4 ms·

Sure, nobody likes political correctness but without any controls on content on a public forum as a part of a ToS, nazis and other people who are desperate to e

by antris 5y ago

Sure, nobody likes political correctness but without any controls on content on a public forum as a part of a ToS, nazis and other people who are desperate to express their hate, and even break the law and recruit others will eventually find it and spam the hell out of it. 4chan is a perfect example of what happens to an actually occasionally funny place that allows any kind of discussion "just for lulz". It's been a cesspool and barely anyone remembers how it was before the nazis came in. It's just how it works when the forum is public and there's no moderation. If you want good discussion without limits, I suggest joining smaller communities that are harder to flood in this way, or talk to people you know in real life.

hnnnnnnng 5y ago
Lmao
armchairhacker 5y ago
I completely agree with you, we need content moderation and some political beliefs are just toxic. But Reddit just takes it to the absurd: - Automods which remove posts which simply contain certain words (e.g. "coronavirus", apparently because too many covid deniers). I get trying to restrict covid misinformation, but I'm not even exaggerating, they remove anything discussing covid even if it's supporting. - Mods removing some posts seemingly at random (seem using sites like reveddit.com). These posts really don't involve anything controversial at all and I can't understand why they were removed. - Automods which ban you simply for posting in certain subreddits. And not radical ones, ones like r/PoliticalCompassMemes or r/watchredditdie. Btw, check out r/watchredditdie yourself to see more issues Another issue is that Redditors in top subreddits tend to add politics to pretty much anything. Like, there is a highly upvoted post in r/nextfuckinglevel (a subreddit designed for e.g. people running ultra-marathons or doing crazy gymnastics or magic tricks) that is literally just a guy in his 40s ranting about how the U.S. government is fucked. And yeah, I agree the US government is pretty bad, but I don't need to hear about it in every single subreddit or r/AskReddit thread.
- atweiden 5y ago
  Social bookmarking site moderation is in need of an overhaul. Moderators have turned into gatekeepers who can’t be unseated. I’m dreaming of an “old Reddit”/HN-esque discussion board where moderation policies are opt-in. E.g. submit a thread to /r/bayarea, users compete to moderate e.g. ban/censor content. Users “follow” moderators to opt-in to their moderation policies. Basically upvoting/downvoting but for moderation itself. Even better if a user’s moderation policies could be forked and lightly edited. I even think there’s room for a learning curve here, given how thoroughly social bookmarking sites have trounced traditional media.
  - handoflixue 5y ago
    I think the big problem with this is that very few people actually want to be moderators, and the people who do want the position are often least suited for it. Smaller communities can rely on simple upvote/downvote, possibly with some intelligent logic to notice who you tend to agree with - I think Slashdot was primarily this? But past a certain scale, just dealing with spam is a huge deal. Plus you need 24/7 coverage, and you want mods to be reasonably responsive. Assuming each person can put in 42 hours/week of moderation that still means you need four moderators. And of course you need a default for people who have just arrived at the site, so that they're not buried in spam or attacked by trolls on their first post.
    - atweiden 5y ago
      Not to belittle the problem of spam, but spam isn’t really what people are increasingly taking issue with. “Political” moderation or just plain obstinance are the biggest shortcomings of present day moderation policies. It leads to de facto namesquatting of popular topics the moderators of which have unfettered power to control the narrative surrounding it. I bet fame and karma points could counteract the disincentives to moderate. What if opting in to a particular moderator translated into 1 karma point per week for that moderator? Moderators of popular topics (e.g. topics with 100k+ subscriber counts) would quickly become some of the most highly upvoted users on the site. And if commenters could “layer” opt-in moderation policies one on top of the other, moderators could specialize then. Much of the specialization could be done by bots. Anti-“flagrant spam” policies would be easy to bot and easy to combine. The moderation policies left to be done by hand would largely amount to narrative control. > And of course you need a default for people who have just arrived at the site, so that they're not buried in spam or attacked by trolls on their first post. That choice could be left up to GUI frontend maintainers, assuming the site itself were open source. Really I just think social bookmarking has the clearest signal for human communications in general, by far — by leaps and bounds in fact. It’s a public service for such a thing to exist in modern pop culture.
