6 ms·

> In some ways Reddit is worse than Facebook because it is influenced by anonymous entities with zero checks and balances. The discourse in many subreddits is

> In some ways Reddit is worse than Facebook because it is influenced by anonymous entities with zero checks and balances. The discourse in many subreddits is invisibly dictated by the moderators. It's not obvious when you browse posts because everything is organically coming from random people. However, moderators can entirely shape the conversation by only allowing posts that say what they want. In other words: The moderators are speaking through users, by selectively filtering out everyone else. Many subreddits are also famous for banning any commenters who say anything that doesn't support what the moderators want to see. The remaining unbanned users are effectively curated to echo what the moderators want you to see. Discord obviously has the same dynamics, but Discord makes it more obvious when you're switching between "servers". Reddit mashes it all into one feed that feels like something organic. In this case, I suspect the core issue is that the person used the Stable Diffusion trademark, which resulted in Stable Diffusion playing the legal card. The correct response would have been to force a rename of this Discord (if legally obligated), though.

c7DJTLrn 4y ago
Absolutely. And the front page is just full of this kind of specially curated content that aligns with the moderators' views. It's propaganda, basically. Question is whose?
- tayo42 4y ago
  who is pushing for antiwork to hit the frontpage constantly?
  - squeaky-clean 4y ago
    The issue is more that if you make a post critical of some of the ideas in antiwork, expect it to get removed within about 10 minutes. While no individual in particular is pushing for those posts to reach the front page, only posts that fit the groupthink stay alive long enough to do so.
NayamAmarshe 4y ago
On the other hand, nobody forces the feed on you if you choose your own community. Yes popular subs can be very political and biased but it doesn't mean you have to join them. On reddit, you can totally avoid bans and still say something. On Facebook, your words and your whole account have no value if the algorithm decides you spoke a 'no no word'. Facebook feed is entirely controlled by the algorithm and that algorithm is controlled by the people at Facebook, the reddit feed can be controlled by you. That difference alone makes Reddit a little bit better than Facebook. Getting banned on Facebook is extremely easy, I got banned for quoting someone's comment and replying with 'ok' and unfortunately I'm not kidding. So far on reddit, haven't gotten any bans or warnings and I have always kept my discussions civil. Facebook wants conformity, it doesn't slap you on the wrist if you do something that Zuckerberg doesn't approve, it totally takes your voice away for a long time. I deleted my 10 year old Facebook account because the censorship was getting really crazy. Somebody could give you death threats and your comments would be the one getting deleted by Facebook, that's how bad it got near the end of 2020.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  > On the other hand, nobody forces the feed on you if you choose your own community. That's only true if you stay small. If the subreddit gains traction, it will be taken from you if you don't moderate in a way that suits the whims of the power mod / admin cabal. They may take it from you under a flimsy pretext even if you're doing a good job, simply because they want to add your subreddit to their dominion.
  - NayamAmarshe 4y ago
    Yes, no denying that but at least you have the ability to reach the point. Facebook on the other hand finishes before something can even start because the algorithm checks every single word that you post, unlike Reddit.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      This seems like arguing whether chicken shit or pig shit smells worse.
caconym_ 4y ago
100%. The reality of moderation on Reddit is absolutely horrifying, like flipping over a rock and finding a pile of decomposing rat carcasses underneath. It's unbelievable, for instance, how often comments going against the grain are "shadow removed".
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  For forget you can get preemptively banned from many subs simply by posting in a “wrong think” sub the mods don’t like. Granted you can just create a new account to route around it but still…
  - Brusco_RF 4y ago
    For a good laugh, drop a comment in /r/ChurchOfCovid and watch the auto-bans roll in for a few hours
    - spookthesunset 4y ago
      Yup. The biggest tip off that our response to Covid is basically a scam is the fact that you are absolutely not allowed to think anything beyond what “the experts” say. And not just any “expert” either, only ones that fall inline and spread doom and gloom. God damn I still cannot get over how many people continue to buy into this Covid nonsense.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      I'll give reddit some credit for leaving that subreddit unbanned. It's good to be aware of what kind of misinformation is being spread around;.
      - Brusco_RF 4y ago
        I won't. They banned every other sub along the same vane. This one only gets by because they pretend the whole thing is satire. Read the comments
      - 4y ago
NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
>The discourse in many subreddits is invisibly dictated by the moderators. If you haven't signed up for alerts on reveddit, odds are good you have no idea how many of your comments and posts have been silently removed: https://www.reveddit.com/y/<your_username> https://www.reveddit.com/y/<your_username>
fortylove 4y ago
100% agreed. The /r/cycling subreddit is unexpectedly one of the worst offenders, from what I've encountered. Many removed comments and posts. Anything remotely seen as critical of any aspect of cycling (even coming from avid cyclists!) is immediately removed.
Scalene2 4y ago
Best example is r/legaladvice. Good luck getting any advice on dealing with corrupt law enforcement.
- uncletammy 4y ago
  Can you elaborate or give some context? I know nothing about this sub or it's history.
Brusco_RF 4y ago
I spent a large part of my formative years on Reddit and I agree with everything you just said. I don't know how to fix the issue, but I have some ideas. One would be a "mod action audit." Each subreddit, or perhaps each moderator, would have a score indicating what % of comments are removed. Some random chunk of the removed content could be reviewed by auditors to determine what % were just spam and what came from legitimate users. This way when I see a community where >50% of content is removed, I know that what I'm seeing is not organic.
- Domenic_S 4y ago
  Slashdot had (has?) meta-moderation, where you are randomly selected to re-moderate decisions
- account42 4y ago
  I think HN's showdead is not a bad solution - let people choose if they want to see removed content.
widowlark 4y ago
I was banned from r/streetphotography with my first post because, despite it being a street photograph, the moderator on the clock at the time thought it was 'too derivative' - It was a permanent ban. Since then, I have taken tens of thousands of street photos, and the fact that I cannot post them on the most-used street photography subreddit is confusing and shitty.
- practice9 4y ago
  Similar problems exists with Wikipedia and StackOverflow moderators. IMO people who become moderators just enjoy exercising their (often unchecked) power in these online communities.
  - Brusco_RF 4y ago
    When you frame it like that it becomes the tale as old as time; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
- jrockway 4y ago
  I got banned from r/AskReddit for posting the Chicago Transit Authority's customer service phone number, because it was "personal information". (In a thread about the CTA, no less. The rule is any comment that matches the regular expression /\d{3}-\d{4}/ is a permaban.) I also got kicked out of a Discord server I moderated because someone asked to be nagged about doing their homework, and I nagged them, and then someone in the server created fanart of my anime profile picture hitting their anime profile picture on the head with a magic wand, and I pinned it. I thought it was hilarious and I treasure it to this day. But that apparently was the last straw. ("There must have been some underlying issue," I hear you cry. There was. There were some differences of opinion on how to moderate the channel and the discord server. The community skewed about 60% female, and I was pretty quick to time stuff out like "women should be in the kitchen, not watching a stream" when the inevitable edgelord showed up to troll. This was apparently a controversial opinion, and all the other mods that would back me up on those decisions had long since left. I was pretty late to the giving up party, but I'm glad I eventually left. Even if not on my own terms ;) The TL;DR here is yeah, it's really easy to be a bad community manager, and people are pretty good at easy things. Stir in a spoonful of power tripping, and the results are predictable.
cercatrova 4y ago
92 of top 500 subreddits controlled by same 5 people https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018
uncletammy 4y ago
> The discourse in many subreddits is invisibly dictated by the moderators. In the case of r/bitcoin, the largely invisible reddit censorship allowed for the effective capture of the coin's community and development. It was used to silence and remove those who believed BTC's primary use case should be cash. It was incredibly effective too. For further reading: https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-history-of-censorship-in-r-bitcoin-c85a290fe43 https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-histor... https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-revisited-58d5b1bdcd64 https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-revisite...

