17 ms·

Gotta pay the team of people that wholesale censor information there

paulpauper 5y ago
the mods are even worse than admins in many respects. mods for popular subs have considerable control over what is allowed or not. Many subs have enormous blacklists of users,domains,and even words. As well as stupid, arbitrary content guidelines pertaining to length, the title, the body, and other stuff. Reddit admins have the most power but they tend to not get involved unless a sitewide rule is broken.
- CamelCaseName 5y ago
  > Many subs have enormous blacklists of users,domains,and even words. This is the most pathetic slam against mods I have ever seen and shows that you haven't spent two seconds considering what you're criticizing.
  - khazhoux 5y ago
    Ironically, your comment itself also lacks any detail of countering or clarifying information, and is itself just a content-free slam on the person you replied to. Is your point that the mods don't have all these blacklists (including of words), or that the mods do have the blacklists but they're allowed and expected to? Is the mod system working well, in your opinion?
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      If you try moderating one you'll see quickly why these tools are necessary.
    - CamelCaseName 5y ago
      > Is your point that the mods don't have all these blacklists (including of words), Of course moderators have blacklists. For words / phrases / domains, they are site sanctioned through the (now) built in function called "Automoderator". User blacklists are done through the built in ban function. In fact, one would call these blacklists... moderation. Something a moderator would be expected to do. > the mods do have the blacklists but they're allowed and expected to? They are built into the site. It would logically follow that it is both allowed and expected. Stepping back, I'm not sure how you can expect a forum, any forum, to survive without moderation. > Is the mod system working well, in your opinion? This is really impossible to answer. From the bird's eye view, users and impressions are growing while reddit doesn't have to pay for moderation. A stunning success. From a lurker perspective, they never interact with moderators and generally get content that has been reviewed and determined to be within the rules, though this may vary by subreddit. From an active user perspective, the system may work well, or not well, depending on which subreddit(s) you frequent and how you use the platform. There are many subreddits, and moderators on some may certainly make your life unpleasant. So... don't be active on those subreddits. However, the number of active users, according to the 90-9-1 principle is quite small, and the number of those that ever meaningfully interact with a moderator, or even a bot moderator, are probably a magnitude smaller than that. So yes, IMO, the mod system seems to work well overall.
  - buu700 5y ago
    I get where you're coming from, as I created /r/relationship_advice. The existence of such blacklists, even "enormous" ones, isn't inherently bad; it's just a reality of dealing with an enormous flood of spam on a $0 budget. That being said, blacklists on strings have 100% been abused by both the mods and the admins. Blacklists should be used for mitigating spam — e.g. we'll often block a specific attacker by blacklisting certain phrases or regexes and then deal with the inevitable edge case false positives by hand — not generally for censoring ideas or "offensive" words. Sure, by all means block phrases like "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch and maybe /r/relationship_advice. If a sub is inciting violence or posting CP, there's probably a case for banning it. But when people have to self-censor common curse words and even the word "fart" in a general forum like /r/tifu, clearly something is wrong.
    - Blikkentrekker 5y ago
      > Sure, by all means block phrases like "kill yourself" Even that will often lead to the scunthorpe problem. I remember well once scouring through a post that was rejected on a forum to finally realize it was because it contained the phrase “tardive dyskinesia” which contained “tard” which alone was enough to deny the post, apparently.
      - buu700 5y ago
        FWIW, I think it's silly that reddit has banned the term "retard" site-wide, although I also acknowledge that the term may be becoming broader and more offensive than I personally understand it to be. In the case of "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch, though, it's such an extreme case with potentially disastrous results that I wouldn't find it particularly problematic. The occasional false positive is arguably a small price to pay.
        Blikkentrekker 5y ago
        > FWIW, I think it's silly that reddit has banned the term "retard" site-wide, although I also acknowledge that the term may be becoming broader and more offensive than I personally understand it to be. Do you have any source of this? As far as I know Reddit bans no words site-wide, and I see the term used now and then. On the very same website a post could not come through because I described someone as having “retarded pubertal development”, in any case. > In the case of "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch, though, it's such an extreme case with potentially disastrous results that I wouldn't find it particularly problematic. The occasional false positive is arguably a small price to pay. It's also completely useless because people that want to get through the censor will et through it by other means that will still make their message easily understood. Word censors are window politics and people that want to get around them will get around them and I assume it's already against the rules on that subreddit to encourage suicide so they would be quite willing to also break a rule to evade word censors.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kiba 5y ago
  That's what make reddit great. Certain reddit are heavily moderated and you get great content. If you don't like how moderation done, go start your own reddit.
