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I think something that really bothers me about this discussion about moderation is how many people approach this debate like a new born baby. They have an idea

I think something that really bothers me about this discussion about moderation is how many people approach this debate like a new born baby. They have an idea and then speculate on how it fixes everything. There's never any discussion of what exists in the real world. ACX here is essentially describing some key attributes of reddit. Each sub-reddit has it's own moderation team that decides what's acceptable and then you opt-in. This is pretty close to what ACX is proposing. So let's look at what happened in reality. Almost immediately sub-reddits pop up that are at the very least attempting to skirt the law, and often directly breaching the law- popular topics on reddit included creative interpretations of the age of consent for example, or indeed the requirement for consent at all. Oh and because anyone can create one these communities, the site turns into whack-a-mole. The second thing that happened was communities popped up pretty much for the sole purpose of harassing's other communities. But enabling this sort of market place of moderation, you are providing a mechanism for a group of people to organize a way to attack your own platform. So now you have to step back in and we're back to censorship. I also think that this article completely mischaracterizes what the free speech side of the debate want.

derlvative 4y ago
I think a key problem with Reddit is that when you create a subreddit (and obtain the final say on all moderation decisions) you also get the name of the subreddit and URL forever. This means that early arrivers have the advantage of taking all the best subreddit names.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Well if you do leave it unmoderated for long, other users can appeal to admins to get control instead, assuming they have a plan on doing something with it. Not unlike a domain name in a way, just without the paywall.
  - richbell 4y ago
    > Well if you do leave it unmoderated for long, other users can appeal to admins to get control instead Historically the r/RedditRequest process only considered whether the moderator was completely inactive from Reddit. There could be a dead subreddit that hadn't been touched in years or a flourishing subreddit whose top mod was completely MIA, there was nothing you could do if the top mod was still active on Reddit — even if you could prove they were just squatting. Not unlike domain squatting.
- LiquidSky 4y ago
  A very funny example of this is that r/trees was long ago set up by marijuana users to discuss pot-related topics. So later r/marijuanaenthusiasts was set up for discussion of actual trees and dendrology.
hprotagonist 4y ago
> ACX here is essentially describing some key attributes of reddit. instead i first thought of HN’s “showdead”
collyw 4y ago
Reddit is awful. The whole system is designed to create a groupthink. Downvoting of alternate opinions, post throttling and over zealous moderators banning people for wrongthink. Actual discussion of unpopular opinions is impossible. This creates a userbase with a very similar mindset, and so the problem just compounds itself. (This is for anything with a political slant to it, I still find it useful for niche subjects, say mycology)
- deleted 4y ago
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- acdha 4y ago
  That can happen but the relative frequencies matter a lot. What I’ve seen at least an order of magnitude more frequently is that someone comes in with some tedious repeat of e.g. recent Fox News talking points, perhaps even literally copy-pasted, and then whines about downvoting because clearly the problem is that other people weren’t taking seriously their regurgitation of something which has debunked many times already. This is especially common in places like science or economics subreddits where a hefty fraction of these aren’t controversial takes but simply run afoul of measurable reality. I’ve also seen a ton of cases where people expressed disagreement or contrarian positions but did so in a respectful and fact-aware manner and had positive interactions because they were respectful of the community.
  - gorwell 4y ago
    It's funny you call out the exception as tedious as opposed to the groupthink that's mindlessly enforced and repeated ad nauseam on most Subreddits.
    - acdha 4y ago
      A subreddit is a community - if you don’t like the norms, go to a different one. It’s like going to someone’s party and loudly asking why they all like such lousy music – nothing positive is going to come from it. In many cases, it’s not even entertainingly weird - more like “you should try something good. You probably haven’t heard of my favorite band before but look them up. Nickleback.” Note also how I mentioned people repeating low-effort arguments. The tedium comes from the stream of people who come, repeat someone else’s idea, aren’t prepared or willing to engage intellectually, and whine about censorship when nobody finds that compelling. Anyone who spends much time in a particular forum can recognize that and see that there’ll be very little value from engaging. We see that a lot here where people complain that HN is biased against cryptocurrency because the response to “have you accepted our lord and savior bitcoin into your heart?” was not well received by people who remember the exact same claims being made a decade ago.
dale_glass 4y ago
There's no perfect answers here. They tried getting rid of that in Voat, and it was such a cesspool that nobody sane used it, and the owner couldn't keep it up and shut it down. /r/TheDonald at one point tried to migrate after whining about Reddit's moderation and came crawling back because they couldn't stomach it. Yeah, Reddit's moderation system is far from ideal, but we've seen experimentally that it's definitely better than not having it.
