6 ms·

> 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

by 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?
    - dmoy 6y ago
      > What do they do well that can be transferred without basically asking the mods to do more work? Nothing > Isn't it just a manpower thing? Yes > 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? Well ok yeah I think they can vet expertise beforehand and then have a smaller list of approved posters, but most of the stuff I suspect just gets sent into the moderation queue requiring more humanpower to deal with. That's why I say "I wish" heh, it's non practical here
  - trav4225 6y ago
    > Too many people here on hn talk a lot of shit on stuff they don't really know much about beyond a cursory understanding Amen, amen!
  - 1_player 6y ago
    > Sometimes I honestly wish hackernews was run more like r/askhistorians. I don't. The moderation and voting/karma system on HN is much better than anything seen on Reddit. People have stupid opinions everywhere in life, but this is one of a few rare havens where it's incredibly easy to find deep and interesting conversation. Reddit ain't it.
    - dmoy 6y ago
      You should spend some time on r/askhistorians then, because it's very much unlike the rest of reddit. It's not perfect of course, but... I see more blatantly false armchair comments here at the top of threads loudly proclaiming something that is not correct than I do in r/askhistorians. I can only tell when it's a topic that I'm actually expert in, so I don't know for sure. But, Gell Mann amnesia...
- basch 6y ago
  The iron fist is a double edged sword in some senses. Although reddit acted as a free speech haven for a long time, it was only overall, and not ever in major specific communities. True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. A marketplace of ideas, and maybe more importantly, the counterspeech doctrine, are incredibly important principals in justifying the existence of free speech. Fiefdoms more often than not were echo chambers, where to see a response to bad speech, a person would have to know where else to venture. By creating filter bubbles, tribes, echo chambers, reddit was not an exemplar of a free speech haven, but instead a collection of lopsided megaphones pointed in opposite directions, strewn across a hard to navigate map. Strong moderation is what allows communities with strict quality guidelines to function, but also amplifies division. And on the topic of history, a part of me finds it unfortunate that this banning will make historical, sociological, and psychological analysis of trends, thoughts of the times, past bad behavior etc much harder. It's no what.cd or house of wisdom or library of alexandria loss, but it is still a historical record loss of a huge event that happened. I may not have personally liked The_Donald but it was quite the experience, as a fish out of water, to go look at how other people think, communicate, and reason. The culture that developed there will continue to exist, but the ease with which one could passively observe it, and learn lessons from it is greatly diminished. Another double edged sword.
  - duxup 6y ago
    > True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. Is that really a thing on the internet though? It seems like the unmoderated free speech havens on the internet are bubbles themselves and I'm not sure there's much real debate going on there....
    - basch 6y ago
      >Some observers argue that the counterspeech principle makes a better ideal than a reality, primarily because some people or groups in society possess far more power than do others. For example, proponents of critical race theory contend that minorities often are denied access to the marketplace of ideas to counter harmful speech. >Others argue that some types of speech — for example, pornography and hate speech — are so harmful that counterspeech alone is not an adequate response. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/940/counterspeech-doctrine https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/940/counterspee... I agree with your point, without some way to structure, weigh, and amplify the signal; noise and polarization are more likely to win out. https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/the-illusion-of-a-marketplace-of-ideas-and-the-right-to-truth/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/the-illusion-of-a... The final result still leaves me conflicted, in a baby with the bathwater sense. Plenty of the speech in the sub was merely speech I disagreed with, and censoring it all is nowhere close to a least restrictive means way to erase hate. Moments like spez editing a users comment are now erased from the record, for the moment at least archived elsewhere. If a politician ever wanted to go back, look at the pain of others, and use what they learned to bridge divides, to be able to speak to the others, they are now denied this resource for research. That probably bothers me more than the structure of reddit being quasi-free-speech-incompatible. ChapoTrapHouse isnt somewhere I ever went, but from a communication sense, I now feel a missed opportunity to learn how to read their language, and understand or recognize it if I heard it. Between Reddit, Youtube, Twitch, and India; today itself might eventually be regarded as a historical day, where both public servants and private enterprise stood up and said enough, albeit for different reasons.
- sireat 6y ago