c7DJTLrn 4y ago

Absolutely. And the front page is just full of this kind of specially curated content that aligns with the moderators' views. It's propaganda, basically. Question is whose?

tayo42 4y ago
who is pushing for antiwork to hit the frontpage constantly?
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  The issue is more that if you make a post critical of some of the ideas in antiwork, expect it to get removed within about 10 minutes. While no individual in particular is pushing for those posts to reach the front page, only posts that fit the groupthink stay alive long enough to do so.

NayamAmarshe 4y ago

On the other hand, nobody forces the feed on you if you choose your own community. Yes popular subs can be very political and biased but it doesn't mean you have to join them. On reddit, you can totally avoid bans and still say something. On Facebook, your words and your whole account have no value if the algorithm decides you spoke a 'no no word'. Facebook feed is entirely controlled by the algorithm and that algorithm is controlled by the people at Facebook, the reddit feed can be controlled by you. That difference alone makes Reddit a little bit better than Facebook. Getting banned on Facebook is extremely easy, I got banned for quoting someone's comment and replying with 'ok' and unfortunately I'm not kidding. So far on reddit, haven't gotten any bans or warnings and I have always kept my discussions civil. Facebook wants conformity, it doesn't slap you on the wrist if you do something that Zuckerberg doesn't approve, it totally takes your voice away for a long time. I deleted my 10 year old Facebook account because the censorship was getting really crazy. Somebody could give you death threats and your comments would be the one getting deleted by Facebook, that's how bad it got near the end of 2020.