- liopleurodon 4y ago
  What? /r/TheDonald eventually went over to https://patriots.win https://patriots.win
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    Yes, back when Voat still existed, /r/TheDonald tried to move to Voat. Then they moved back to Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/c5urdn/what_is_the_deal_with_people_referencing_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/c5urdn/what_i... Apparently /r/TheDonald was very used to being in a safe space. Voat didn't cater to that, and TheDonald couldn't take that so eventually they returned to Reddit. This was before their separate website.
    - liopleurodon 4y ago
      Oh dang, interesting
NHQ 4y ago
> newborn baby Precisely, It's like the author never understood the original definitions, but think their interpretation of the world creates them anew. It's a dictionary, not the bible. Moderation as "we modulate other people's behaviors for you and your feelings" is justifying the act of censorship using other terms. These rationalists aren't half as smart as they think they are, or they wouldn't need so many words and novel interpretations.
shadowgovt 4y ago
I have observed an awful lot of Eternal September effect in these debates. I suspect it might be easy for people who have been living on the Internet for a long time to miss the ways in which their intuitions don't mesh with somebody new to the space. Leads to a lot of two ships passing in the night debate. Fresh ideas are always welcome, but the people who are trying to maintain working forums have been at the process for a long time now and can draw on experience all the way back to the BBS days.
- nobody9999 4y ago
  >I have observed an awful lot of Eternal September effect in these debates. I suspect it might be easy for people who have been living on the Internet for a long time to miss the ways in which their intuitions don't mesh with somebody new to the space. Leads to a lot of two ships passing in the night debate. I don't disagree with your point, there's quite a bit of knowledge around building communities and moderation that's been around and honed for at least a generation. And we should take that knowledge and build on and around it. That said, folks have been going on about "Eternal September" for decades. Granted, people are born all the time, but they've grown up in the age of the Internet. As such, it seems to me that at some point (if not now, when?) we need to get away from that particular excuse. Anyone born before the Internet (myself included) has had a long time to figure things out, and anyone born in the Internet's wake is immersed in it from a fairly young age. So why do we continue to use "Eternal September" as a foil? It's entirely possible I'm missing something important, and if I am, please do enlighten me. Thanks!
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    Yes and no. There has been a general coarsening of the culture which has gotten worse since the 2010s, Donald Trump was certainly a part of it. I was talking about it with my wife this morning and she thinks that people have been getting more concerned about the homeless colony in a nearby city because the people who live there have been getting angrier and nastier. Other people down our road have put up signs that say "SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!" There are the nihilistic forms of protest such as the people who are attacking paintings in museums to protest climate change. (Why don't they blow up a gas station?) And of course there are the people on the right and left who believe they can "create their own reality" whether it is about the 2020 election or vaccines or about gender.
fallingknife 4y ago
Moderation isn't supposed to prevent illegal content, law enforcement is. So that's out of scope. The harassment problem is supposed to prevent harassment, but this is just a failure of reddit to provide the correct moderation tools to block organized harassment, not a failure of the concept.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Do you want cops filtering through all online sites looking for child porn? Do you think that's a good use for their time? It's the threat of law enforcement that leads people who run websites to remove illegal content. Generically (to, say, please advertisers) that is an expectation that sites are going to be proactive about removing offensive (or illegal) material. Simply responding on a "whack-a-mole" basis is not good enough. I ran a site that had something like 1-in-10,000 offensive (not illegal... but images of dead nazis, people with terrible tumors on their genitals, etc.) images and that was not clean enough for Adsense. From the viewpoint of quality control, particularly the Deming viewpoint of statistical quality control, it is an absolute bear of a problem to find offensive images at that level -- and look at how many people write a paper about some A.I. program that gets 70% accuracy is state of the art.
richbell 4y ago
> Each sub-reddit has it's own moderation team that decides what's acceptable and then you opt-in. It's a great concept, though it's worth pointing out that there's considerable overlap of moderators between subreddits (a.k.a. powermods). In effect, you end up with a single system applied across hundreds of subreddits which may-or-may-not be appropriate, and if you happen to earn the ire of a powermod you find yourself banned from all the subreddits they moderate.
- treis 4y ago
  There's way way more censorship on Reddit than I think more people realize. Mods shadow delete your post so you can still see it but no one else does. Unless you have a habit of logging out and checking you won't notice when a post gets deleted. Mostly quit Reddit when I realized about 5% of my posts were shadow deleted for holding the wrong opinion.
