigotry including celebrations of political violence I would argue that was what TD was until very recently.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      That's the point. Other communities are worse than TD and go reprimanded. And it's not just communities like TD; people are canceled, terminated, etc for completely not racist offenses such as "making an OK symbol by accident" or "standing next to a woman who wrongly suggested a minority person was vandalizing a store" or "citing a prominent Black academic's research on nonviolent-vs-violent protests" or "publishing an interview wherein a Black man says that he wishes there was more concern for crime problems in predominately Black communities", or "publishing an op ed from a US senator that expresses a viewpoint shared by more than 50% of the US public", or etc. Meanwhile people can go on years-long racist tirades on Twitter and be promoted into the NYT or say things like "literally all members of $RACE are irredeemably evil" in a book and hit the top of the Amazon and NYT best-sellers list and get diversity consulting gigs all over the country. There aren't words to describe how far beyond parody these double standards have become. EDIT: That's a lot of downvotes. I'd be really interested to hear what specifically people disagree with. Do you contest my assertion that a double standard exists? Or maybe you don't agree with my negative characterization of TD? Or do you contest that the implication that double standards (in general or this one in particular) is morally wrong? Let's talk about it (leave the downvotes by all means, but let's have a productive discussion).
- hinkley 6y ago
  > Would something decentralized help? I've been thinking about this a bit lately, and I don't see how. People are going to game the system, and decentralization just means they can play the game for longer, or in all new ways. How do you establish a pattern of bad behavior by a person if that data is balkanized across a hundred independent nodes? They can feel out the line between ban-worthy and nuisance and if they happen to overstep a little bit a few times, they can still annoy 90% of the userbase. You have to have centralized moderation information and infrastructure. People who don't want to be moderated, therefore, don't want this kind of decentralized system, and the maintainers would be fools to offer it. What they want is their own system, but someone else to do the work. An open-source Reddit engine, perhaps. When they discover how expensive it is to run, especially with people acting up, then a few of them may become self-aware.
- three_seagrass 6y ago
  Anything decentralized will create a vacuum of power to be filled by rational actors. Kind of like how Bitcoin is decentralized but controlled by a handful of miners on China.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
    Is email controlled by Google and Yahoo?
    - new2628 6y ago
      No, only by Google.
      - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
        Email is not controlled by Google. There is myriad of other big players in the field, plus you can get an email server on your own domain up and running in ~ 5 minutes
        belorn 6y ago
        Email is controlled through gmail in the same way as webdesign is controlled by SEO directed towards google search. People need to access the users on the google platform, and google sets the terms for that. That is, if you want your email to work you got to play by the rules dictated by google or a very large portion of all email will go away into a black hole.
        Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
        If Google will start blocking random non-spammy domains from exchanging mail with Gmail users, it not end well for Google and their mail platform.
        teddyh 6y ago
- jerf 6y ago
  "Would something decentralized help?" Not directly; I'm increasingly thinking centralization is not the problem. The problem is size. The intersection of "things that everyone agrees are acceptable" goes to zero as the size of the community increases, and while communities have strong selection effects that prevent them from being anything like "a uniformly random selection of people slammed together", regression to the mean means that you get there as size goes into the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions. I don't think there's a solution, because no matter what technical tools you put into place, you can't get around the fact the people don't agree about what's acceptable. What we need is a diaspora back into a community structure where HN would be just about the largest sort of community out there, instead of still a relatively small one. Decentralized tools could help with that, but if "decentralization" just ends up building "decentralized" communities trying to contain a million people in the "same place" you'll just get the same problems again. It's kinda orthogonal. "Reddit, but once a community hits 10,000 people it becomes progressively harder to join" would quite possibly work fine, for instance. (I envision something like an exponentially-growing waiting list delay, such that getting to even 11,000 users would be difficult.) Obviously, legislating some sort of limit here is virtually impossible. Somehow the technical structures need to support it and afford communities in the hundreds to low thousands, but somehow make it inconvenient to grow beyond that. Or afford more complicated structures where membership is not a binary status. (A social graph would work, if it wasn't being run by an entity that desires to aggregate people together more to more effectively advertise at them. Or more accurately, a set of graphs.)
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    I would put it as "the problem is society" essentially as opposed to size per se. I personally doubt that what is essentially a forcibly sharded technical approach akin to what MMOs did to deal with larger loads and content saturation would be useful. Content depends upon O(n) users subdividing it would reduce the utility and make it lose out and worse breed a new tribalism. Combine that with side channels and I am skeptical it would get better.
    - jerf 6y ago
      It doesn't have to be a "forcible shard". In fact I think that's not terribly effective and there's better ways to do it. Weblogs did it fairly well, way back when. Also, don't forget that you don't belong to one community; it's not like you log in one day and get assigned to your immutable chunk of the internet. You wander around the read versions of various communities, pick a couple of communities you invest it, pick several more to half-follow, get tired of the abuse in one and switch to another, meet someone in real life who encourages you to join another community, and so on. Basically, the sort of "tribalism" that you'd encounter is whatever "tribalism" you associate with HN, because the structure I describe already half-exists, scrounging around the remnants from reddit and Facebook in tens of thousands of forums and active blogs and other such things. I don't think it produces any more or less "tribalism" than you get from anything else.
- lumberingjack 6y ago
  >The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites Like none one the cnn "news" stories on /world news aren't fake
  - duxup 6y ago
    I mean websites / twitter accounts that put out actual fake news as a matter of process. I wasn't thinking of any of the major media outlets when I noted that.
- usefulcat 6y ago
  > I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. The sheer volume of users at its height seemed to involve a huge amount of brand new accounts you never saw again / never posted again (except when they show up as a group again), and etc. Or those without brand new accounts show up and post strange dishonest lead in type posts that sort of try to lead folks down a bigoted path ... that you can blatantly see in their post history. This is very much a side note, but I do wonder what sorts of things would be enabled with more visibility into this kind of information. For example, average and median ages of all accounts in a thread or subthread. Per-user visualizations of posting histories (time of day, subreddit, etc). Information that would enable automated correlation (by time or subject) of posts from different accounts. Stuff like that. I'm sure they must have something internally that does at least some of the above.
  - alexandercrohde 6y ago
    As soon as those metrics are exposed though, people will start hacking them by purchasing older accounts, etc.
    - usefulcat 6y ago
      ..which seems like it would make it more expensive to achieve the same level of credibility via such 'fake' accounts. Seems like an improvement to me.
    - duxup 6y ago
      A less common, but I'm seeing more frequent tacit are user accounts where they delete their posts after X time so the account looks like it has been around, but you've no idea where / what was posted. Those users almost always head down the rabbit hole after a few posts....
      - HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
        You can try something pushshift.io
    - neop1x 6y ago
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content? What's wrong with a decentralized "platform" that works like the web? Anybody, right now, can submit some bigoted trolling to HN. It'll get flagged and killed in ten seconds. And then people don't much bother because there's no advantage in immediate failure. You can have a "platform" that shares formats and protocols and supports shared links but has independently-moderated subsections, and then the contents of each one is reflected in how it's moderated.
- zackees 6y ago
  NO. Fake news is what the MSM does and it's supported by big tech. That's why I blew the whistle on Google and exposed their censorship regime to the whole world to see: https://www.zachvorhies.com https://www.zachvorhies.com
- dmoy 6y ago
  > The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc. Yea, I gotta say, having to previously deal with r/The_Donald brigades on another large subreddit was incredibly annoying and depressing. Can't speak to spreading fake news, but massive influxes of r/The_Donald users spamming truly vile stuff in an ostensibly non-political sub really sucked (as a moderator, to clean up). The only thing that works imo is fairly strict moderation, or extremely niche/small communities. Everything else just gets swamped by toxicity. Decentralized vs centralized isn't really the right dimension to look at I think. And as soon as your small community grows... the trolls come a-knocking.
  - ngold 6y ago
    Gotta respect the iron fist of /r/askhistorians. Probably the best sub on reddit.
    - duxup 6y ago
      The sound of folks bemoaning getting moderated there is music to my hears. No people, we want someone who KNOWS, not just saw something on the Discovery Channel this one time ... it's such a refreshing change from the magical internet experts that come and go.
    - dmoy 6y ago
      Yea wow, I don't moderate r/askhistorians but rather a different sub, and we sometimes pride ourselves on keeping this relatively clean. But then I stumble across r/askhistorians again and remember that no, no we don't have things under control by comparison. We can barely keep a lid on the vitriol and toxicity, and some of the more blatantly false/scammy advice. r/askhistorians is a whole 'nother level. Sometimes I honestly wish hackernews was run more like r/askhistorians. Too many people here on hn talk a lot of shit on stuff they don't really know much about beyond a cursory understanding (I'm probably guilty myself).
      - vikramkr 6y ago
        What do they do well that can be transferred without basically asking the mods to do more work? Isn't it just a manpower thing? Or do they have a way of verifying expertise etc so you know you're getting answers from experts without having to moderate each comment?
- rgrs 6y ago
  Fake news for us, but not to those who were part of it. It wasn't fake news at all. They are going to group again somewhere else. The member might see this as action to silence. This could make them even more angry and isolated. Reddit meanwhile will be a unreliable source of information to them.
  - creato 6y ago
    Reddit should be considered an unreliable source of information to everyone.
  - perf1 6y ago
    They already build a clone of their reddit forum a long time ago.
    - vanniv 6y ago
      They correctly saw that, in the run-up to the election, all the big leftist tech companies would assert themselves and silence conservatives in an effort to "prevent the next Trump situation" as Google's Jen Gennai put it last May when she thought she was talking to a fellow "diversity advocate".
- Natanael_L 6y ago
  How's this different from email? Management of server reputation, spam filters, etc. One and gone spam servers are frequent and are dealt with through putting low trust in new servers and using heuristics to flag behavior that look abusive.