  - SkyMarshal 5y ago
    > go start your own reddit. This is actually what makes reddit great, that anyone can start their own subreddit, mod it however they want, and compete with all the others based on the merits of its own content, community and moderation style.
    - pageandrew 5y ago
      Untrue... reddit pushes some subreddits to the front page and bans other subreddits on the basis of spreading "disinformation".
    - Blikkentrekker 5y ago
      However the platform lacks namespaces. It is impossible to compete with the first one that claims the obvious name for the subject, such as, say r/startrek The competing ones also censor heavily, so all it does is that one can now choose what particular opinions one can't express. Competing on the merits of moderation style is insignificant compared to having the most straightforward name that everyone will try first; the subreddit with such name will always be the largest.
    - mytailorisrich 5y ago
      Yes and no. That's great for niches but not for general, high profile topics, a country subreddit for instance.
      - whimsicalism 5y ago
        Disagree - most city subreddits are pretty hands off and they get overrun by people coming from alt-right subs who don't even live in the city talking about crime. Moderation often improves quality. It can also be bad, but is not universally so.
- ryantgtg 5y ago
  I mod a surfing video sub, and I censor the heck out of wakeboarding videos! Oh, the power I wield! Mwahahaha!
- emodendroket 5y ago
  So join a different community on Reddit whose rules you like better, or make one. Why does everyone have to allow everything?
  - pageandrew 5y ago
    Reddit pushes certain communities to the front page and suggests them to users, and quarantines/bans other communities.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      I'm not going to shed any tears over them shutting down communities devoted to hate speech because the site has become noticeably more pleasant to read and participate in as those users went elsewhere.
  - potatoman22 5y ago
    I think that once a sub attracts a large amount of readers, it's unethical to block certain conversations. For large subs like /r/politics, a select few people get to control what's fed into the eyeballs of millions of people. And we don't even know what content wasn't allowed to be posted, how can we trust they're unbiased?
    - marcinzm 5y ago
      >I think that once a sub attracts a large amount of readers, it's unethical to block certain conversations. Why? You're free to make your own subreddit with a different bias or no bias. No one really assumes it's unbiased and they go there because of the bias that they agree with. People like communities of like minded people. By that logic any large scale media (tv, newspapers, magazines, etc.) should not be allowed to have bias even if the only reason people went there was for the bias.
      - emodendroket 5y ago
        This is quite true too. If you don't feel like politics is conservative enough for your tastes, worldnews is right there for you. And there are countless smaller communities catering to nearly any perspective imaginable.
- pageandrew 5y ago
  I've been permanently banned from almost all of the top COVID related subs for daring to discuss disallowed topics, like the Wuhan lab, as well as expressing anti-lockdown sentiments. My appeals have been instantly denied as well. I understand the idea that subreddits are user-run communities and should be able to self-moderate, but there are a couple problems with this: 1. Reddit claims to be the "front page of the internet" and promotes many of these top subreddits with front-page rankings, user suggestions, and push notifications. Therefore, reddit mods have immense power in controlling the flow of information to those who believe they're interacting with a reputable source, and Reddit corporate has washed their hands of any responsibility to have a say in this, despite the profit they receive from it. 2. Reddit corporate certainly is willing to get involved with subreddits, by banning or quarantining certain subs for spreading "misinformation", but this seems selectively applied to one particular side of these issues. Anti-lockdown subreddits are banned for downplaying Covid, but major Covid subreddits openly feature fear-mongering posts that overplay, say, the risk of the virus to kids. Both are misinformation, but one is allowed and and the other is banned.
  - zpeti 5y ago
    This seems more like a Silicon Valley issue than a Reddit one. And Silicon Valley generally doesn’t have much motivation to get people doing actual stuff, people sitting at home is where the cash is.
    - iammisc 5y ago
      The nice thing is as alternative tech platforms rise up (communities.win, ovarit.com, ruqqus, rumble, etc) we will see a more decentralized web and these tech giants will soon be forgotten. Hopefully, they'll take their toxic VCs with them, but I think that may be a pipe dream.
  - lovich 5y ago
    Was the front page of anything ever not curated?
    - 5y ago
paxys 5y ago
Funny enough paying for professional moderation will actually help Reddit. The quality of almost every major subreddit is trash due to mods on a power trip (or paid by a third party to push an agenda).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- leereeves 5y ago
  What makes you think reddit wouldn't just take the third party's money to push the agenda themselves, like many media companies do?
  - paxys 5y ago
    They would, but at least in that case they get paid for it.
- Seattle3503 5y ago
  The last thing Reddit wants is to take responsibility for unpopular but necessary moderation.

the mods are even worse than admins in many respects. mods for popular subs have considerable control over what is allowed or not. Many subs have enormous blacklists of users,domains,and even words. As well as stupid, arbitrary content guidelines pertaining to length, the title, the body, and other stuff. Reddit admins have the most power but they tend to not get involved unless a sitewide rule is broken.