  I respect the iron fist of /r/askhistorians but it has the feel of being impossible to contribute. This is by design but horribly off putting even if you read all the rules. It feels way worse than wikipedia or Stack Overflow inner circle. For example a few years ago there was a question about Hitler underestimating Soviet tank production. I submitted a link to HistoryChannel Youtube audio of the famous Hitler-Mannerheim talk of June 4th of 1942. I included even the exact second where Hitler talks about Soviet tank production. Well, my comment which was 3rd or 4th level down got [deleted]. Why did I even bother? I had a lengthy discussion with the askhistorians moderator on what the problem was. * It was not Hitler since the question was about him. * It was not the fact that this was about as close to primary source as possible. * The problem apparently was that I did not provide enough context. We are talking about providing a primary source in a comment 3 levels down. This leads to a horrible ratio of questions/accepted answers. You would think that with only few historians being able to navigate the requirements the answers would be of the highest quality. When it comes to recent history it certainly does not feel like it. Another example: There was a question on Soviet black markets in 1980s The sole accepted answer referenced one pitiful official Soviet source and that was it. It was a lazy answer. Since all I had was a wealth of anecdata I could not contribute which was fine but the feeling of incomplete answer really nagged me. So you end up feeling like https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/ but unable to do anything. The problem is this, if the official r/askhistorians answer is so obviously(to a biased participant in a recent event) incomplete for recent history how can we trust askhistorians for history where you have no knowledge? It leads to a form of Gell-Mann effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
zalkota 6y ago
Isn’t /r/politics completely one sided fake news to prop up the democrats???
- postphoned 6y ago
  >Isn’t /r/politics completely one sided fake news to prop up the democrats??? /r/politics is how I imagine the "Two Minutes Hate" from 1984. A complete circle-jerk that has infested many of the main subreddits. /r/pics, /r/nextfuckinglevel, /r/publicfreakout are rather outposts of /r/politics these days. No wonder, when a small clique of politically aligned mods controls the major subreddits. Even /r/askhistorians joined the blackout in support of 'Black Lives Matter'. What's neutral about that?
  - Can_Not 6y ago
    Damn, I can't believe they took a non-neutral stance on extrajudicial murder of black people. Crazy stuff.
    - postphoned 6y ago
      >extrajudicial murder of black people. Thought experiment: If that were true, prisons wouldn't be full of black people as it would be more much more convenient (and economical advantageous) to extrajudicially 'murder' them, as you claim. But since reality shows, most black criminals don't die in altercations with the police, even when getting belligerent, your assertion is wrong. African Americans commit crimes at a disproportionally higher rate than any other race, therefore have more run-ins with the police and despite having a much higher tendency for violent outbursts[1], only a 2-digit number of arrets led to deaths of the arrestee and of those only an even smaller fraction could be considered "wrongful". Even the death of George Floyd is better explained by "heart-attack induced by stress and exertion while resisting the arrest while overdosing on Fentanyl" than being choked to death by racist cop, especially when the medical examiner found no signs of asphyxation. But to BLM actual facts don't matter, for them it's Black vs White, manufacturing the narrative that Black people "are being hunted down in the streets" and "extrajudicially murdered". The internalized victim-complex and tribal thinking inside the Black community leads to this dangerous reversal of cause and effect and that is also why it's unlikely the situation will improve. 'Live by sword, die by the sword', so to speak. You will be hard-pressed to find a video where white people will act like these guys. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiQeZDE1t1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiQeZDE1t1c Rap music is THE pillar of Black culture. And these artists will be the role models for all those Black adolescents. And I'm not even touching the issue the 'Black Lives Matter' org is run by Marxist ideologues to instigate a violent communist revolution in the US. /r/askhistorians should be impartial enough not to pander to a trendy movement based on a false narrative and especially not condone an org with ulterior political motives. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886912004047 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...
Natanael_L 6y ago
As a moderator in a smaller technical subreddit myself, I mostly agree with that assessment. The best subs I've seen usually have small communities and/or strict enforcement of the community rules (doesn't always need to be through moderator action!). Unmoderated or otherwise weakly managed communities just don't scale. They never retain any quality if you try anyway. The noise will always dominate. With no way to set expectations that the vast majority of the audience understands (see least common denominator), expectations which they agree with and which you can meet, you'll get endless conflicts. Strict moderation like in /r/netsec and /r/askhistory works when done well and consistently by competent mods. It preserves good discussions and gives people and incentive to maintain high quality in their submissions since that's a requirement to even be seen in the first place. Smaller forums with tight healthy communities often don't need much moderation (usually niche communities with no significant controversies), and can often self regulate by typical social means (just telling people to behave). All the best contributors are usually driven by some kind of intrinsic motivation, often an interest in the topic at hand and a wish to share their knowledge. If the forum is by far too flooded with low quality content for that to be seen, they will lose motivation to contribute, and as a consequence the signal to noise ratio falls. You're more likely to incentivize new competent contributors to join if the contributions from your existing competent contributors are among the most prominent submissions in your forum. ----- As for centralized vs decentralized, I see decentralization of forums as a form of an escape hatch when the quality of a forum degrades. The ability to cleanly fork a forum and walk away to a new location with new rules, like in software projects, provides a motivation to work hard to maintain unity in the forum, or else the mods will have nothing left to be modded, and likewise for other prominent members whose bad behavior contributes to division.

