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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 r
by 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 agoFWIW, 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.
- buu700 5y agoDo you have any source of this? Not offhand, but I've heard of users getting temporary suspensions for using the word, although I don't believe there's an automated rule site-wide. It's also completely useless Not entirely. Sure, if you're a dedicated attacker trying to tell a specific target to kill themselves, there's not much I can do about it; you'll acquire an aged account with decent karma and find a way to do it. If you're just a regular person going about your day and say something stupid, an automod removal with a warning that circumventing the rule will result in a permanent ban is probably sufficient to make you give up and move on with your life. And of course bots that aren't specifically designed to circumvent my subreddit's rules would be trivially blocked.
- Blikkentrekker 5y ago> Not offhand, but I've heard of users getting temporary suspensions for using the word, although I don't believe there's an automated rule site-wide. Merely for using the word? this seems like a myth to me. Various subreddits would obviously ban for it if used as a direct insult, but banning any use of it side-wide seems unlikely. > If you're just a regular person going about your day and say something stupid, an automod removal with a warning that circumventing the rule will result in a permanent ban is probably sufficient to make you give up and move on with your life. And of course bots that aren't specifically designed to circumvent my subreddit's rules would be trivially blocked. In which case it would be just as effective to simply give a warning based on detected words that various conduct with it will not be tolerated and that a moderator will be automatically informed of the post, and to remind users to make use that their usage of the word falls within the guidelines. This would eliminate scuntorpe false positives, and have about the same effect of stopping the intended behavior.