  - richbell 4y ago
    > Mods shadow delete your post so you can still see it but no one else does. Mass taggers have historically been abused to ban or shadow-ban users who've posted in "bad" subreddits. If you argued with someone in r/the Donald, you'd magically be unable to participate in a large swath of unrelated communities. Trying to appeal the bans would often result in you being permanently muted or receiving a snarky response from the mods saying it's your fault for engaging in said 'bad' communities.
    - treis 4y ago
      Nah, this was a local sub and I participated regularly. That's why it was so shocking. I had hundreds to thousands of posts over a few years there and there was no indication ever that I was doing anything problematic. It was specifically the posts about local politics (zoning and such) that went against the zeitgest that were shadow deleted.
      - richbell 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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istinetz 4y ago
>Each sub-reddit has it's own moderation team that decides what's acceptable and then you opt-in. This is pretty close to what ACX is proposing. No, it really isn't. Differences: 1) Reddit is super ban happy, and there is no way to view banned content. Ban reasons include slurs, political opinions, as well as no reasons at all. 2) Subreddits are not filters over the same content, they have (mostly) different content. 3) There is a fractal abundance of user-moderated subreddit; yes, there is some bad culture in some of them. This is not what ACX is proposing. He is proposing 2-20 filters, ran by the company, not by volunteers, with a specific purpose and clearly defined. I really don't see how ACX's proposal can cause illegal behavior or harassment that is not already there. You're making a false equivalence with reddit, then pointing out reddit has negative emergent properties.
- cft 4y ago
  I personally gave up on Reddit, they are too trigger happy. Gave up on anything political 9 years ago, but 3 years ago gave up on practical things like credit card miles, traveling with US phone, etc. It's at best read-only for me.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  Reddit is super ban happy today. That's because of the complete trash fire that resulted of their original policy. They literally just had straight child porn on the site for a long time before they finally had to actually bite the bullet and fix the platform.
  - istinetz 4y ago
    Be that as it may, they are super ban happy, and regularly exceed what is necessary. Particularly with regards to politics. And also, whether they're justified or not, it doesn't really matter to he point. ACX's proposal =/= subreddits.
  - scythe 4y ago
    Reddit didn't have child porn in the open at any time that I'm aware of (I joined in 2008). What it did have were subreddits catering to pedophiles with "barely legal" content, which repeatedly were found to contain child porn distribution rings operating via PMs.
iwillbenice 4y ago
naasking 4y ago
> Almost immediately sub-reddits pop up that are at the very least attempting to skirt the law, and often directly breaching the law- popular topics on reddit included creative interpretations of the age of consent for example, or indeed the requirement for consent at all. Oh and because anyone can create one these communities, the site turns into whack-a-mole. Twitter is already a whack-a-mole, but for a range of content that's much broader than just illegal content. A change like this would reduce their moderation burden. > The second thing that happened was communities popped up pretty much for the sole purpose of harassing's other communities. But enabling this sort of market place of moderation, you are providing a mechanism for a group of people to organize a way to attack your own platform. So now you have to step back in and we're back to censorship. You can ban harassing behaviour without banning open discussions. Finally, I don't think the ACX proposal is exactly like reddit. Reddit still has moderation imposed by a third party, this moderation configuration is in your control.
- tstrimple 4y ago
  > You can ban harassing behaviour without banning open discussions. You can. But you'll still have people screaming about how they were actually silenced for their political views. Which is exactly the situation we have today.
  - naasking 4y ago
    Banning harassing behaviour doesn't necessarily entail banning people. You can also make the reasons for suppression publicly visible and so auditable to expose any such lies. More transparent systems with less suppression or banning are clearly possible, but commercial entities don't want to hold themselves to strict rules which is why they keep the rules and processes opaque. This same trend is seen in both social media and app stores.
dalbasal 4y ago
I agree entirely. The new born baby approach is a bane of our time more broadly. A stupid descendant of an important, enlightenment idea. I think if you look at real-world examples with an actual history like reddit... you find that reality is complicated. All those problematic reddit dynamics that you describe exist. But, there were also some advantages/successes to their "moderation" approach. Above all, these approaches aren't just good/bad or successful/failed. There's a ton of texture. The moderation approach dictates a lot about the platform's character, and that isn't captured by binaries or spectrums.
matthewdgreen 4y ago
