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I know how this works: someone will show an example and someone else will say that decent human beings don't think like that and that they deserve to be silence

by naoqj 5y ago

I know how this works: someone will show an example and someone else will say that decent human beings don't think like that and that they deserve to be silenced.

XMPPwocky 5y ago
If a person can't even deal with the vague threat of somebody "silencing" them, they're likely to be too scared of thinking to be worth talking to. They don't "deserve to be silenced" any more than a spam email "deserves to be filtered out". They just... that's what the filter's for, to keep the recipient's email inbox readable. If I start posting on here about why you should buy my GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T R0L4X, and nothing else- whether it's "just a weird bit i'm doing" or not, I'm going to get banned. I'm not going to get banned for thinking the words "Buy my GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T R0L4X", though. Funny, that. (Well, hopefully! It'd suck to lose this account, though being off HN is probably a net positive in most ways!) And posting the text string "GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T ROLAX" is, to a human, obviously not spam, and is an obvious joke. To a spam filter, though, unthinking shitty rulesets and regexes? Yeah, bye. Human moderation "doesn't scale", though, right? You've gotta have some basic filtering and CAPTCHAs to at least catch low-effort spambots lest they make everything useless for everybody else. Unfortunately, this means that actual human posters do need to be able to identify a fire hydrant or traffic light. This is trivial generally... for people who know what fire hydrants and traffic lights are. (Is a hot dog a sandwich?). But if you don't know, ask a friend. That seems to work.
Fogest 5y ago
It's that, but also the fact that many subreddits are often controlled by powermods with tons of subreddits they control. They often also end up leaning very heavy towards the radical left. This ends up further compounding the echo chamber problem, especially across the "default subreddits". /r/politics is a good example of this. It is very hard to have any view that is classically liberal or conservative on a good chunk of reddit. These views typically get removed by moderators, get you banned in subreddits, or they get the result you speak of where others try and downvoted them and tell them how bad of a person they are.

by naoqj 5y ago

I know how this works: someone will show an example and someone else will say that decent human beings don't think like that and that they deserve to be silenced.

XMPPwocky 5y ago

If a person can't even deal with the vague threat of somebody "silencing" them, they're likely to be too scared of thinking to be worth talking to. They don't "deserve to be silenced" any more than a spam email "deserves to be filtered out". They just... that's what the filter's for, to keep the recipient's email inbox readable. If I start posting on here about why you should buy my GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T R0L4X, and nothing else- whether it's "just a weird bit i'm doing" or not, I'm going to get banned. I'm not going to get banned for thinking the words "Buy my GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T R0L4X", though. Funny, that. (Well, hopefully! It'd suck to lose this account, though being off HN is probably a net positive in most ways!) And posting the text string "GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T ROLAX" is, to a human, obviously not spam, and is an obvious joke. To a spam filter, though, unthinking shitty rulesets and regexes? Yeah, bye. Human moderation "doesn't scale", though, right? You've gotta have some basic filtering and CAPTCHAs to at least catch low-effort spambots lest they make everything useless for everybody else. Unfortunately, this means that actual human posters do need to be able to identify a fire hydrant or traffic light. This is trivial generally... for people who know what fire hydrants and traffic lights are. (Is a hot dog a sandwich?). But if you don't know, ask a friend. That seems to work.

Fogest 5y ago

It's that, but also the fact that many subreddits are often controlled by powermods with tons of subreddits they control. They often also end up leaning very heavy towards the radical left. This ends up further compounding the echo chamber problem, especially across the "default subreddits". /r/politics is a good example of this. It is very hard to have any view that is classically liberal or conservative on a good chunk of reddit. These views typically get removed by moderators, get you banned in subreddits, or they get the result you speak of where others try and downvoted them and tell them how bad of a person they are.