- hereaboutreddit 6y ago
  > Would something decentralized help? The most important thing to realise is: This is ONLY happening because the internet is now centralised. Put aside Trump. Put aside politics. Put away US culture wars, and all other mass politics. It does not matter who is banned or why. Understand that what is happening now is the INEVITABLE result of an internet concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. We have less websites. More natural tech monopolies. More points of failure: host, DNS, DDos protection, CAs. As any or all of these become centralised, website and communities are placed under the inevitable threat of censorship. Yesterday it was about copyright, today it is about politics, some day it will probably be about creed or race. When you give unaccountable power to the few, they will use it as they see fit. This couldn't happen in a decentralised web, with more sites, players, hosts, more places for communities and discussion, more places to go if the site-owner turns sour. We had a web 20 years ago where everyone from a Nazi to a transvestite from transsexual Transylvania could have their own place on the web which no-one else could take from them. We have lost that. Now several people can take your place on the web away. A small number of centralised gatekeepers control what is allowed to stay online.
- CRConrad 6y ago
  “duxup” writes:<blockquote>Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content?</blockquote>Apparently, yes: Hundreds of millions of people are still on Facebook.
- InternetUser 6y ago
  Well, you must be thrilled! Now that Trump supporters have all migrated over to this tiny little obscure island where they can just spam EACH OTHER, and share conspiracy theories with EACH OTHER, and post fake news links for EACH OTHER! Joe Biden is surely gonna win AT LEAST 28 states now that all those pesky Trump supporters have been isolated away from smart normal good people like you and me!
nullc 6y ago
Not just hate you, but stalk, threaten and harass you. There are some people where even just saying-- as a moderator-- "Hey, can you chill out and at lease pretend to treat other posters with some respect" will trigger a full on war against you. There aren't many people like this, but it only takes a few because even a single obsessed person can spew a lot of hate.
- oceanghost 6y ago
  Ive had this happen in real life trying to moderate arguments. Some people just want to fight, and if you draw their fire, they'll fight you.
- rmrfstar 6y ago
  It's really too bad that there are no scalable "proof of intellectual work" protocols for human interactions. I guess 3301 got things right with the Liber Primus.
  - dboreham 6y ago
    Isn't this pretty much what "elites" are for?
    - rmrfstar 6y ago
      I think they tend to be fashion critics more than anything else.
  - posterboy 6y ago
    I think don't expect intelectual work to work on reddit is very scalable for a start, or any faceless interface. There's a reason sciences still hold conferences, which should appear rather uneconomic if internet was a viable competitor. It was never meant to be thst, but many people seem to think so, effectively isolating themselves and becoming detached from reality. This is just a random internet comment of course, so ymmv
- epa 6y ago
  You realize that it is possible to log out and walk away right?
enraged_camel 6y ago
>> I wish that we didn't have to go through these things to begin with, and could have more federated and decentralized platforms Decentralization simply leads to the creation of echo-chambers, except with no one to keep the toxicity in check.
- quazar 6y ago
  I believe that different communities might have different definitions of "toxicity". I don't think global moderation solves this problem.
  - enraged_camel 6y ago
    >>I believe that different communities might have different definitions of "toxicity" Sure. The problem is that despite the decentralized nature of those communities, they still don't exist in a vacuum. Their various beliefs and behaviors (that the community itself may not consider toxic) inevitably leak out and cause problems for society at large. The incel community, for example, worships Elliott Rodgers, the guy who went on an insane shooting rampage because sorority girls wouldn't have sex with him. How long until another Rodgers appears? Why should we allow such breeding grounds to exist?
    - smsm42 6y ago
      Some leftist communities worship Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and others, whose actions led to murder of tens of millions of people. Why should we allow any of them to exist?
nordsieck 6y ago
> Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use. While this is probably true in most cases, given the Reddit CEO's history with the_donald[1], this doesn't seem like it applies in this particular case. ___ 1. https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/23/reddit-huffman-trump/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/23/reddit-huffman-trump/
kylebenzle 6y ago
Users won't allow for (use) decentralized platforms until there is a good way to censor them. Once that happens, what would be the point of switching. Facebook and Reddit are successful BECAUSE they are censorship machines. Facebook spends far more man hours on "curating" content compared to engineering. Same with Reddit. Add up all the "moderation" time spent removing negative or controversial posts and I bet much more time is spent on content compared to programming the site. You are not wrong, but even if a perfect decentralized clone existed tomorrow you'd only get young men and programmers to use it, the average TicTok users wants to see beautiful people doing stupid things, they don't care how it happens.
- philipov 6y ago
  > Users won't allow for (use) decentralized platforms until there is a good way to censor them. > Facebook and Reddit are successful BECAUSE they are censorship machines. Citations needed.
- pyronik19 6y ago
  Reddit particularly used to be a free speech platform where anything could go and then used network effects to gain dominance. Now that they have dominance they now implement censorship of right wing views comments. This is true for Facebooks deboosting capabilities.
  - bradlys 6y ago
    > Now that they have dominance they now implement censorship of right wing views comments. They did the same with chapo - so, it's really not just right wing views...
    - raverbashing 6y ago
      Those platforms don't lack on identitarian division and push of extremist views There might be a slight point that those platforms end up being more of a right wing echo-chamber more than a left-wing one because of some factors. But the bias is on what's in there, not on the platform That being said, nothing was lost of value with the shutting down of T_D (ok, maybe it would be a prime source of information on manipulative state actors, but they can work on what they have already)
matchagaucho 6y ago
> a lot of people will really really hate you. That's an anticipated cost of removing hate.
- ve55 6y ago
  It is, but it's also a cost for not removing hate, and also just for having a slightly different opinion on what constitutes hate than some of your users. When you have a billion users, there's going to be a lot of them that disagree with you on things.
  - reroute1 6y ago
    Yes and reasonable people understand this and don't need censorship. Who would hate a platform for not removing people for just honestly disagreeing and talking? Inciting violence and cheating the system is a different story and the obvious edge of free speech
    - luckylion 6y ago
      > Who would hate a platform for not removing people for just honestly disagreeing and talking? A lot of people. And if your goal is quantity, not quality, those people are important, because they are who the investors give you money to build a site for.
      - reroute1 6y ago
        Exactly I'm just saying they are not reasonable people, so who cares?
    - fragmede 6y ago
      The problem is "honest disagreement and talking" isn't. One person's honest disagreement is inciting violence, and with coded signals and dogwhistles, it's not a subject that everyone will agree on. Things that are clearly on one side or there other of the line aren't in question. It's more subtle stuff that can be argued either way, eg "When the looting starts, the shooting starts", where it gets more contentious. Pretending it's all just honest disagreement is being naive.
barnesto 6y ago
You can win if you apply rules equally, but you have to be willing to stand up for your platform and not cave to a small group of people. r/The_Donald - they shut down r/Fuckthealtright - open for business And by open for business, I mean openly calling for killing conservatives.
Joeri 6y ago
If you make enemies regardless of what position you take, you are free to take your own position without guilt or additional consequence. Moderators should take positions based on what they personally believe moderation should be (or those deciding the rules for moderators should do so). Just because their position may align with the interests of a particular group does not mean they are caving to that group.
wefarrell 6y ago
Social media companies should not be in this position where they are the arbiter of what is offensive/explicit/hate speech vs acceptable free speech. Despite what they state, they will ALWAYS make the decision that generates more profits or power. There really needs to be effective legislation given the importance of free speech for democracy. Unfortunately government agencies are so politically charged that I trust them with enforcement even less than social media companies.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
CM30 6y ago
The best solution is not to cave to anyone. It's to come out, say what you think is best, then tell anyone who disagrees to either take it or leave the platform. If enough companies, groups and individuals do that, this sort of pressure will stop, since people will learn it doesn't work. Most people won't stop using a platform over this stuff anyway.
- Covzire 6y ago
  I wish it were that easy, but the things that keep people from shouting extremely distasteful but legal speech on every street corner of busy intersections don't really work for the internet, at least not yet. I suspect the only way to get a truly free and open honest platforms, is by removing anonymity and forcing users to categorize/tag their speech and then use punitive measures if they don't tag correctly. Say you have a native feature where anonymous users or anyone will not see (by default) certain types of content by tags. The community might vote on which tags to require users to "opt in" to view. The only way to be banned might be, assuming legal speech in the first place, would be if someone posts content that fits within a community agreed upon tag, but the user fails to tag it. I haven't given this a ton of thought, but I would love to see something like this tried.
  - rcxdude 6y ago
    This is basically how booru image boards work.
- mratsim 6y ago
  If you replace platform by country, this logic doesn't work though.
- christkv 6y ago
  The problem is the advertisers who have your proverbial nuts in their hands. If you could live without advertisers then maybe it would work.
- fragmede 6y ago
  In order to do that you have to go the Silk Road route, and try to host the site untraceably, paying for the server in Bitcoin, with the server hosted in a country with a no-extradition policy but has fast Internet. Otherwise for the platform to exist on the "regular" Internet, with servers and server admin living in a country with laws, the platform has to start policing content - banning the sale of drugs, weapons, and murder-for-hire, along with censoring other material - porn, gore, child pornography, copyright infringing material, files that are covered under ITAR. The Internet is rife with censorship. It just offends our first amendment sensibilities to call it that for some very specific categories.
seph-reed 6y ago
There is a right way to do this which minimizes the issues, but it's counter-intuitive: reflect the negative aspects of The_Donald. It's called "closed loop hypocrisy" and the theory is that all negativity or opposition is inherently hypocritical (given we are all very similar in the end). But being hypocritical does not mean opposition is bad, if anything the issue is long loop hypocrisy where someone pretends to be righteous when really it's just hypocrisy with extra steps. Most people solve problems with long loop hypocrisy and those who support them can easily choose to overlook the hypocrisy by focusing on the convoluted steps and rhetoric in between. Meanwhile, it's obvious to those being attacked just how hypocritical they are. In contrast, closed loop hypocrisy is about applying the form of negativity to itself. It seems kind of dumb, but that's the point: to show how dumb X form of negativity is directly to X form of negativity. It's a form of inception and it's hard to pull off, but there is a better way.