by dmoy 6y ago

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?
  - dmoy 6y ago
    > What do they do well that can be transferred without basically asking the mods to do more work? Nothing > Isn't it just a manpower thing? Yes > 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? Well ok yeah I think they can vet expertise beforehand and then have a smaller list of approved posters, but most of the stuff I suspect just gets sent into the moderation queue requiring more humanpower to deal with. That's why I say "I wish" heh, it's non practical here
- trav4225 6y ago
  > Too many people here on hn talk a lot of shit on stuff they don't really know much about beyond a cursory understanding Amen, amen!
- 1_player 6y ago
  > Sometimes I honestly wish hackernews was run more like r/askhistorians. I don't. The moderation and voting/karma system on HN is much better than anything seen on Reddit. People have stupid opinions everywhere in life, but this is one of a few rare havens where it's incredibly easy to find deep and interesting conversation. Reddit ain't it.
  - dmoy 6y ago
    You should spend some time on r/askhistorians then, because it's very much unlike the rest of reddit. It's not perfect of course, but... I see more blatantly false armchair comments here at the top of threads loudly proclaiming something that is not correct than I do in r/askhistorians. I can only tell when it's a topic that I'm actually expert in, so I don't know for sure. But, Gell Mann amnesia...
basch 6y ago
The iron fist is a double edged sword in some senses. Although reddit acted as a free speech haven for a long time, it was only overall, and not ever in major specific communities. True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. A marketplace of ideas, and maybe more importantly, the counterspeech doctrine, are incredibly important principals in justifying the existence of free speech. Fiefdoms more often than not were echo chambers, where to see a response to bad speech, a person would have to know where else to venture. By creating filter bubbles, tribes, echo chambers, reddit was not an exemplar of a free speech haven, but instead a collection of lopsided megaphones pointed in opposite directions, strewn across a hard to navigate map. Strong moderation is what allows communities with strict quality guidelines to function, but also amplifies division. And on the topic of history, a part of me finds it unfortunate that this banning will make historical, sociological, and psychological analysis of trends, thoughts of the times, past bad behavior etc much harder. It's no what.cd or house of wisdom or library of alexandria loss, but it is still a historical record loss of a huge event that happened. I may not have personally liked The_Donald but it was quite the experience, as a fish out of water, to go look at how other people think, communicate, and reason. The culture that developed there will continue to exist, but the ease with which one could passively observe it, and learn lessons from it is greatly diminished. Another double edged sword.
- duxup 6y ago
  > True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. Is that really a thing on the internet though? It seems like the unmoderated free speech havens on the internet are bubbles themselves and I'm not sure there's much real debate going on there....
  - basch 6y ago
    >Some observers argue that the counterspeech principle makes a better ideal than a reality, primarily because some people or groups in society possess far more power than do others. For example, proponents of critical race theory contend that minorities often are denied access to the marketplace of ideas to counter harmful speech. >Others argue that some types of speech — for example, pornography and hate speech — are so harmful that counterspeech alone is not an adequate response. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/940/counterspeech-doctrine https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/940/counterspee... I agree with your point, without some way to structure, weigh, and amplify the signal; noise and polarization are more likely to win out. https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/the-illusion-of-a-marketplace-of-ideas-and-the-right-to-truth/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/the-illusion-of-a... The final result still leaves me conflicted, in a baby with the bathwater sense. Plenty of the speech in the sub was merely speech I disagreed with, and censoring it all is nowhere close to a least restrictive means way to erase hate. Moments like spez editing a users comment are now erased from the record, for the moment at least archived elsewhere. If a politician ever wanted to go back, look at the pain of others, and use what they learned to bridge divides, to be able to speak to the others, they are now denied this resource for research. That probably bothers me more than the structure of reddit being quasi-free-speech-incompatible. ChapoTrapHouse isnt somewhere I ever went, but from a communication sense, I now feel a missed opportunity to learn how to read their language, and understand or recognize it if I heard it. Between Reddit, Youtube, Twitch, and India; today itself might eventually be regarded as a historical day, where both public servants and private enterprise stood up and said enough, albeit for different reasons.
sireat 6y ago
I respect the iron fist of /r/askhistorians but it has the feel of being impossible to contribute. This is by design but horribly off putting even if you read all the rules. It feels way worse than wikipedia or Stack Overflow inner circle. For example a few years ago there was a question about Hitler underestimating Soviet tank production. I submitted a link to HistoryChannel Youtube audio of the famous Hitler-Mannerheim talk of June 4th of 1942. I included even the exact second where Hitler talks about Soviet tank production. Well, my comment which was 3rd or 4th level down got [deleted]. Why did I even bother? I had a lengthy discussion with the askhistorians moderator on what the problem was. * It was not Hitler since the question was about him. * It was not the fact that this was about as close to primary source as possible. * The problem apparently was that I did not provide enough context. We are talking about providing a primary source in a comment 3 levels down. This leads to a horrible ratio of questions/accepted answers. You would think that with only few historians being able to navigate the requirements the answers would be of the highest quality. When it comes to recent history it certainly does not feel like it. Another example: There was a question on Soviet black markets in 1980s The sole accepted answer referenced one pitiful official Soviet source and that was it. It was a lazy answer. Since all I had was a wealth of anecdata I could not contribute which was fine but the feeling of incomplete answer really nagged me. So you end up feeling like https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/ but unable to do anything. The problem is this, if the official r/askhistorians answer is so obviously(to a biased participant in a recent event) incomplete for recent history how can we trust askhistorians for history where you have no knowledge? It leads to a form of Gell-Mann effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

