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reddit used to be great until they pulled their great bait & switch, then added all kinds of authoritarian features. A brief history of reddit: >We want to de

reddit used to be great until they pulled their great bait & switch, then added all kinds of authoritarian features. A brief history of reddit: >We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it. — Reddit FAQ 2005 >We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content — u/kn0thing 2008 >A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets. — u/kn0thing 2012 >We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal. — u/reddit 2012 >We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse). — u/yishan 2012 >Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech — u/spez 2015

sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
reddit wouldn't be so bad re: free speech if you could ignore all of the non-sense, sadly they push it out to everyone by design
- Damogran6 5y ago
  For a platform built on user contributions, they got too big (everybody ends up saying the same thing and getting downvoted as a result) and the moderation got hostile to the point you don’t WANT to contribute. Eventually you find the site that used to be fun, with lots of interesting things from interesting people…turned into a chore.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
jacobolus 5y ago
Circa 2005 reddit was a forum for nerdy young tech people, talking about miscellaneous web links but mostly focused around nerdy tech stuff. Nobody I know who read reddit circa 2005 wanted it to become a white supremacist hate forum. When it started to attract large numbers of white supremacists who deposited their steaming piles of bullshit (hate speech, vicious personal attacks) all over the site, lots of people reading the site (including those who had been there since 2005) were appalled. Obviously advertisers also don’t want to associate their brands with hate speech (or child porn, etc.).
- dannyw 5y ago
  I joined Reddit around 2007, and my perspective is completely the opposite of yours. Reddit was a place where you could create your own community, and moderate it as you see fit (as long as it's legal). It was a place where people respected free speech, and that you don't have to agree with someone but you'll defend their right to see it. White supremacy or hate wasn't really a thing on reddit until the past few years. The controversial content on reddit were r/jailbait (which I'd say a majority of the community agreed with; although many did begrudge the shifting of the overton window on 'we host anything that is legal'), but then "social justice" became a thing and a new crowd of redditors seemed to want to de-platform people. I don't have a time machine, but I suspect if you polled a majority of redditors in 2017 whether they'd support the de-platforming that is happening today, a majority would vehemently disagree.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    A bunch of abusive Reddit sub-fora (whose users had a way of spilling out across the general site and violating the site guidelines) were banned in the 2011–2015 timeframe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities#Banned_subreddits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti... But my impression is that being the central hub of one of the most aggressively hateful online pro-Donald-Trump communities in 2016 attracted a larger number of abusive users and increased the visibility of the problem.
- SaiUEF9U6gDXHyW 5y ago
TechBro8615 5y ago
Reddit should break off all political content into its own site, porn into another, and keep the rest in place. If a post is porn or political, mods can click a button to move it to the dedicated site. This would be similar to the “move topic” functionality from phpBB and vBulletin. This might solve a lot of problems, but it would create issues on the edge, like r/pics content that may not be overtly political but clearly has an agenda. Personally I use Reddit exclusively for political flamewars on one account, and in-depth technical content on another account. I’m starting to feel pretty unwelcome, though, when it comes to anything “misinformarion” related. Once you get banned from one subreddit, if you have a post reported on the same subreddit from another account, then both your accounts get banned site-wide. Combine this with the dragnet, unsolicited bans that some mods are sending to anyone who posts in certain subreddits and you have a real chilling effect. The average IQ on Reddit is also about 110, which is just boring in most cases. When you can predict the top comments on a thread, reading them is probably a waste of time.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  You're ignoring the way that subreddits like r/ChoosingBeggars are full of trivially faked texts that tick off every box to rile people up on political and social issues.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  In the current polarized era, all discussion online is inherently political. The only way to escape it is in small groups with other people you have mutually agreed not to talk about it with. This is the result of Citizens United; when elections are decided by who has the most money, it’s a zero-sum game until politics have consumed the totality of our lives.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Is HN "small"? Political discussions at HN (which are quite rare) seem obviously low-quality compared to the rest of the site, but still rank well above much of the Internet. I assume that the same would go for many niche-focused spaces, where curiosity and intellectual interest can dominate.
xyzzy123 5y ago
It feels like reddit changed in line with the rest of the Internet though. In 2022 you have the choice of a) "suppressing free speech" or b) "platforming racists" and there is no middle ground and no way to win. You can't pass the buck to moderators. The choice did not feel so stark in 2005.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
  - knowaveragejoe 5y ago
- didericis 5y ago
  Self moderation was and still is a way out. If there were better tools to allow users to say "I don't like this person, I don't want to hear more from then" and "Bill likes this person, maybe I'll hear him out." or "I don't want to deal with this kind of thing in this room, can you talk about it elsewhere"? The tools we have for those things are not nearly as sophisticated as what exists in real life with body language, facial expressions, physical distance, symbols, demeanor, conversation timing, etc. Our tools to self moderate and separate into amicable groups which still permit crossover in real life are much better. The major problem with most internet platforms is the boundaries and user controls are non existent. Everything is open for everyone to see and no one can control who is in their network. Only a handful of moderators and platforms have control over both visibility and membership/rules, and those controls are limited and primitive. Feeds which magically select content users are supposed to like and the attempt to eliminate user settings to make platforms more accessible and magical contribute to this problem. Creating effective and easy to use self moderating tools is a difficult enough problem on its own; when you also have to fight a lot of entrenched design philosophy, it's even harder.
  - HappyDreamer 5y ago
    > If there were better tools to allow users to say "I don't like this person, I don't want to hear more from then" That's not a solution in the cases when those people, are using the platform to gather a group of angry people and then will go and kill you and your family and those who look like you. Now, I'm guessing this isn't a problem in _your_ case -- but it is, for some others (see e.g. FB and Myanmar, or WhatsApp lynch mobs). Another problem is when the one's you don't want to hear, are spreading propaganda supporting a want-to-be-dictaor. And then eventually they succeed, because those who didn't like the dictator, just ignored them (let them spread the propaganda unhindered). -- What's the likelihood that the US is still a democracy in 30 years. (Btw I didn't downvote your comment)
rhaksw 5y ago
Reddit also stopped showing users the red background on their mod-removed comments. So when you're logged in it looks like your comment is live [1]. You can try it here [2]. I once tried looking through their archived code base to find when they made that change but couldn't decipher it. It's possible they never showed authors the red background at all. [1] https://imgur.com/E3bFvKh https://imgur.com/E3bFvKh [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/about/sticky https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/about/sticky
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Reddit's been shadow banning forever. HN does it, too.
  - tonguez 5y ago
    yes they do! i read this website for months before posting and then all my posts would always get deleted or deleted secretly. so i realized ive just been reading propaganda this whole time. i was gutted. feels like ive been lied to the entire time. you just naturally assume youre reading what people actually think. i wish there was a way to go back to the old internet where there wasnt massive amounts of money involved in policing peoples conversations
  - rhaksw 5y ago
    I'm not sure that's justification for continuing the policy. Most people are surprised to discover mods can "remove your comment and it still shows up on your side as if it wasn't removed". [1] Reddit gave mods the ability to shadow ban about 5 years ago via automod [2]. Now even crowd control can remove comments [3]. These features would be fine, in my opinion, if users could discover when their comments were removed. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/jp4j76/google_admits_to_censoring_the_world_socialist/gbco8xo/?context=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/jp4j76/google_a... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6bj5de/state_of_spam https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6bj5de/state_of_sp... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/qhpr6i/crowd_control_can_now_filter_comments/ https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/qhpr6i/crowd_contr...
knowaveragejoe 5y ago
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Is propaganda free speech? That is the question of the open internet.