MichaelCollins 4y ago
> On the other hand, nobody forces the feed on you if you choose your own community. That's only true if you stay small. If the subreddit gains traction, it will be taken from you if you don't moderate in a way that suits the whims of the power mod / admin cabal. They may take it from you under a flimsy pretext even if you're doing a good job, simply because they want to add your subreddit to their dominion.
- NayamAmarshe 4y ago
  Yes, no denying that but at least you have the ability to reach the point. Facebook on the other hand finishes before something can even start because the algorithm checks every single word that you post, unlike Reddit.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    This seems like arguing whether chicken shit or pig shit smells worse.

caconym_ 4y ago

100%. The reality of moderation on Reddit is absolutely horrifying, like flipping over a rock and finding a pile of decomposing rat carcasses underneath. It's unbelievable, for instance, how often comments going against the grain are "shadow removed".

spookthesunset 4y ago
For forget you can get preemptively banned from many subs simply by posting in a “wrong think” sub the mods don’t like. Granted you can just create a new account to route around it but still…
- Brusco_RF 4y ago
  For a good laugh, drop a comment in /r/ChurchOfCovid and watch the auto-bans roll in for a few hours
  - spookthesunset 4y ago
    Yup. The biggest tip off that our response to Covid is basically a scam is the fact that you are absolutely not allowed to think anything beyond what “the experts” say. And not just any “expert” either, only ones that fall inline and spread doom and gloom. God damn I still cannot get over how many people continue to buy into this Covid nonsense.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    I'll give reddit some credit for leaving that subreddit unbanned. It's good to be aware of what kind of misinformation is being spread around;.
    - Brusco_RF 4y ago
      I won't. They banned every other sub along the same vane. This one only gets by because they pretend the whole thing is satire. Read the comments
    - 4y ago

NaturalPhallacy 4y ago

>The discourse in many subreddits is invisibly dictated by the moderators. If you haven't signed up for alerts on reveddit, odds are good you have no idea how many of your comments and posts have been silently removed: https://www.reveddit.com/y/<your_username> https://www.reveddit.com/y/<your_username>

fortylove 4y ago

100% agreed. The /r/cycling subreddit is unexpectedly one of the worst offenders, from what I've encountered. Many removed comments and posts. Anything remotely seen as critical of any aspect of cycling (even coming from avid cyclists!) is immediately removed.

Scalene2 4y ago

Best example is r/legaladvice. Good luck getting any advice on dealing with corrupt law enforcement.

uncletammy 4y ago
Can you elaborate or give some context? I know nothing about this sub or it's history.

Brusco_RF 4y ago

I spent a large part of my formative years on Reddit and I agree with everything you just said. I don't know how to fix the issue, but I have some ideas. One would be a "mod action audit." Each subreddit, or perhaps each moderator, would have a score indicating what % of comments are removed. Some random chunk of the removed content could be reviewed by auditors to determine what % were just spam and what came from legitimate users. This way when I see a community where >50% of content is removed, I know that what I'm seeing is not organic.

Domenic_S 4y ago
Slashdot had (has?) meta-moderation, where you are randomly selected to re-moderate decisions
account42 4y ago
I think HN's showdead is not a bad solution - let people choose if they want to see removed content.

widowlark 4y ago

I was banned from r/streetphotography with my first post because, despite it being a street photograph, the moderator on the clock at the time thought it was 'too derivative' - It was a permanent ban. Since then, I have taken tens of thousands of street photos, and the fact that I cannot post them on the most-used street photography subreddit is confusing and shitty.

practice9 4y ago
Similar problems exists with Wikipedia and StackOverflow moderators. IMO people who become moderators just enjoy exercising their (often unchecked) power in these online communities.
- Brusco_RF 4y ago
  When you frame it like that it becomes the tale as old as time; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
jrockway 4y ago
I got banned from r/AskReddit for posting the Chicago Transit Authority's customer service phone number, because it was "personal information". (In a thread about the CTA, no less. The rule is any comment that matches the regular expression /\d{3}-\d{4}/ is a permaban.) I also got kicked out of a Discord server I moderated because someone asked to be nagged about doing their homework, and I nagged them, and then someone in the server created fanart of my anime profile picture hitting their anime profile picture on the head with a magic wand, and I pinned it. I thought it was hilarious and I treasure it to this day. But that apparently was the last straw. ("There must have been some underlying issue," I hear you cry. There was. There were some differences of opinion on how to moderate the channel and the discord server. The community skewed about 60% female, and I was pretty quick to time stuff out like "women should be in the kitchen, not watching a stream" when the inevitable edgelord showed up to troll. This was apparently a controversial opinion, and all the other mods that would back me up on those decisions had long since left. I was pretty late to the giving up party, but I'm glad I eventually left. Even if not on my own terms ;) The TL;DR here is yeah, it's really easy to be a bad community manager, and people are pretty good at easy things. Stir in a spoonful of power tripping, and the results are predictable.

cercatrova 4y ago

92 of top 500 subreddits controlled by same 5 people https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018

uncletammy 4y ago

> The discourse in many subreddits is invisibly dictated by the moderators. In the case of r/bitcoin, the largely invisible reddit censorship allowed for the effective capture of the coin's community and development. It was used to silence and remove those who believed BTC's primary use case should be cash. It was incredibly effective too. For further reading: https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-history-of-censorship-in-r-bitcoin-c85a290fe43 https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-histor... https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-revisited-58d5b1bdcd64 https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-revisite...