There is nothing wrong with the Reddit approach of having different communities with different moderation policies (well, except for the many edge cases you point out.) But presumably the unspoken motivation behind TFA is moderation on Twitter which is a very unique site that does not have specific “walled garden communities” with their own moderation, and is uniquely porous. If you want to use a moderated (ad-supported) site that lets each user define their own community, then you either need some global base moderation policies or else you need aggressive client-side filtering (and advertisers had better trust that it works effortlessly, since it will be their ads showing up next to the genocide posts.)
fluoridation 4y ago
>Almost immediately sub-reddits pop up that are at the very least attempting to skirt the law, and often directly breaching the law- popular topics on reddit included creative interpretations of the age of consent for example, or indeed the requirement for consent at all. What do you mean? It's not in any way illegal to discuss such topics.
- lostgame 4y ago
  LOL, tell that to the NSA/FBI and see how they feel about those conversations when they need to dig up dirt on you. :P It’s not technically illegal to have those conversations, but it’s in some kind of a grey area, because if you’re having conversations like those; the immediate question is of course why…it’s tough to find reasons to bring up that topic other than the obvious.
  - fluoridation 4y ago
    That's a problem for those LEOs, not for the moderators.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  They weren't just discussing the topics, they were literally posting child porn.
  - fluoridation 4y ago
    Sure, delete the CP and allow the discussion. What's the problem?
bnralt 4y ago
> ACX here is essentially describing some key attributes of reddit. Each sub-reddit has it's own moderation team that decides what's acceptable and then you opt-in. This is pretty close to what ACX is proposing. This is like saying "no moderation is _essentially_ the same as moderation because you can just choose not to read posts." I suppose it's simplistically true if you squint hard enough and actively ignore the issues people care about, but in that case you're not left with a particularly useful statement. Let's look at the proposal vs. how Reddit currently works. Let's say you have a sub called /r/soda, there's a rule where you can't "promote sodas," and they'll ban you for rule violations if you say "Coke is my favorite" but not if you say "Pepsi is my favorite" (selective enforcement of rules, even by site administrators is common on Reddit). 45% of the users love Coke, 30% love Pepsi, but 100% of the posts about what soda people live are about Pepsi. So with the proposal you make a post about how much you love Coke, notice that the post is deleted, then choose to ignore moderation and see all the other posts by other Coke users of the sub that have had a similar journey. You continue to discuss things with many of the people on the sub like you did before. With the current way Reddit works, you get banned and then start your own sub. But no one knows about your sub, the vast majority of new subs die, and even the ones that are moderately successful take years of work to gain a community. No one in /r/soda might even realize that "Coke is my favorite" posts are banned if they hadn't made such posts themselves, since there's no way to see what's banned and what isn't. The users there are kept completely ignorant of the need to create another sub. So now you spend hours trying to promote your sub in various places and creating enough content for it that people who visit will actually use it and not just see a dead sub and move on. If you're lucky, and with a lot of work, in a year you might be able to reach a small fraction of the audience that was in /r/soda, and tell that small group of people "Coke is my favorite." And even then, Reddit admins can look at you askance and decide to shut down your sub. I've seen multiple subs say "We can't even have a friendly discussion about [particular_topic] because Reddit admins have said they'll shut us down if we do." Even things that other subs are allowed to talk about (again, the rules are applied rather arbitrarily). I can't see how the proposal is like Reddit in any meaningful way.
- Linosaurus 4y ago
  > So with the proposal you make a post about how much you love Coke, notice that the post is deleted, then choose to ignore moderation and see all the other posts by other Coke users of the sub that have had a similar journey. You continue to discuss things with many of the people on the sub like you did before. That’s a nice outcome, but also leave you vulnerable to outsiders deciding to ruin your sub by flooding it with discussions of table tennis or racism or arguing about moderation. But you make a good point if the differences between the OP and Reddit.
commandlinefan 4y ago
I don't believe that anybody who moderates content on reddit would actually say "it's fine for you to say _x_, but I just don't want you to say it here". EVERY reddit moderator wants _x_ not only not to be said, but not to be thought, either. They make do with the tools they have to eradicate _x_ as a concept and are disappointed that they can't go farther.
zby 4y ago
What frustrates me is when people argue about solutions before they clarify their language. The value of that ACX post is in the second - it clarifies the language - it shows that we can distinguish (at least in some fuzzy way) between moderation and censorship - and that is the very first step in analysing solutions.
bannedbybros 4y ago
btbuildem 4y ago
I think Reddit is a terrible example. The moderators are volunteers, the rules and their application seem entirely arbitrary, and there is no way to opt out. The key point the author of the article makes is the difference between moderation and censorship: you can opt-in to see moderated content, but you're unilaterally prevented from seeing censored content. What Reddit does (removing posts, comments, banning accounts) falls under the definition of censorship here -- within the platform itself, obviously.