- andybak 6y ago
  "closed loop hypocrisy" sounds intriguing and is exactly the kind of counter-intuitive idea I'm drawn to. I'm not sure I entirely follow your explanation and Google is not bringing up much. Do you have a link to a longer explanation of some kind?
  - seph-reed 6y ago
    I do not. It's a theory a friend and I philosophized about for a while in college, but nothing published. If you'd like to check our work though, play with proving/disproving the following: 1. All negativity/opposition is inherently hypocritical 2. Negativity/opposition is necessary 3. Your opposition will always focus more on your negative differences than your negative similarities 4. Focusing on similarities is the only way to truly resolve conflict.
    - andybak 6y ago
      On a phone so can't type at length but I actually agree with you on some of this.
    - 6y ago
smolder 6y ago
This resonates with my experience moderating a local facebook group. I get attacked and threatened by racist instigators and BLM supporters alike because people feel that any moderation against them is solidarity with the other side. I point to the group rules violated and they still assume bias on my part. I AM biased (in favor of BLM) but still get treated like crap when I'm doing my best to moderate fairly, for free, in my spare time, for the benefit of the people treating me like crap.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  This is exactly why moderators ultimately quit and are replaced by activists with no interest in balanced speech. Any platform with unpaid moderators tends to biased activism.
  - at_a_remove 6y ago
    See also "the long march through the institutions."
  - monksy 6y ago
    Also paid moderators can't be trusted to moderate without bias. Supporting the ability for Trump-friendly speach (as long as it's relevant and civil) may get you bluelisted+defunded by advertisers who get harassed.
tbabb 6y ago
> You have to pick who you want to cave to Why does the narrative have to be about "caving" to someone instead of weighing principles against each other and taking the action which protects what's most important?
- munchbunny 6y ago
  I don't think the "caving" framing was about how the decision maker thinks about it, more about how one side or another sees it as "caving". Life is full of dilemmas like that where it's not possible to make everyone happy, but content moderation is full of dilemmas where, no matter what you choose, a few very unhappy ones will hound you to the ends of the earth.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
SI_Rob 6y ago
> we [..] could have more federated and decentralized platforms, or at least more client-side filtering inside of centralization curation We should start a center to discuss and curate these ideas, a place where we could get together and define what it means to achieve decentralization. We could call it something snappy and semantic like, say, the Center for Decentralization.
jakobdabo 6y ago
So, why moderate a public forum? Why should platform owners decide what's right and what's wrong? If something is legal then why should we censor it just because it may seem hateful to someone, or somebody feels offended? So what if a post offends somebody? They can deal with it like an adult. Ignore the trolls, and discuss if there is a discussion, offending or not. If people want a safe private place with no intruders, then they can create a closed/invite-only group and moderate it themselves.
- mcguire 6y ago
  There is a certain amount of irony here, due to this comment's presence on as heavily moderated a forum as this.
  - postphoned 6y ago
    >There is a certain amount of irony here, due to this comment's presence on as heavily moderated a forum as this. The difference is that on HN the political content (so far) remains contained to a few articles every now and then, plus you can still read 'flagged' comments. Even if I have a strong political opinion I prefer HN in this curated way. On Reddit on the other hand every major subreddit gets politicized eventually (/r/pics, /r/news), on-topic discussions being derailed to shout about Trump, calling people "Nazis" and the mods will rather ban or delete the posts that call the activists out or which cite 'inconvenient' facts. Complete threads get nuked in the most intransparent ways which can be seen using third-party tools like https://snew.notabug.io https://snew.notabug.io Inside the major subreddit only one side (the 'Left' side) of the political spectrum is allowed to voice their opinions even if those were off-topic in the first place.
- jwilber 6y ago
  “ Why should platform owners decide what's right and what's wrong” Because they made the platform. In some light, it’s the same logic that allows businesses to refuse service, or homeowners to defend their property.
tanilama 6y ago
> could have more federated and decentralized platforms I would absolutely not going to a platform with no moderation. The quality of the content will be abysmal. Honestly, r/D or something like that should just go to host its own website/forum, it shouldn't be Reddit's problem to begin with. Their presence brings toxic attention/traffic that is hard to monetize anyway
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >The quality of the content will be abysmal. Granted I haven't been there in years but the content on the chans isn't much worse than Reddit once you've been there long enough that your brain stops registering the "nig" prefix and "fag" postfix they slap on every other word. Any place that is open to cross-polination from internet riff-raff from other niches is going to devolve toward a very low lowest common denominator (which is why HN is mostly unscathed).
- nmfisher 6y ago
  > Honestly, r/D or something like that should just go to host its own website/forum, it shouldn't be Reddit's problem to begin with. I think that's basically what they've done.
dustingetz 6y ago
the only reason they are centralized at all is to make a profit, so it’s the profit motive which is causing them to hoover up and own all this content and thereby being vulnerable to the risk
dman 6y ago
I think a lack of geographical diversity is coming back to bite tech companies. For better or for worse conservatives believe they are not fairly treated by tech companies. The fact that most US tech companies are on the coasts which happen to be fairly liberal further feeds into this us-vs-them tribal arguments. Curbing divisiveness and helping bring people together has never been more important, I hope we find a way out of the current quagmire collectively as a society.
rvz 6y ago
The whole cancelling of the opposition is the reason why those who do it, become their own echo-chamber and will continue to find every. single. thought-criminal. and suffocate them in livelihood, privacy and financial healthiness. Twitter has been the ground digital war of the liberal-left and (some of the far-left) over the conservative right and (some of the actual far-right) and the right-wingers retreated to their own chambers with the former have Twitter under its control. As soon as 'the right' we're told to 'create their own platform' which they have done many times, cancellation was always the goal from those from the left. Having echo-chambers creates one-sided discussions but unfortunately they are left with no choice given that cancellation is inevitable where-ever they go. If both sides are yelling, screeching and howling at each other they're both not listening to one another which is nothing like a reasonable debate.
amadeuspagel 6y ago
The fundamental problem here is that people discover things that make them angry. Platforms need to figure out how to prevent that, how to let open-minded people discover others who think differently, while keeping crybullies in a comfortable bubble. For reddit, part of the problem is that everyone who isn't logged in sees the same frontpage, which means they see posts from these controversial subreddits and get angry. They should make it possible to subscribe to or block subreddits without making an account.
hhhhhhhjjjjjjju 6y ago
I run a video game clan with a fairly active discord channel -- the stance I've taken is: there are no rules beyond: 1. nothing illegal (includes cheating at games) 2. no racism / homophobia / transphobia 3. no harassing other members 4. everyone has different beliefs and come from different parts of the world -- if you are offended, ask the offender to stop, otherwise see a mod so far there are around 50 people in the chat and almost no issues even though we have members who are rep/dem/other, religions ranging from Christian to Satanist, and we regularly post political and religious memes and such. I don't know how but thus far we've had no real issues.
- monksy 6y ago
  > includes cheating at games That's not illegal. It's just not permissible on the services that run the games. Also, it used to be a thing in video gaming. (Game genie) For some reason, we've given up to video game companies who try to dictate how people should enjoy a product that they purchase.
  - hhhhhhhjjjjjjju 6y ago
    It might not be illegal by laws of the land, but its illegal in our world and we will instantly kick + permanently ban any member who is caught cheating. We take it as seriously as any illegal activity (as defined by law of the land).
  - Shorel 6y ago
    It's not about game companies. The companies actually don't care that much, they have sold the game, and spent our money already. If they ever react is just because of the pressure from gamers. Also, it is not about cheating in your single player game. No one really cares about that. Want to enable god mode and insta-kill every baddie? Go for it. Cheaters in online competitions simply ruin the game for other players. Cheaters destroy online gaming communities. So of course, in online gaming communities, cheating is seen as one of the worst offences someone can commit.
- xienze 6y ago
  > I don't know how but thus far we've had no real issues. Because you only have 50 users, which is nothing. It’s the same reason communism is such an appealing idea, in very small communities it works but doesn’t scale up to nation-sized ones.
Svperstar 6y ago
As the head mod of a subreddit this really resonates with me.
ipython 6y ago
It’s funny, what I see is not politics but simple market effects. The truth is that most people value some level of moderation. Surprise! A cesspool of trolls does not provide for an inviting community. I find it hilarious that we have congresspeople whining about being “censored” on the very platform they claim is censoring them. I would think the first step of a competent censor would be to censor complaints of censorship itself.
- Brendinooo 6y ago
  Eh, I'm not so sure about that. If you want to censor and you don't have an ironclad mandate to go nuts, you need veneer of plausible deniability. "How are we censoring people? If we were censoring, would our first step be to censor complaints of censorship itself?" (Not saying that's what's happening, just saying I disagree with the argument here)
dgzl 6y ago
Almost like being a police officer?
SmokeyHamster 6y ago
>Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use. You kind of can, though. Sure, group X hates group Y and wants the admins to ban them. Group Y hates group X and wants the admins to ban them. The smart play would have been to be neutral and set out an explicit set of rules everyone has to follow. Reddit instead did it the worst possible way imaginable. They laid out no clear rules, banned thousands of subs for vague "hate" reasons that you can't define, much less verify, and drastically reduced the scale and appeal of their site. If you think group X will now be happy and stop complaining now that group Y has been banned, I think that's naive. The admins will still be pressured, but the goalposts will just be moved to ever more extremes until Reddit's such a niche echo-chamber that it appeals to too few people to remain financially viable.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
untangle 6y ago
> "...I wish that we...could have more federated and decentralized platforms" We did. They were called newsgroups and forums. Reddit is just 1000+ forums stuck together to build audience and make money.
raxxorrax 6y ago
If they had not caved to calls for banning, they would have less problems. The ambitions to ban more subs won't subside anytime soon. Of course this hands off approach would get you hate. That is price you have to pay. Worth it in my opinion.
lenkite 6y ago
The_Donald was censored and taken over by reddit moderators for "threats made against police". It was laughable considering the extraordinarily explicit explicit threats made against the police in other more popular reddit forums. Equal rules were not applied. If reddit was consistent in their application of rules, it would be nice. But we all know that is not the case. Some are more equal than others.