daptaq 5y ago
Sounds to me like internet fora inevitably fail, either suffering under over- or under-regulation. People usually act as though one of the two solutions could fix the problem, but having seen both, I cannot prefer either. The medium is broken.
1337biz 5y ago
Reddit has become a long-form of Twitter. An endless circle of pandering to the same claqueurs. It is so tedious. My time spent on Reddit has dropped massively over the last months. And I moved back to 4chan. It is so refreshing to see raw and uncensored communication. Even if 4chan often borders on insanity, it feels so much more honest and real than the cleansed cliques of sameness.
tryonenow 5y ago
>nazis and other people who are desperate to express their hate, and even break the law and recruit others will eventually find it and spam the hell out of it. 4chan is a perfect example of what happens to an actually occasionally funny place that allows any kind of discussion "just for lulz". No, the problem is that right of center posts and comments are banned and cheaply and falsely dismissed as "nazi" ideology. The issue is exacerbated with the heavily politicized moderation. It's a self reinforcing bubble at this point. There is far more diverse discussion on 4chan. You may get shouted down, but you won't be banned or downvoted into oblivion for dissenting. I think it's far more telling that unmoderated forums tend to lean right - it speaks to the authoritarianism that has consumed the left, and pervasive control that progressives have across the internet. When you ban both far right extremism and right of center opinions, the people are forced to congregate in the select few alternative forums that are not politicized through moderation. It's also seems that leftist opinions can only flourish through heavy handed moderation and community gatekeeping. Reddit is just one example. Take a look at Wikipedia, or stackexhange, and the kind of sources that are permitted. Frankly, the "nazi" right is more open-minded at this point than the left, because leftist forums (and in person groups) tend to suppress dissenting ideas, to the degree that people on these moderated forums are simply not exposed to alternative ideas, which are far more nuanced than the trivial -isms that they are universally slandered with. Polarization in the US is thusly driven primarily by left wing authoritarianism, which uses the paradox of intolerance as an excuse to be intolerant, assigning guilt to right of center opinions by tenuous assocation.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
The problem with your desire to squelch nazis at all costs is that the tools for squelching nazis quickly get abused by labeling everything those possessing the tools don't like to be nazi content. Even if that weren't the case, you're infantilizing everyone else in the world, assuming that they're morons who will instantly start to genocide Jewish people because they saw some nazi babbling on about whatever it is that nazis babble on about. You're giving tremendous power to nazis and being incredibly insulting to pretty much everybody else.
- antris 5y ago
  You could replace nazis with any group of people with a specific message that they want to spam all day, every day and it would still be a horrible decision to let them roam free in every public forum. Whichever the group is, not ALL forums on the internet should be about the grievances of that one group. Though, it just happens that nazis are the ones who seem to be the quickest and most common group to take over forums. This is because they need an audience for their crap, and on every forum either the nazis get kicked out or their audience leaves. I never mentioned any real world consequences (although they definitely exist too), but even if you purely talk about discussion quality and ability for people of different kinds to participate, you usually have to be kicking some nazis out eventually, because they tend to become as overbearing of a voice as the moderation lets them.
AussieWog93 5y ago
>barely anyone remembers how it was before the nazis came in. I remember it. A non-negligible part of the traffic was pedophiles posting LazyTown content, and users of /v/ would keep folders full of transsexual porn on their desktop just to derail threads they didn't like.