derlvative 4y ago

I think a key problem with Reddit is that when you create a subreddit (and obtain the final say on all moderation decisions) you also get the name of the subreddit and URL forever. This means that early arrivers have the advantage of taking all the best subreddit names.

moffkalast 4y ago
Well if you do leave it unmoderated for long, other users can appeal to admins to get control instead, assuming they have a plan on doing something with it. Not unlike a domain name in a way, just without the paywall.
- richbell 4y ago
  > Well if you do leave it unmoderated for long, other users can appeal to admins to get control instead Historically the r/RedditRequest process only considered whether the moderator was completely inactive from Reddit. There could be a dead subreddit that hadn't been touched in years or a flourishing subreddit whose top mod was completely MIA, there was nothing you could do if the top mod was still active on Reddit — even if you could prove they were just squatting. Not unlike domain squatting.
LiquidSky 4y ago
A very funny example of this is that r/trees was long ago set up by marijuana users to discuss pot-related topics. So later r/marijuanaenthusiasts was set up for discussion of actual trees and dendrology.

hprotagonist 4y ago

> ACX here is essentially describing some key attributes of reddit. instead i first thought of HN’s “showdead”

collyw 4y ago

Reddit is awful. The whole system is designed to create a groupthink. Downvoting of alternate opinions, post throttling and over zealous moderators banning people for wrongthink. Actual discussion of unpopular opinions is impossible. This creates a userbase with a very similar mindset, and so the problem just compounds itself. (This is for anything with a political slant to it, I still find it useful for niche subjects, say mycology)

deleted 4y ago
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acdha 4y ago
That can happen but the relative frequencies matter a lot. What I’ve seen at least an order of magnitude more frequently is that someone comes in with some tedious repeat of e.g. recent Fox News talking points, perhaps even literally copy-pasted, and then whines about downvoting because clearly the problem is that other people weren’t taking seriously their regurgitation of something which has debunked many times already. This is especially common in places like science or economics subreddits where a hefty fraction of these aren’t controversial takes but simply run afoul of measurable reality. I’ve also seen a ton of cases where people expressed disagreement or contrarian positions but did so in a respectful and fact-aware manner and had positive interactions because they were respectful of the community.
- gorwell 4y ago
  It's funny you call out the exception as tedious as opposed to the groupthink that's mindlessly enforced and repeated ad nauseam on most Subreddits.
  - acdha 4y ago
    A subreddit is a community - if you don’t like the norms, go to a different one. It’s like going to someone’s party and loudly asking why they all like such lousy music – nothing positive is going to come from it. In many cases, it’s not even entertainingly weird - more like “you should try something good. You probably haven’t heard of my favorite band before but look them up. Nickleback.” Note also how I mentioned people repeating low-effort arguments. The tedium comes from the stream of people who come, repeat someone else’s idea, aren’t prepared or willing to engage intellectually, and whine about censorship when nobody finds that compelling. Anyone who spends much time in a particular forum can recognize that and see that there’ll be very little value from engaging. We see that a lot here where people complain that HN is biased against cryptocurrency because the response to “have you accepted our lord and savior bitcoin into your heart?” was not well received by people who remember the exact same claims being made a decade ago.