by ve55 6y ago

duxup 6y ago

Would something decentralized help? I don't think people want that. The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc. Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content? I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. The sheer volume of users at its height seemed to involve a huge amount of brand new accounts you never saw again / never posted again (except when they show up as a group again), and etc. Or those without brand new accounts show up and post strange dishonest lead in type posts that sort of try to lead folks down a bigoted path ... that you can blatantly see in their post history. So you'd be in your other community and one day they all show up and down votes and the vitriol begins... it was no mystery that this happened, it was spoken of openly in The_Donald for a time. Who wants to deal with that?

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> So you'd be in your other community and one day I don't think so? So if TD was a mastodon community, many others would blacklist their content, but unless members of TD go and make accounts elsewhere that'd be the extent of it, no?
- ryankemper 6y ago
  I believe they mean other communities in the sense of "other subreddits", although I can't speak for them.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    Maybe? But we're in a subthread about decentralized solutions, so I feel like it makes sense.
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  No, they send 'envoys' to other social media sites to argue with and harass those who speak up against them anywhere on the Internet. Think "flash mob" crossed with "sealioning^", and look to Gamergate for being first to that particular line. For example, there's a lot of green accounts posting comments here about where to find their new community. ^ Sealioning: https://wondermark.com/1k62/ https://wondermark.com/1k62/
  - Jetrel 6y ago
    That's honestly one of the Big Questions™ about stuff like Mastodon; is how resilient it is against that sort of behaviour. On a lot of levels, it seems to be designed to allow multiple groups to share blacklists, so that if a given target is a bad actor anywhere, as long as other groups trust the group they initially burned, word is allowed to get around and close the door in their face before they even say a word somewhere else. That's really the sign of our times when it comes to internet communities - almost all communities have this "innocent until proven guilty" stance for random strangers. Having been a moderator before on at least one internet community, it's almost like you're a police detective "building a case". You don't just get a whiff of "gee, this person's probably acting in bad faith, let's just ban them" - you have to gradually build up a strong dossier of sorts proving that they're genuinely bad, otherwise (at least in the old-school communities I grew up in) it reflects extremely poorly on you. But because of this, they're susceptible to all sorts of really rudimentary social hack vectors, some almost feeling as silly as "the same guy coming back five minutes later wearing a Groucho Marx mask and a slightly altered name - and fooling everyone". ----------- I feel like that's really the novel thing about Mastodon et al - being able to ditch these social norms lets people unload a whole raft of scorched earth tools - like pre-emptive IP bans that follow people around and are in place before they even arrive. They're dangerous tools - we could easily make ourselves susceptible to attacks where trolls get people kicked out of their own communities by impersonating them elsewhere, but it feels like the pendulum's been swung way to far in the "gentle and understanding" direction for decades, now.
ryankemper 6y ago
> I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. It was very clearly a real community, as you can see evidence from the fact that they migrated to thedonald.win when Reddit made it clear that they wouldn't be treated fairly. > So you'd be in your other community and one day they all show up and down votes and the vitriol begins... it was no mystery that this happened, it was spoken of openly in The_Donald for a time. > Who wants to deal with that? And yet Reddit happily ignores vote brigading and other negative externalities from any subreddit that toes their party line, so it seems bizarre to single T_D out. And as far as I know that wasn't the reason Reddit gave, rather they said something about supporting violence which in my opinion was a pretty clear "we're fishing for a made up reason that lets us boot you guys"
- spaced-out 6y ago
  >And yet Reddit happily ignores vote brigading and other negative externalities from any subreddit that toes their party line, so it seems bizarre to single T_D out Do you have evidence for this, or is it just your gut feeling?
  - simple_phrases 6y ago
    I am a member of several non-conservative political and non-political groups that were banned because of the bad behavior of members of those subreddits. Users of The_Donald regularly got away with behavior that got other communities wiped off of Reddit entirely.
  - 1MachineElf 6y ago
    r/AHS staged a massive public brigading campaign in 2018 to get as many right-wing subreddits banned as possible.
    - dlp211 6y ago
      > r/AHS staged a massive public brigading campaign in 2018 to get many HATE subreddits banned. FTFY.
jlkuester7 6y ago
IMHO decentralization (via federated protocols) is the most viable option here. Taking Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/) as an example, people are able to connect globally with each other, but you also have a moderation framework that allows for true decentralized control over content. You can join an instance with moderation policies that align with your ideals or even host your own instance.
- deegles 6y ago
  Who does the moderation? Some really messed up stuff gets uploaded to basically every social media platform [0] and I sure as hell do not want to deal with that. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
  - numpad0 6y ago
    It’s server admins’ responsibility, so if it’s run by individuals the admin bans when he has time, if it’s run by a company then it’s done at company expense, and if moderation standards of two instances conflict then either operator takes it as offense and blacklist the other one. My understanding of Mastodon federation is that the Europe/American instances generally play along, some alt-rights oriented are cut off, and then there is group of predominantly Japanese instances running incompatible legal ideology on completely incompatible language so European admins generally reject those as horrible dark corners of internet(?)
- berkes 6y ago
  In addition, mastodon, and even the protocol, has a lot in place to mitigate targeted harassment by a community. Individual Instance blocks, where a user can block an entire instance are in place. Instance blocks on your instance, where an admin blocks another instance for all the users of that instance. And, community driven, blacklists where an admin can copy paste from. Even more interesting, is that some instances block any instance that in themselves don't block another instance. In practice, this means that if you don't block Gab, there are a lot of instances that don't want to talk to you. This works. This gives people the freedom to pick and choose or to move somewhere where they have more or less freedom to listen to others.
throwaway894345 6y ago
> I don't think people want that. The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc. > Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content? No, but I think people want equal, consistent, and predictable enforcement. Notably, lots of other communities are allowed to exist despite having much more and more overt bigotry including celebrations of political violence and even concerted attempts to slander people and get them fired or harassed. The difference is the groups they target and the transparently BS justifications for targeting them ("well actually, racism doesn't mean 'hating a person or group because of their race'" or something like that).
- duxup 6y ago
  >lots of other communities are allowed to exist despite having much more and more overt bigotry including celebrations of political violence I would argue that was what TD was until very recently.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    That's the point. Other communities are worse than TD and go reprimanded. And it's not just communities like TD; people are canceled, terminated, etc for completely not racist offenses such as "making an OK symbol by accident" or "standing next to a woman who wrongly suggested a minority person was vandalizing a store" or "citing a prominent Black academic's research on nonviolent-vs-violent protests" or "publishing an interview wherein a Black man says that he wishes there was more concern for crime problems in predominately Black communities", or "publishing an op ed from a US senator that expresses a viewpoint shared by more than 50% of the US public", or etc. Meanwhile people can go on years-long racist tirades on Twitter and be promoted into the NYT or say things like "literally all members of $RACE are irredeemably evil" in a book and hit the top of the Amazon and NYT best-sellers list and get diversity consulting gigs all over the country. There aren't words to describe how far beyond parody these double standards have become. EDIT: That's a lot of downvotes. I'd be really interested to hear what specifically people disagree with. Do you contest my assertion that a double standard exists? Or maybe you don't agree with my negative characterization of TD? Or do you contest that the implication that double standards (in general or this one in particular) is morally wrong? Let's talk about it (leave the downvotes by all means, but let's have a productive discussion).
hinkley 6y ago
> Would something decentralized help? I've been thinking about this a bit lately, and I don't see how. People are going to game the system, and decentralization just means they can play the game for longer, or in all new ways. How do you establish a pattern of bad behavior by a person if that data is balkanized across a hundred independent nodes? They can feel out the line between ban-worthy and nuisance and if they happen to overstep a little bit a few times, they can still annoy 90% of the userbase. You have to have centralized moderation information and infrastructure. People who don't want to be moderated, therefore, don't want this kind of decentralized system, and the maintainers would be fools to offer it. What they want is their own system, but someone else to do the work. An open-source Reddit engine, perhaps. When they discover how expensive it is to run, especially with people acting up, then a few of them may become self-aware.
three_seagrass 6y ago
Anything decentralized will create a vacuum of power to be filled by rational actors. Kind of like how Bitcoin is decentralized but controlled by a handful of miners on China.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  Is email controlled by Google and Yahoo?
  - new2628 6y ago
    No, only by Google.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
      Email is not controlled by Google. There is myriad of other big players in the field, plus you can get an email server on your own domain up and running in ~ 5 minutes
      - belorn 6y ago