by antris 5y ago

hnnnnnnng 5y ago

Lmao

armchairhacker 5y ago

I completely agree with you, we need content moderation and some political beliefs are just toxic. But Reddit just takes it to the absurd: - Automods which remove posts which simply contain certain words (e.g. "coronavirus", apparently because too many covid deniers). I get trying to restrict covid misinformation, but I'm not even exaggerating, they remove anything discussing covid even if it's supporting. - Mods removing some posts seemingly at random (seem using sites like reveddit.com). These posts really don't involve anything controversial at all and I can't understand why they were removed. - Automods which ban you simply for posting in certain subreddits. And not radical ones, ones like r/PoliticalCompassMemes or r/watchredditdie. Btw, check out r/watchredditdie yourself to see more issues Another issue is that Redditors in top subreddits tend to add politics to pretty much anything. Like, there is a highly upvoted post in r/nextfuckinglevel (a subreddit designed for e.g. people running ultra-marathons or doing crazy gymnastics or magic tricks) that is literally just a guy in his 40s ranting about how the U.S. government is fucked. And yeah, I agree the US government is pretty bad, but I don't need to hear about it in every single subreddit or r/AskReddit thread.

atweiden 5y ago
Social bookmarking site moderation is in need of an overhaul. Moderators have turned into gatekeepers who can’t be unseated. I’m dreaming of an “old Reddit”/HN-esque discussion board where moderation policies are opt-in. E.g. submit a thread to /r/bayarea, users compete to moderate e.g. ban/censor content. Users “follow” moderators to opt-in to their moderation policies. Basically upvoting/downvoting but for moderation itself. Even better if a user’s moderation policies could be forked and lightly edited. I even think there’s room for a learning curve here, given how thoroughly social bookmarking sites have trounced traditional media.
- handoflixue 5y ago
  I think the big problem with this is that very few people actually want to be moderators, and the people who do want the position are often least suited for it. Smaller communities can rely on simple upvote/downvote, possibly with some intelligent logic to notice who you tend to agree with - I think Slashdot was primarily this? But past a certain scale, just dealing with spam is a huge deal. Plus you need 24/7 coverage, and you want mods to be reasonably responsive. Assuming each person can put in 42 hours/week of moderation that still means you need four moderators. And of course you need a default for people who have just arrived at the site, so that they're not buried in spam or attacked by trolls on their first post.
  - atweiden 5y ago
    Not to belittle the problem of spam, but spam isn’t really what people are increasingly taking issue with. “Political” moderation or just plain obstinance are the biggest shortcomings of present day moderation policies. It leads to de facto namesquatting of popular topics the moderators of which have unfettered power to control the narrative surrounding it. I bet fame and karma points could counteract the disincentives to moderate. What if opting in to a particular moderator translated into 1 karma point per week for that moderator? Moderators of popular topics (e.g. topics with 100k+ subscriber counts) would quickly become some of the most highly upvoted users on the site. And if commenters could “layer” opt-in moderation policies one on top of the other, moderators could specialize then. Much of the specialization could be done by bots. Anti-“flagrant spam” policies would be easy to bot and easy to combine. The moderation policies left to be done by hand would largely amount to narrative control. > And of course you need a default for people who have just arrived at the site, so that they're not buried in spam or attacked by trolls on their first post. That choice could be left up to GUI frontend maintainers, assuming the site itself were open source. Really I just think social bookmarking has the clearest signal for human communications in general, by far — by leaps and bounds in fact. It’s a public service for such a thing to exist in modern pop culture.

daptaq 5y ago

Sounds to me like internet fora inevitably fail, either suffering under over- or under-regulation. People usually act as though one of the two solutions could fix the problem, but having seen both, I cannot prefer either. The medium is broken.

1337biz 5y ago

Reddit has become a long-form of Twitter. An endless circle of pandering to the same claqueurs. It is so tedious. My time spent on Reddit has dropped massively over the last months. And I moved back to 4chan. It is so refreshing to see raw and uncensored communication. Even if 4chan often borders on insanity, it feels so much more honest and real than the cleansed cliques of sameness.

tryonenow 5y ago

>nazis and other people who are desperate to express their hate, and even break the law and recruit others will eventually find it and spam the hell out of it. 4chan is a perfect example of what happens to an actually occasionally funny place that allows any kind of discussion "just for lulz". No, the problem is that right of center posts and comments are banned and cheaply and falsely dismissed as "nazi" ideology. The issue is exacerbated with the heavily politicized moderation. It's a self reinforcing bubble at this point. There is far more diverse discussion on 4chan. You may get shouted down, but you won't be banned or downvoted into oblivion for dissenting. I think it's far more telling that unmoderated forums tend to lean right - it speaks to the authoritarianism that has consumed the left, and pervasive control that progressives have across the internet. When you ban both far right extremism and right of center opinions, the people are forced to congregate in the select few alternative forums that are not politicized through moderation. It's also seems that leftist opinions can only flourish through heavy handed moderation and community gatekeeping. Reddit is just one example. Take a look at Wikipedia, or stackexhange, and the kind of sources that are permitted. Frankly, the "nazi" right is more open-minded at this point than the left, because leftist forums (and in person groups) tend to suppress dissenting ideas, to the degree that people on these moderated forums are simply not exposed to alternative ideas, which are far more nuanced than the trivial -isms that they are universally slandered with. Polarization in the US is thusly driven primarily by left wing authoritarianism, which uses the paradox of intolerance as an excuse to be intolerant, assigning guilt to right of center opinions by tenuous assocation.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

The problem with your desire to squelch nazis at all costs is that the tools for squelching nazis quickly get abused by labeling everything those possessing the tools don't like to be nazi content. Even if that weren't the case, you're infantilizing everyone else in the world, assuming that they're morons who will instantly start to genocide Jewish people because they saw some nazi babbling on about whatever it is that nazis babble on about. You're giving tremendous power to nazis and being incredibly insulting to pretty much everybody else.

antris 5y ago
You could replace nazis with any group of people with a specific message that they want to spam all day, every day and it would still be a horrible decision to let them roam free in every public forum. Whichever the group is, not ALL forums on the internet should be about the grievances of that one group. Though, it just happens that nazis are the ones who seem to be the quickest and most common group to take over forums. This is because they need an audience for their crap, and on every forum either the nazis get kicked out or their audience leaves. I never mentioned any real world consequences (although they definitely exist too), but even if you purely talk about discussion quality and ability for people of different kinds to participate, you usually have to be kicking some nazis out eventually, because they tend to become as overbearing of a voice as the moderation lets them.

AussieWog93 5y ago

>barely anyone remembers how it was before the nazis came in. I remember it. A non-negligible part of the traffic was pedophiles posting LazyTown content, and users of /v/ would keep folders full of transsexual porn on their desktop just to derail threads they didn't like.