dale_glass 4y ago

There's no perfect answers here. They tried getting rid of that in Voat, and it was such a cesspool that nobody sane used it, and the owner couldn't keep it up and shut it down. /r/TheDonald at one point tried to migrate after whining about Reddit's moderation and came crawling back because they couldn't stomach it. Yeah, Reddit's moderation system is far from ideal, but we've seen experimentally that it's definitely better than not having it.

liopleurodon 4y ago
What? /r/TheDonald eventually went over to https://patriots.win https://patriots.win
- dale_glass 4y ago
  Yes, back when Voat still existed, /r/TheDonald tried to move to Voat. Then they moved back to Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/c5urdn/what_is_the_deal_with_people_referencing_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/c5urdn/what_i... Apparently /r/TheDonald was very used to being in a safe space. Voat didn't cater to that, and TheDonald couldn't take that so eventually they returned to Reddit. This was before their separate website.
  - liopleurodon 4y ago
    Oh dang, interesting

NHQ 4y ago

> newborn baby Precisely, It's like the author never understood the original definitions, but think their interpretation of the world creates them anew. It's a dictionary, not the bible. Moderation as "we modulate other people's behaviors for you and your feelings" is justifying the act of censorship using other terms. These rationalists aren't half as smart as they think they are, or they wouldn't need so many words and novel interpretations.

shadowgovt 4y ago

I have observed an awful lot of Eternal September effect in these debates. I suspect it might be easy for people who have been living on the Internet for a long time to miss the ways in which their intuitions don't mesh with somebody new to the space. Leads to a lot of two ships passing in the night debate. Fresh ideas are always welcome, but the people who are trying to maintain working forums have been at the process for a long time now and can draw on experience all the way back to the BBS days.

nobody9999 4y ago
>I have observed an awful lot of Eternal September effect in these debates. I suspect it might be easy for people who have been living on the Internet for a long time to miss the ways in which their intuitions don't mesh with somebody new to the space. Leads to a lot of two ships passing in the night debate. I don't disagree with your point, there's quite a bit of knowledge around building communities and moderation that's been around and honed for at least a generation. And we should take that knowledge and build on and around it. That said, folks have been going on about "Eternal September" for decades. Granted, people are born all the time, but they've grown up in the age of the Internet. As such, it seems to me that at some point (if not now, when?) we need to get away from that particular excuse. Anyone born before the Internet (myself included) has had a long time to figure things out, and anyone born in the Internet's wake is immersed in it from a fairly young age. So why do we continue to use "Eternal September" as a foil? It's entirely possible I'm missing something important, and if I am, please do enlighten me. Thanks!
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Yes and no. There has been a general coarsening of the culture which has gotten worse since the 2010s, Donald Trump was certainly a part of it. I was talking about it with my wife this morning and she thinks that people have been getting more concerned about the homeless colony in a nearby city because the people who live there have been getting angrier and nastier. Other people down our road have put up signs that say "SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!" There are the nihilistic forms of protest such as the people who are attacking paintings in museums to protest climate change. (Why don't they blow up a gas station?) And of course there are the people on the right and left who believe they can "create their own reality" whether it is about the 2020 election or vaccines or about gender.

fallingknife 4y ago

Moderation isn't supposed to prevent illegal content, law enforcement is. So that's out of scope. The harassment problem is supposed to prevent harassment, but this is just a failure of reddit to provide the correct moderation tools to block organized harassment, not a failure of the concept.