        Email is controlled through gmail in the same way as webdesign is controlled by SEO directed towards google search. People need to access the users on the google platform, and google sets the terms for that. That is, if you want your email to work you got to play by the rules dictated by google or a very large portion of all email will go away into a black hole.
        Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
        If Google will start blocking random non-spammy domains from exchanging mail with Gmail users, it not end well for Google and their mail platform.
        teddyh 6y ago
jerf 6y ago
"Would something decentralized help?" Not directly; I'm increasingly thinking centralization is not the problem. The problem is size. The intersection of "things that everyone agrees are acceptable" goes to zero as the size of the community increases, and while communities have strong selection effects that prevent them from being anything like "a uniformly random selection of people slammed together", regression to the mean means that you get there as size goes into the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions. I don't think there's a solution, because no matter what technical tools you put into place, you can't get around the fact the people don't agree about what's acceptable. What we need is a diaspora back into a community structure where HN would be just about the largest sort of community out there, instead of still a relatively small one. Decentralized tools could help with that, but if "decentralization" just ends up building "decentralized" communities trying to contain a million people in the "same place" you'll just get the same problems again. It's kinda orthogonal. "Reddit, but once a community hits 10,000 people it becomes progressively harder to join" would quite possibly work fine, for instance. (I envision something like an exponentially-growing waiting list delay, such that getting to even 11,000 users would be difficult.) Obviously, legislating some sort of limit here is virtually impossible. Somehow the technical structures need to support it and afford communities in the hundreds to low thousands, but somehow make it inconvenient to grow beyond that. Or afford more complicated structures where membership is not a binary status. (A social graph would work, if it wasn't being run by an entity that desires to aggregate people together more to more effectively advertise at them. Or more accurately, a set of graphs.)
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  I would put it as "the problem is society" essentially as opposed to size per se. I personally doubt that what is essentially a forcibly sharded technical approach akin to what MMOs did to deal with larger loads and content saturation would be useful. Content depends upon O(n) users subdividing it would reduce the utility and make it lose out and worse breed a new tribalism. Combine that with side channels and I am skeptical it would get better.
  - jerf 6y ago
    It doesn't have to be a "forcible shard". In fact I think that's not terribly effective and there's better ways to do it. Weblogs did it fairly well, way back when. Also, don't forget that you don't belong to one community; it's not like you log in one day and get assigned to your immutable chunk of the internet. You wander around the read versions of various communities, pick a couple of communities you invest it, pick several more to half-follow, get tired of the abuse in one and switch to another, meet someone in real life who encourages you to join another community, and so on. Basically, the sort of "tribalism" that you'd encounter is whatever "tribalism" you associate with HN, because the structure I describe already half-exists, scrounging around the remnants from reddit and Facebook in tens of thousands of forums and active blogs and other such things. I don't think it produces any more or less "tribalism" than you get from anything else.
lumberingjack 6y ago
>The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites Like none one the cnn "news" stories on /world news aren't fake
- duxup 6y ago
  I mean websites / twitter accounts that put out actual fake news as a matter of process. I wasn't thinking of any of the major media outlets when I noted that.
usefulcat 6y ago
> I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. The sheer volume of users at its height seemed to involve a huge amount of brand new accounts you never saw again / never posted again (except when they show up as a group again), and etc. Or those without brand new accounts show up and post strange dishonest lead in type posts that sort of try to lead folks down a bigoted path ... that you can blatantly see in their post history. This is very much a side note, but I do wonder what sorts of things would be enabled with more visibility into this kind of information. For example, average and median ages of all accounts in a thread or subthread. Per-user visualizations of posting histories (time of day, subreddit, etc). Information that would enable automated correlation (by time or subject) of posts from different accounts. Stuff like that. I'm sure they must have something internally that does at least some of the above.
- alexandercrohde 6y ago
  As soon as those metrics are exposed though, people will start hacking them by purchasing older accounts, etc.
  - usefulcat 6y ago
    ..which seems like it would make it more expensive to achieve the same level of credibility via such 'fake' accounts. Seems like an improvement to me.
  - duxup 6y ago
    A less common, but I'm seeing more frequent tacit are user accounts where they delete their posts after X time so the account looks like it has been around, but you've no idea where / what was posted. Those users almost always head down the rabbit hole after a few posts....
    - HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
      You can try something pushshift.io
  - neop1x 6y ago
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content? What's wrong with a decentralized "platform" that works like the web? Anybody, right now, can submit some bigoted trolling to HN. It'll get flagged and killed in ten seconds. And then people don't much bother because there's no advantage in immediate failure. You can have a "platform" that shares formats and protocols and supports shared links but has independently-moderated subsections, and then the contents of each one is reflected in how it's moderated.
zackees 6y ago
NO. Fake news is what the MSM does and it's supported by big tech. That's why I blew the whistle on Google and exposed their censorship regime to the whole world to see: https://www.zachvorhies.com https://www.zachvorhies.com
dmoy 6y ago
> The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc. Yea, I gotta say, having to previously deal with r/The_Donald brigades on another large subreddit was incredibly annoying and depressing. Can't speak to spreading fake news, but massive influxes of r/The_Donald users spamming truly vile stuff in an ostensibly non-political sub really sucked (as a moderator, to clean up). The only thing that works imo is fairly strict moderation, or extremely niche/small communities. Everything else just gets swamped by toxicity. Decentralized vs centralized isn't really the right dimension to look at I think. And as soon as your small community grows... the trolls come a-knocking.
- ngold 6y ago
  Gotta respect the iron fist of /r/askhistorians. Probably the best sub on reddit.
  - duxup 6y ago
    The sound of folks bemoaning getting moderated there is music to my hears. No people, we want someone who KNOWS, not just saw something on the Discovery Channel this one time ... it's such a refreshing change from the magical internet experts that come and go.
  - dmoy 6y ago
    Yea wow, I don't moderate r/askhistorians but rather a different sub, and we sometimes pride ourselves on keeping this relatively clean. But then I stumble across r/askhistorians again and remember that no, no we don't have things under control by comparison. We can barely keep a lid on the vitriol and toxicity, and some of the more blatantly false/scammy advice. r/askhistorians is a whole 'nother level. Sometimes I honestly wish hackernews was run more like r/askhistorians. Too many people here on hn talk a lot of shit on stuff they don't really know much about beyond a cursory understanding (I'm probably guilty myself).
    - vikramkr 6y ago
      What do they do well that can be transferred without basically asking the mods to do more work? Isn't it just a manpower thing? Or do they have a way of verifying expertise etc so you know you're getting answers from experts without having to moderate each comment?
rgrs 6y ago
Fake news for us, but not to those who were part of it. It wasn't fake news at all. They are going to group again somewhere else. The member might see this as action to silence. This could make them even more angry and isolated. Reddit meanwhile will be a unreliable source of information to them.
- creato 6y ago
  Reddit should be considered an unreliable source of information to everyone.
- perf1 6y ago
  They already build a clone of their reddit forum a long time ago.
  - vanniv 6y ago
    They correctly saw that, in the run-up to the election, all the big leftist tech companies would assert themselves and silence conservatives in an effort to "prevent the next Trump situation" as Google's Jen Gennai put it last May when she thought she was talking to a fellow "diversity advocate".
Natanael_L 6y ago
How's this different from email? Management of server reputation, spam filters, etc. One and gone spam servers are frequent and are dealt with through putting low trust in new servers and using heuristics to flag behavior that look abusive.
hereaboutreddit 6y ago
> Would something decentralized help? The most important thing to realise is: This is ONLY happening because the internet is now centralised. Put aside Trump. Put aside politics. Put away US culture wars, and all other mass politics. It does not matter who is banned or why. Understand that what is happening now is the INEVITABLE result of an internet concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. We have less websites. More natural tech monopolies. More points of failure: host, DNS, DDos protection, CAs. As any or all of these become centralised, website and communities are placed under the inevitable threat of censorship. Yesterday it was about copyright, today it is about politics, some day it will probably be about creed or race. When you give unaccountable power to the few, they will use it as they see fit. This couldn't happen in a decentralised web, with more sites, players, hosts, more places for communities and discussion, more places to go if the site-owner turns sour. We had a web 20 years ago where everyone from a Nazi to a transvestite from transsexual Transylvania could have their own place on the web which no-one else could take from them. We have lost that. Now several people can take your place on the web away. A small number of centralised gatekeepers control what is allowed to stay online.
CRConrad 6y ago
“duxup” writes:<blockquote>Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content?</blockquote>Apparently, yes: Hundreds of millions of people are still on Facebook.
InternetUser 6y ago
Well, you must be thrilled! Now that Trump supporters have all migrated over to this tiny little obscure island where they can just spam EACH OTHER, and share conspiracy theories with EACH OTHER, and post fake news links for EACH OTHER! Joe Biden is surely gonna win AT LEAST 28 states now that all those pesky Trump supporters have been isolated away from smart normal good people like you and me!