sorry_outta_gas 5y ago

reddit wouldn't be so bad re: free speech if you could ignore all of the non-sense, sadly they push it out to everyone by design

Damogran6 5y ago
For a platform built on user contributions, they got too big (everybody ends up saying the same thing and getting downvoted as a result) and the moderation got hostile to the point you don’t WANT to contribute. Eventually you find the site that used to be fun, with lots of interesting things from interesting people…turned into a chore.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

jacobolus 5y ago

Circa 2005 reddit was a forum for nerdy young tech people, talking about miscellaneous web links but mostly focused around nerdy tech stuff. Nobody I know who read reddit circa 2005 wanted it to become a white supremacist hate forum. When it started to attract large numbers of white supremacists who deposited their steaming piles of bullshit (hate speech, vicious personal attacks) all over the site, lots of people reading the site (including those who had been there since 2005) were appalled. Obviously advertisers also don’t want to associate their brands with hate speech (or child porn, etc.).

dannyw 5y ago
I joined Reddit around 2007, and my perspective is completely the opposite of yours. Reddit was a place where you could create your own community, and moderate it as you see fit (as long as it's legal). It was a place where people respected free speech, and that you don't have to agree with someone but you'll defend their right to see it. White supremacy or hate wasn't really a thing on reddit until the past few years. The controversial content on reddit were r/jailbait (which I'd say a majority of the community agreed with; although many did begrudge the shifting of the overton window on 'we host anything that is legal'), but then "social justice" became a thing and a new crowd of redditors seemed to want to de-platform people. I don't have a time machine, but I suspect if you polled a majority of redditors in 2017 whether they'd support the de-platforming that is happening today, a majority would vehemently disagree.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  A bunch of abusive Reddit sub-fora (whose users had a way of spilling out across the general site and violating the site guidelines) were banned in the 2011–2015 timeframe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities#Banned_subreddits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti... But my impression is that being the central hub of one of the most aggressively hateful online pro-Donald-Trump communities in 2016 attracted a larger number of abusive users and increased the visibility of the problem.
SaiUEF9U6gDXHyW 5y ago