zalkota 6y ago

Isn’t /r/politics completely one sided fake news to prop up the democrats???

postphoned 6y ago
>Isn’t /r/politics completely one sided fake news to prop up the democrats??? /r/politics is how I imagine the "Two Minutes Hate" from 1984. A complete circle-jerk that has infested many of the main subreddits. /r/pics, /r/nextfuckinglevel, /r/publicfreakout are rather outposts of /r/politics these days. No wonder, when a small clique of politically aligned mods controls the major subreddits. Even /r/askhistorians joined the blackout in support of 'Black Lives Matter'. What's neutral about that?
- Can_Not 6y ago
  Damn, I can't believe they took a non-neutral stance on extrajudicial murder of black people. Crazy stuff.
  - postphoned 6y ago
    >extrajudicial murder of black people. Thought experiment: If that were true, prisons wouldn't be full of black people as it would be more much more convenient (and economical advantageous) to extrajudicially 'murder' them, as you claim. But since reality shows, most black criminals don't die in altercations with the police, even when getting belligerent, your assertion is wrong. African Americans commit crimes at a disproportionally higher rate than any other race, therefore have more run-ins with the police and despite having a much higher tendency for violent outbursts[1], only a 2-digit number of arrets led to deaths of the arrestee and of those only an even smaller fraction could be considered "wrongful". Even the death of George Floyd is better explained by "heart-attack induced by stress and exertion while resisting the arrest while overdosing on Fentanyl" than being choked to death by racist cop, especially when the medical examiner found no signs of asphyxation. But to BLM actual facts don't matter, for them it's Black vs White, manufacturing the narrative that Black people "are being hunted down in the streets" and "extrajudicially murdered". The internalized victim-complex and tribal thinking inside the Black community leads to this dangerous reversal of cause and effect and that is also why it's unlikely the situation will improve. 'Live by sword, die by the sword', so to speak. You will be hard-pressed to find a video where white people will act like these guys. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiQeZDE1t1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiQeZDE1t1c Rap music is THE pillar of Black culture. And these artists will be the role models for all those Black adolescents. And I'm not even touching the issue the 'Black Lives Matter' org is run by Marxist ideologues to instigate a violent communist revolution in the US. /r/askhistorians should be impartial enough not to pander to a trendy movement based on a false narrative and especially not condone an org with ulterior political motives. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886912004047 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...

Natanael_L 6y ago

As a moderator in a smaller technical subreddit myself, I mostly agree with that assessment. The best subs I've seen usually have small communities and/or strict enforcement of the community rules (doesn't always need to be through moderator action!). Unmoderated or otherwise weakly managed communities just don't scale. They never retain any quality if you try anyway. The noise will always dominate. With no way to set expectations that the vast majority of the audience understands (see least common denominator), expectations which they agree with and which you can meet, you'll get endless conflicts. Strict moderation like in /r/netsec and /r/askhistory works when done well and consistently by competent mods. It preserves good discussions and gives people and incentive to maintain high quality in their submissions since that's a requirement to even be seen in the first place. Smaller forums with tight healthy communities often don't need much moderation (usually niche communities with no significant controversies), and can often self regulate by typical social means (just telling people to behave). All the best contributors are usually driven by some kind of intrinsic motivation, often an interest in the topic at hand and a wish to share their knowledge. If the forum is by far too flooded with low quality content for that to be seen, they will lose motivation to contribute, and as a consequence the signal to noise ratio falls. You're more likely to incentivize new competent contributors to join if the contributions from your existing competent contributors are among the most prominent submissions in your forum. ----- As for centralized vs decentralized, I see decentralization of forums as a form of an escape hatch when the quality of a forum degrades. The ability to cleanly fork a forum and walk away to a new location with new rules, like in software projects, provides a motivation to work hard to maintain unity in the forum, or else the mods will have nothing left to be modded, and likewise for other prominent members whose bad behavior contributes to division.