nullc 6y ago

Not just hate you, but stalk, threaten and harass you. There are some people where even just saying-- as a moderator-- "Hey, can you chill out and at lease pretend to treat other posters with some respect" will trigger a full on war against you. There aren't many people like this, but it only takes a few because even a single obsessed person can spew a lot of hate.

oceanghost 6y ago
Ive had this happen in real life trying to moderate arguments. Some people just want to fight, and if you draw their fire, they'll fight you.
rmrfstar 6y ago
It's really too bad that there are no scalable "proof of intellectual work" protocols for human interactions. I guess 3301 got things right with the Liber Primus.
- dboreham 6y ago
  Isn't this pretty much what "elites" are for?
  - rmrfstar 6y ago
    I think they tend to be fashion critics more than anything else.
- posterboy 6y ago
  I think don't expect intelectual work to work on reddit is very scalable for a start, or any faceless interface. There's a reason sciences still hold conferences, which should appear rather uneconomic if internet was a viable competitor. It was never meant to be thst, but many people seem to think so, effectively isolating themselves and becoming detached from reality. This is just a random internet comment of course, so ymmv
epa 6y ago
You realize that it is possible to log out and walk away right?

enraged_camel 6y ago

>> I wish that we didn't have to go through these things to begin with, and could have more federated and decentralized platforms Decentralization simply leads to the creation of echo-chambers, except with no one to keep the toxicity in check.

quazar 6y ago
I believe that different communities might have different definitions of "toxicity". I don't think global moderation solves this problem.
- enraged_camel 6y ago
  >>I believe that different communities might have different definitions of "toxicity" Sure. The problem is that despite the decentralized nature of those communities, they still don't exist in a vacuum. Their various beliefs and behaviors (that the community itself may not consider toxic) inevitably leak out and cause problems for society at large. The incel community, for example, worships Elliott Rodgers, the guy who went on an insane shooting rampage because sorority girls wouldn't have sex with him. How long until another Rodgers appears? Why should we allow such breeding grounds to exist?
  - smsm42 6y ago
    Some leftist communities worship Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and others, whose actions led to murder of tens of millions of people. Why should we allow any of them to exist?