CamelCaseName 5y ago
> Many subs have enormous blacklists of users,domains,and even words. This is the most pathetic slam against mods I have ever seen and shows that you haven't spent two seconds considering what you're criticizing.
- khazhoux 5y ago
  Ironically, your comment itself also lacks any detail of countering or clarifying information, and is itself just a content-free slam on the person you replied to. Is your point that the mods don't have all these blacklists (including of words), or that the mods do have the blacklists but they're allowed and expected to? Is the mod system working well, in your opinion?
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    If you try moderating one you'll see quickly why these tools are necessary.
  - CamelCaseName 5y ago
    > Is your point that the mods don't have all these blacklists (including of words), Of course moderators have blacklists. For words / phrases / domains, they are site sanctioned through the (now) built in function called "Automoderator". User blacklists are done through the built in ban function. In fact, one would call these blacklists... moderation. Something a moderator would be expected to do. > the mods do have the blacklists but they're allowed and expected to? They are built into the site. It would logically follow that it is both allowed and expected. Stepping back, I'm not sure how you can expect a forum, any forum, to survive without moderation. > Is the mod system working well, in your opinion? This is really impossible to answer. From the bird's eye view, users and impressions are growing while reddit doesn't have to pay for moderation. A stunning success. From a lurker perspective, they never interact with moderators and generally get content that has been reviewed and determined to be within the rules, though this may vary by subreddit. From an active user perspective, the system may work well, or not well, depending on which subreddit(s) you frequent and how you use the platform. There are many subreddits, and moderators on some may certainly make your life unpleasant. So... don't be active on those subreddits. However, the number of active users, according to the 90-9-1 principle is quite small, and the number of those that ever meaningfully interact with a moderator, or even a bot moderator, are probably a magnitude smaller than that. So yes, IMO, the mod system seems to work well overall.
- buu700 5y ago
  I get where you're coming from, as I created /r/relationship_advice. The existence of such blacklists, even "enormous" ones, isn't inherently bad; it's just a reality of dealing with an enormous flood of spam on a $0 budget. That being said, blacklists on strings have 100% been abused by both the mods and the admins. Blacklists should be used for mitigating spam — e.g. we'll often block a specific attacker by blacklisting certain phrases or regexes and then deal with the inevitable edge case false positives by hand — not generally for censoring ideas or "offensive" words. Sure, by all means block phrases like "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch and maybe /r/relationship_advice. If a sub is inciting violence or posting CP, there's probably a case for banning it. But when people have to self-censor common curse words and even the word "fart" in a general forum like /r/tifu, clearly something is wrong.
  - Blikkentrekker 5y ago
    > Sure, by all means block phrases like "kill yourself" Even that will often lead to the scunthorpe problem. I remember well once scouring through a post that was rejected on a forum to finally realize it was because it contained the phrase “tardive dyskinesia” which contained “tard” which alone was enough to deny the post, apparently.
    - buu700 5y ago
      FWIW, I think it's silly that reddit has banned the term "retard" site-wide, although I also acknowledge that the term may be becoming broader and more offensive than I personally understand it to be. In the case of "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch, though, it's such an extreme case with potentially disastrous results that I wouldn't find it particularly problematic. The occasional false positive is arguably a small price to pay.
      - Blikkentrekker 5y ago
        > FWIW, I think it's silly that reddit has banned the term "retard" site-wide, although I also acknowledge that the term may be becoming broader and more offensive than I personally understand it to be. Do you have any source of this? As far as I know Reddit bans no words site-wide, and I see the term used now and then. On the very same website a post could not come through because I described someone as having “retarded pubertal development”, in any case. > In the case of "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch, though, it's such an extreme case with potentially disastrous results that I wouldn't find it particularly problematic. The occasional false positive is arguably a small price to pay. It's also completely useless because people that want to get through the censor will et through it by other means that will still make their message easily understood. Word censors are window politics and people that want to get around them will get around them and I assume it's already against the rules on that subreddit to encourage suicide so they would be quite willing to also break a rule to evade word censors.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kiba 5y ago
That's what make reddit great. Certain reddit are heavily moderated and you get great content. If you don't like how moderation done, go start your own reddit.
- SkyMarshal 5y ago