TechBro8615 5y ago

Reddit should break off all political content into its own site, porn into another, and keep the rest in place. If a post is porn or political, mods can click a button to move it to the dedicated site. This would be similar to the “move topic” functionality from phpBB and vBulletin. This might solve a lot of problems, but it would create issues on the edge, like r/pics content that may not be overtly political but clearly has an agenda. Personally I use Reddit exclusively for political flamewars on one account, and in-depth technical content on another account. I’m starting to feel pretty unwelcome, though, when it comes to anything “misinformarion” related. Once you get banned from one subreddit, if you have a post reported on the same subreddit from another account, then both your accounts get banned site-wide. Combine this with the dragnet, unsolicited bans that some mods are sending to anyone who posts in certain subreddits and you have a real chilling effect. The average IQ on Reddit is also about 110, which is just boring in most cases. When you can predict the top comments on a thread, reading them is probably a waste of time.

lamontcg 5y ago
You're ignoring the way that subreddits like r/ChoosingBeggars are full of trivially faked texts that tick off every box to rile people up on political and social issues.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
wayoutthere 5y ago
In the current polarized era, all discussion online is inherently political. The only way to escape it is in small groups with other people you have mutually agreed not to talk about it with. This is the result of Citizens United; when elections are decided by who has the most money, it’s a zero-sum game until politics have consumed the totality of our lives.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Is HN "small"? Political discussions at HN (which are quite rare) seem obviously low-quality compared to the rest of the site, but still rank well above much of the Internet. I assume that the same would go for many niche-focused spaces, where curiosity and intellectual interest can dominate.

xyzzy123 5y ago

It feels like reddit changed in line with the rest of the Internet though. In 2022 you have the choice of a) "suppressing free speech" or b) "platforming racists" and there is no middle ground and no way to win. You can't pass the buck to moderators. The choice did not feel so stark in 2005.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- knowaveragejoe 5y ago
didericis 5y ago
Self moderation was and still is a way out. If there were better tools to allow users to say "I don't like this person, I don't want to hear more from then" and "Bill likes this person, maybe I'll hear him out." or "I don't want to deal with this kind of thing in this room, can you talk about it elsewhere"? The tools we have for those things are not nearly as sophisticated as what exists in real life with body language, facial expressions, physical distance, symbols, demeanor, conversation timing, etc. Our tools to self moderate and separate into amicable groups which still permit crossover in real life are much better. The major problem with most internet platforms is the boundaries and user controls are non existent. Everything is open for everyone to see and no one can control who is in their network. Only a handful of moderators and platforms have control over both visibility and membership/rules, and those controls are limited and primitive. Feeds which magically select content users are supposed to like and the attempt to eliminate user settings to make platforms more accessible and magical contribute to this problem. Creating effective and easy to use self moderating tools is a difficult enough problem on its own; when you also have to fight a lot of entrenched design philosophy, it's even harder.
- HappyDreamer 5y ago
  > If there were better tools to allow users to say "I don't like this person, I don't want to hear more from then" That's not a solution in the cases when those people, are using the platform to gather a group of angry people and then will go and kill you and your family and those who look like you. Now, I'm guessing this isn't a problem in _your_ case -- but it is, for some others (see e.g. FB and Myanmar, or WhatsApp lynch mobs). Another problem is when the one's you don't want to hear, are spreading propaganda supporting a want-to-be-dictaor. And then eventually they succeed, because those who didn't like the dictator, just ignored them (let them spread the propaganda unhindered). -- What's the likelihood that the US is still a democracy in 30 years. (Btw I didn't downvote your comment)

rhaksw 5y ago

Reddit also stopped showing users the red background on their mod-removed comments. So when you're logged in it looks like your comment is live [1]. You can try it here [2]. I once tried looking through their archived code base to find when they made that change but couldn't decipher it. It's possible they never showed authors the red background at all. [1] https://imgur.com/E3bFvKh https://imgur.com/E3bFvKh [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/about/sticky https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/about/sticky

heavyset_go 5y ago
Reddit's been shadow banning forever. HN does it, too.
- tonguez 5y ago
  yes they do! i read this website for months before posting and then all my posts would always get deleted or deleted secretly. so i realized ive just been reading propaganda this whole time. i was gutted. feels like ive been lied to the entire time. you just naturally assume youre reading what people actually think. i wish there was a way to go back to the old internet where there wasnt massive amounts of money involved in policing peoples conversations
- rhaksw 5y ago
  I'm not sure that's justification for continuing the policy. Most people are surprised to discover mods can "remove your comment and it still shows up on your side as if it wasn't removed". [1] Reddit gave mods the ability to shadow ban about 5 years ago via automod [2]. Now even crowd control can remove comments [3]. These features would be fine, in my opinion, if users could discover when their comments were removed. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/jp4j76/google_admits_to_censoring_the_world_socialist/gbco8xo/?context=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/jp4j76/google_a... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6bj5de/state_of_spam https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6bj5de/state_of_sp... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/qhpr6i/crowd_control_can_now_filter_comments/ https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/qhpr6i/crowd_contr...

knowaveragejoe 5y ago

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

Is propaganda free speech? That is the question of the open internet.