nordsieck 6y ago

> Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use. While this is probably true in most cases, given the Reddit CEO's history with the_donald[1], this doesn't seem like it applies in this particular case. ___ 1. https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/23/reddit-huffman-trump/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/23/reddit-huffman-trump/

kylebenzle 6y ago

Users won't allow for (use) decentralized platforms until there is a good way to censor them. Once that happens, what would be the point of switching. Facebook and Reddit are successful BECAUSE they are censorship machines. Facebook spends far more man hours on "curating" content compared to engineering. Same with Reddit. Add up all the "moderation" time spent removing negative or controversial posts and I bet much more time is spent on content compared to programming the site. You are not wrong, but even if a perfect decentralized clone existed tomorrow you'd only get young men and programmers to use it, the average TicTok users wants to see beautiful people doing stupid things, they don't care how it happens.

philipov 6y ago
> Users won't allow for (use) decentralized platforms until there is a good way to censor them. > Facebook and Reddit are successful BECAUSE they are censorship machines. Citations needed.
pyronik19 6y ago
Reddit particularly used to be a free speech platform where anything could go and then used network effects to gain dominance. Now that they have dominance they now implement censorship of right wing views comments. This is true for Facebooks deboosting capabilities.
- bradlys 6y ago
  > Now that they have dominance they now implement censorship of right wing views comments. They did the same with chapo - so, it's really not just right wing views...
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    Those platforms don't lack on identitarian division and push of extremist views There might be a slight point that those platforms end up being more of a right wing echo-chamber more than a left-wing one because of some factors. But the bias is on what's in there, not on the platform That being said, nothing was lost of value with the shutting down of T_D (ok, maybe it would be a prime source of information on manipulative state actors, but they can work on what they have already)

matchagaucho 6y ago

> a lot of people will really really hate you. That's an anticipated cost of removing hate.

ve55 6y ago
It is, but it's also a cost for not removing hate, and also just for having a slightly different opinion on what constitutes hate than some of your users. When you have a billion users, there's going to be a lot of them that disagree with you on things.
- reroute1 6y ago
  Yes and reasonable people understand this and don't need censorship. Who would hate a platform for not removing people for just honestly disagreeing and talking? Inciting violence and cheating the system is a different story and the obvious edge of free speech
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > Who would hate a platform for not removing people for just honestly disagreeing and talking? A lot of people. And if your goal is quantity, not quality, those people are important, because they are who the investors give you money to build a site for.
    - reroute1 6y ago
      Exactly I'm just saying they are not reasonable people, so who cares?
  - fragmede 6y ago
    The problem is "honest disagreement and talking" isn't. One person's honest disagreement is inciting violence, and with coded signals and dogwhistles, it's not a subject that everyone will agree on. Things that are clearly on one side or there other of the line aren't in question. It's more subtle stuff that can be argued either way, eg "When the looting starts, the shooting starts", where it gets more contentious. Pretending it's all just honest disagreement is being naive.

barnesto 6y ago

You can win if you apply rules equally, but you have to be willing to stand up for your platform and not cave to a small group of people. r/The_Donald - they shut down r/Fuckthealtright - open for business And by open for business, I mean openly calling for killing conservatives.

Joeri 6y ago

If you make enemies regardless of what position you take, you are free to take your own position without guilt or additional consequence. Moderators should take positions based on what they personally believe moderation should be (or those deciding the rules for moderators should do so). Just because their position may align with the interests of a particular group does not mean they are caving to that group.

wefarrell 6y ago

Social media companies should not be in this position where they are the arbiter of what is offensive/explicit/hate speech vs acceptable free speech. Despite what they state, they will ALWAYS make the decision that generates more profits or power. There really needs to be effective legislation given the importance of free speech for democracy. Unfortunately government agencies are so politically charged that I trust them with enforcement even less than social media companies.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

CM30 6y ago

The best solution is not to cave to anyone. It's to come out, say what you think is best, then tell anyone who disagrees to either take it or leave the platform. If enough companies, groups and individuals do that, this sort of pressure will stop, since people will learn it doesn't work. Most people won't stop using a platform over this stuff anyway.

Covzire 6y ago
I wish it were that easy, but the things that keep people from shouting extremely distasteful but legal speech on every street corner of busy intersections don't really work for the internet, at least not yet. I suspect the only way to get a truly free and open honest platforms, is by removing anonymity and forcing users to categorize/tag their speech and then use punitive measures if they don't tag correctly. Say you have a native feature where anonymous users or anyone will not see (by default) certain types of content by tags. The community might vote on which tags to require users to "opt in" to view. The only way to be banned might be, assuming legal speech in the first place, would be if someone posts content that fits within a community agreed upon tag, but the user fails to tag it. I haven't given this a ton of thought, but I would love to see something like this tried.
- rcxdude 6y ago
  This is basically how booru image boards work.
mratsim 6y ago
If you replace platform by country, this logic doesn't work though.
christkv 6y ago
The problem is the advertisers who have your proverbial nuts in their hands. If you could live without advertisers then maybe it would work.
fragmede 6y ago
In order to do that you have to go the Silk Road route, and try to host the site untraceably, paying for the server in Bitcoin, with the server hosted in a country with a no-extradition policy but has fast Internet. Otherwise for the platform to exist on the "regular" Internet, with servers and server admin living in a country with laws, the platform has to start policing content - banning the sale of drugs, weapons, and murder-for-hire, along with censoring other material - porn, gore, child pornography, copyright infringing material, files that are covered under ITAR. The Internet is rife with censorship. It just offends our first amendment sensibilities to call it that for some very specific categories.

seph-reed 6y ago

There is a right way to do this which minimizes the issues, but it's counter-intuitive: reflect the negative aspects of The_Donald. It's called "closed loop hypocrisy" and the theory is that all negativity or opposition is inherently hypocritical (given we are all very similar in the end). But being hypocritical does not mean opposition is bad, if anything the issue is long loop hypocrisy where someone pretends to be righteous when really it's just hypocrisy with extra steps. Most people solve problems with long loop hypocrisy and those who support them can easily choose to overlook the hypocrisy by focusing on the convoluted steps and rhetoric in between. Meanwhile, it's obvious to those being attacked just how hypocritical they are. In contrast, closed loop hypocrisy is about applying the form of negativity to itself. It seems kind of dumb, but that's the point: to show how dumb X form of negativity is directly to X form of negativity. It's a form of inception and it's hard to pull off, but there is a better way.

andybak 6y ago
"closed loop hypocrisy" sounds intriguing and is exactly the kind of counter-intuitive idea I'm drawn to. I'm not sure I entirely follow your explanation and Google is not bringing up much. Do you have a link to a longer explanation of some kind?
- seph-reed 6y ago
  I do not. It's a theory a friend and I philosophized about for a while in college, but nothing published. If you'd like to check our work though, play with proving/disproving the following: 1. All negativity/opposition is inherently hypocritical 2. Negativity/opposition is necessary 3. Your opposition will always focus more on your negative differences than your negative similarities 4. Focusing on similarities is the only way to truly resolve conflict.
  - andybak 6y ago
    On a phone so can't type at length but I actually agree with you on some of this.
  - 6y ago

smolder 6y ago

This resonates with my experience moderating a local facebook group. I get attacked and threatened by racist instigators and BLM supporters alike because people feel that any moderation against them is solidarity with the other side. I point to the group rules violated and they still assume bias on my part. I AM biased (in favor of BLM) but still get treated like crap when I'm doing my best to moderate fairly, for free, in my spare time, for the benefit of the people treating me like crap.

koheripbal 6y ago
This is exactly why moderators ultimately quit and are replaced by activists with no interest in balanced speech. Any platform with unpaid moderators tends to biased activism.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  See also "the long march through the institutions."
- monksy 6y ago
  Also paid moderators can't be trusted to moderate without bias. Supporting the ability for Trump-friendly speach (as long as it's relevant and civil) may get you bluelisted+defunded by advertisers who get harassed.

tbabb 6y ago

> You have to pick who you want to cave to Why does the narrative have to be about "caving" to someone instead of weighing principles against each other and taking the action which protects what's most important?