  > go start your own reddit. This is actually what makes reddit great, that anyone can start their own subreddit, mod it however they want, and compete with all the others based on the merits of its own content, community and moderation style.
  - pageandrew 5y ago
    Untrue... reddit pushes some subreddits to the front page and bans other subreddits on the basis of spreading "disinformation".
  - Blikkentrekker 5y ago
    However the platform lacks namespaces. It is impossible to compete with the first one that claims the obvious name for the subject, such as, say r/startrek The competing ones also censor heavily, so all it does is that one can now choose what particular opinions one can't express. Competing on the merits of moderation style is insignificant compared to having the most straightforward name that everyone will try first; the subreddit with such name will always be the largest.
  - mytailorisrich 5y ago
    Yes and no. That's great for niches but not for general, high profile topics, a country subreddit for instance.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      Disagree - most city subreddits are pretty hands off and they get overrun by people coming from alt-right subs who don't even live in the city talking about crime. Moderation often improves quality. It can also be bad, but is not universally so.
ryantgtg 5y ago
I mod a surfing video sub, and I censor the heck out of wakeboarding videos! Oh, the power I wield! Mwahahaha!
emodendroket 5y ago
So join a different community on Reddit whose rules you like better, or make one. Why does everyone have to allow everything?
- pageandrew 5y ago
  Reddit pushes certain communities to the front page and suggests them to users, and quarantines/bans other communities.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    I'm not going to shed any tears over them shutting down communities devoted to hate speech because the site has become noticeably more pleasant to read and participate in as those users went elsewhere.
- potatoman22 5y ago
  I think that once a sub attracts a large amount of readers, it's unethical to block certain conversations. For large subs like /r/politics, a select few people get to control what's fed into the eyeballs of millions of people. And we don't even know what content wasn't allowed to be posted, how can we trust they're unbiased?
  - marcinzm 5y ago
    >I think that once a sub attracts a large amount of readers, it's unethical to block certain conversations. Why? You're free to make your own subreddit with a different bias or no bias. No one really assumes it's unbiased and they go there because of the bias that they agree with. People like communities of like minded people. By that logic any large scale media (tv, newspapers, magazines, etc.) should not be allowed to have bias even if the only reason people went there was for the bias.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      This is quite true too. If you don't feel like politics is conservative enough for your tastes, worldnews is right there for you. And there are countless smaller communities catering to nearly any perspective imaginable.
pageandrew 5y ago
I've been permanently banned from almost all of the top COVID related subs for daring to discuss disallowed topics, like the Wuhan lab, as well as expressing anti-lockdown sentiments. My appeals have been instantly denied as well. I understand the idea that subreddits are user-run communities and should be able to self-moderate, but there are a couple problems with this: 1. Reddit claims to be the "front page of the internet" and promotes many of these top subreddits with front-page rankings, user suggestions, and push notifications. Therefore, reddit mods have immense power in controlling the flow of information to those who believe they're interacting with a reputable source, and Reddit corporate has washed their hands of any responsibility to have a say in this, despite the profit they receive from it. 2. Reddit corporate certainly is willing to get involved with subreddits, by banning or quarantining certain subs for spreading "misinformation", but this seems selectively applied to one particular side of these issues. Anti-lockdown subreddits are banned for downplaying Covid, but major Covid subreddits openly feature fear-mongering posts that overplay, say, the risk of the virus to kids. Both are misinformation, but one is allowed and and the other is banned.
- zpeti 5y ago
  This seems more like a Silicon Valley issue than a Reddit one. And Silicon Valley generally doesn’t have much motivation to get people doing actual stuff, people sitting at home is where the cash is.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    The nice thing is as alternative tech platforms rise up (communities.win, ovarit.com, ruqqus, rumble, etc) we will see a more decentralized web and these tech giants will soon be forgotten. Hopefully, they'll take their toxic VCs with them, but I think that may be a pipe dream.
- lovich 5y ago
  Was the front page of anything ever not curated?
  - 5y ago

paxys 5y ago

Funny enough paying for professional moderation will actually help Reddit. The quality of almost every major subreddit is trash due to mods on a power trip (or paid by a third party to push an agenda).

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
leereeves 5y ago
What makes you think reddit wouldn't just take the third party's money to push the agenda themselves, like many media companies do?
- paxys 5y ago
  They would, but at least in that case they get paid for it.
Seattle3503 5y ago
The last thing Reddit wants is to take responsibility for unpopular but necessary moderation.