munchbunny 6y ago
I don't think the "caving" framing was about how the decision maker thinks about it, more about how one side or another sees it as "caving". Life is full of dilemmas like that where it's not possible to make everyone happy, but content moderation is full of dilemmas where, no matter what you choose, a few very unhappy ones will hound you to the ends of the earth.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

SI_Rob 6y ago

> we [..] could have more federated and decentralized platforms, or at least more client-side filtering inside of centralization curation We should start a center to discuss and curate these ideas, a place where we could get together and define what it means to achieve decentralization. We could call it something snappy and semantic like, say, the Center for Decentralization.

jakobdabo 6y ago

So, why moderate a public forum? Why should platform owners decide what's right and what's wrong? If something is legal then why should we censor it just because it may seem hateful to someone, or somebody feels offended? So what if a post offends somebody? They can deal with it like an adult. Ignore the trolls, and discuss if there is a discussion, offending or not. If people want a safe private place with no intruders, then they can create a closed/invite-only group and moderate it themselves.

mcguire 6y ago
There is a certain amount of irony here, due to this comment's presence on as heavily moderated a forum as this.
- postphoned 6y ago
  >There is a certain amount of irony here, due to this comment's presence on as heavily moderated a forum as this. The difference is that on HN the political content (so far) remains contained to a few articles every now and then, plus you can still read 'flagged' comments. Even if I have a strong political opinion I prefer HN in this curated way. On Reddit on the other hand every major subreddit gets politicized eventually (/r/pics, /r/news), on-topic discussions being derailed to shout about Trump, calling people "Nazis" and the mods will rather ban or delete the posts that call the activists out or which cite 'inconvenient' facts. Complete threads get nuked in the most intransparent ways which can be seen using third-party tools like https://snew.notabug.io https://snew.notabug.io Inside the major subreddit only one side (the 'Left' side) of the political spectrum is allowed to voice their opinions even if those were off-topic in the first place.
jwilber 6y ago
“ Why should platform owners decide what's right and what's wrong” Because they made the platform. In some light, it’s the same logic that allows businesses to refuse service, or homeowners to defend their property.

tanilama 6y ago

> could have more federated and decentralized platforms I would absolutely not going to a platform with no moderation. The quality of the content will be abysmal. Honestly, r/D or something like that should just go to host its own website/forum, it shouldn't be Reddit's problem to begin with. Their presence brings toxic attention/traffic that is hard to monetize anyway

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>The quality of the content will be abysmal. Granted I haven't been there in years but the content on the chans isn't much worse than Reddit once you've been there long enough that your brain stops registering the "nig" prefix and "fag" postfix they slap on every other word. Any place that is open to cross-polination from internet riff-raff from other niches is going to devolve toward a very low lowest common denominator (which is why HN is mostly unscathed).
nmfisher 6y ago
> Honestly, r/D or something like that should just go to host its own website/forum, it shouldn't be Reddit's problem to begin with. I think that's basically what they've done.

dustingetz 6y ago

the only reason they are centralized at all is to make a profit, so it’s the profit motive which is causing them to hoover up and own all this content and thereby being vulnerable to the risk

dman 6y ago

I think a lack of geographical diversity is coming back to bite tech companies. For better or for worse conservatives believe they are not fairly treated by tech companies. The fact that most US tech companies are on the coasts which happen to be fairly liberal further feeds into this us-vs-them tribal arguments. Curbing divisiveness and helping bring people together has never been more important, I hope we find a way out of the current quagmire collectively as a society.

rvz 6y ago

The whole cancelling of the opposition is the reason why those who do it, become their own echo-chamber and will continue to find every. single. thought-criminal. and suffocate them in livelihood, privacy and financial healthiness. Twitter has been the ground digital war of the liberal-left and (some of the far-left) over the conservative right and (some of the actual far-right) and the right-wingers retreated to their own chambers with the former have Twitter under its control. As soon as 'the right' we're told to 'create their own platform' which they have done many times, cancellation was always the goal from those from the left. Having echo-chambers creates one-sided discussions but unfortunately they are left with no choice given that cancellation is inevitable where-ever they go. If both sides are yelling, screeching and howling at each other they're both not listening to one another which is nothing like a reasonable debate.

amadeuspagel 6y ago

The fundamental problem here is that people discover things that make them angry. Platforms need to figure out how to prevent that, how to let open-minded people discover others who think differently, while keeping crybullies in a comfortable bubble. For reddit, part of the problem is that everyone who isn't logged in sees the same frontpage, which means they see posts from these controversial subreddits and get angry. They should make it possible to subscribe to or block subreddits without making an account.

hhhhhhhjjjjjjju 6y ago

I run a video game clan with a fairly active discord channel -- the stance I've taken is: there are no rules beyond: 1. nothing illegal (includes cheating at games) 2. no racism / homophobia / transphobia 3. no harassing other members 4. everyone has different beliefs and come from different parts of the world -- if you are offended, ask the offender to stop, otherwise see a mod so far there are around 50 people in the chat and almost no issues even though we have members who are rep/dem/other, religions ranging from Christian to Satanist, and we regularly post political and religious memes and such. I don't know how but thus far we've had no real issues.

monksy 6y ago
> includes cheating at games That's not illegal. It's just not permissible on the services that run the games. Also, it used to be a thing in video gaming. (Game genie) For some reason, we've given up to video game companies who try to dictate how people should enjoy a product that they purchase.
- hhhhhhhjjjjjjju 6y ago
  It might not be illegal by laws of the land, but its illegal in our world and we will instantly kick + permanently ban any member who is caught cheating. We take it as seriously as any illegal activity (as defined by law of the land).
- Shorel 6y ago
  It's not about game companies. The companies actually don't care that much, they have sold the game, and spent our money already. If they ever react is just because of the pressure from gamers. Also, it is not about cheating in your single player game. No one really cares about that. Want to enable god mode and insta-kill every baddie? Go for it. Cheaters in online competitions simply ruin the game for other players. Cheaters destroy online gaming communities. So of course, in online gaming communities, cheating is seen as one of the worst offences someone can commit.
xienze 6y ago
> I don't know how but thus far we've had no real issues. Because you only have 50 users, which is nothing. It’s the same reason communism is such an appealing idea, in very small communities it works but doesn’t scale up to nation-sized ones.

Svperstar 6y ago

As the head mod of a subreddit this really resonates with me.

ipython 6y ago

It’s funny, what I see is not politics but simple market effects. The truth is that most people value some level of moderation. Surprise! A cesspool of trolls does not provide for an inviting community. I find it hilarious that we have congresspeople whining about being “censored” on the very platform they claim is censoring them. I would think the first step of a competent censor would be to censor complaints of censorship itself.

Brendinooo 6y ago
Eh, I'm not so sure about that. If you want to censor and you don't have an ironclad mandate to go nuts, you need veneer of plausible deniability. "How are we censoring people? If we were censoring, would our first step be to censor complaints of censorship itself?" (Not saying that's what's happening, just saying I disagree with the argument here)

dgzl 6y ago

Almost like being a police officer?

SmokeyHamster 6y ago

>Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use. You kind of can, though. Sure, group X hates group Y and wants the admins to ban them. Group Y hates group X and wants the admins to ban them. The smart play would have been to be neutral and set out an explicit set of rules everyone has to follow. Reddit instead did it the worst possible way imaginable. They laid out no clear rules, banned thousands of subs for vague "hate" reasons that you can't define, much less verify, and drastically reduced the scale and appeal of their site. If you think group X will now be happy and stop complaining now that group Y has been banned, I think that's naive. The admins will still be pressured, but the goalposts will just be moved to ever more extremes until Reddit's such a niche echo-chamber that it appeals to too few people to remain financially viable.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

untangle 6y ago

> "...I wish that we...could have more federated and decentralized platforms" We did. They were called newsgroups and forums. Reddit is just 1000+ forums stuck together to build audience and make money.

raxxorrax 6y ago

If they had not caved to calls for banning, they would have less problems. The ambitions to ban more subs won't subside anytime soon. Of course this hands off approach would get you hate. That is price you have to pay. Worth it in my opinion.

lenkite 6y ago

The_Donald was censored and taken over by reddit moderators for "threats made against police". It was laughable considering the extraordinarily explicit explicit threats made against the police in other more popular reddit forums. Equal rules were not applied. If reddit was consistent in their application of rules, it would be nice. But we all know that is not the case. Some are more equal than others.