PaulHoule 4y ago
Do you want cops filtering through all online sites looking for child porn? Do you think that's a good use for their time? It's the threat of law enforcement that leads people who run websites to remove illegal content. Generically (to, say, please advertisers) that is an expectation that sites are going to be proactive about removing offensive (or illegal) material. Simply responding on a "whack-a-mole" basis is not good enough. I ran a site that had something like 1-in-10,000 offensive (not illegal... but images of dead nazis, people with terrible tumors on their genitals, etc.) images and that was not clean enough for Adsense. From the viewpoint of quality control, particularly the Deming viewpoint of statistical quality control, it is an absolute bear of a problem to find offensive images at that level -- and look at how many people write a paper about some A.I. program that gets 70% accuracy is state of the art.

richbell 4y ago

> Each sub-reddit has it's own moderation team that decides what's acceptable and then you opt-in. It's a great concept, though it's worth pointing out that there's considerable overlap of moderators between subreddits (a.k.a. powermods). In effect, you end up with a single system applied across hundreds of subreddits which may-or-may-not be appropriate, and if you happen to earn the ire of a powermod you find yourself banned from all the subreddits they moderate.

treis 4y ago
There's way way more censorship on Reddit than I think more people realize. Mods shadow delete your post so you can still see it but no one else does. Unless you have a habit of logging out and checking you won't notice when a post gets deleted. Mostly quit Reddit when I realized about 5% of my posts were shadow deleted for holding the wrong opinion.
- richbell 4y ago
  > Mods shadow delete your post so you can still see it but no one else does. Mass taggers have historically been abused to ban or shadow-ban users who've posted in "bad" subreddits. If you argued with someone in r/the Donald, you'd magically be unable to participate in a large swath of unrelated communities. Trying to appeal the bans would often result in you being permanently muted or receiving a snarky response from the mods saying it's your fault for engaging in said 'bad' communities.
  - treis 4y ago
    Nah, this was a local sub and I participated regularly. That's why it was so shocking. I had hundreds to thousands of posts over a few years there and there was no indication ever that I was doing anything problematic. It was specifically the posts about local politics (zoning and such) that went against the zeitgest that were shadow deleted.
    - richbell 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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istinetz 4y ago

>Each sub-reddit has it's own moderation team that decides what's acceptable and then you opt-in. This is pretty close to what ACX is proposing. No, it really isn't. Differences: 1) Reddit is super ban happy, and there is no way to view banned content. Ban reasons include slurs, political opinions, as well as no reasons at all. 2) Subreddits are not filters over the same content, they have (mostly) different content. 3) There is a fractal abundance of user-moderated subreddit; yes, there is some bad culture in some of them. This is not what ACX is proposing. He is proposing 2-20 filters, ran by the company, not by volunteers, with a specific purpose and clearly defined. I really don't see how ACX's proposal can cause illegal behavior or harassment that is not already there. You're making a false equivalence with reddit, then pointing out reddit has negative emergent properties.

cft 4y ago
I personally gave up on Reddit, they are too trigger happy. Gave up on anything political 9 years ago, but 3 years ago gave up on practical things like credit card miles, traveling with US phone, etc. It's at best read-only for me.
SilverBirch 4y ago
Reddit is super ban happy today. That's because of the complete trash fire that resulted of their original policy. They literally just had straight child porn on the site for a long time before they finally had to actually bite the bullet and fix the platform.
- istinetz 4y ago
  Be that as it may, they are super ban happy, and regularly exceed what is necessary. Particularly with regards to politics. And also, whether they're justified or not, it doesn't really matter to he point. ACX's proposal =/= subreddits.
- scythe 4y ago
  Reddit didn't have child porn in the open at any time that I'm aware of (I joined in 2008). What it did have were subreddits catering to pedophiles with "barely legal" content, which repeatedly were found to contain child porn distribution rings operating via PMs.

iwillbenice 4y ago

naasking 4y ago

> Almost immediately sub-reddits pop up that are at the very least attempting to skirt the law, and often directly breaching the law- popular topics on reddit included creative interpretations of the age of consent for example, or indeed the requirement for consent at all. Oh and because anyone can create one these communities, the site turns into whack-a-mole. Twitter is already a whack-a-mole, but for a range of content that's much broader than just illegal content. A change like this would reduce their moderation burden. > The second thing that happened was communities popped up pretty much for the sole purpose of harassing's other communities. But enabling this sort of market place of moderation, you are providing a mechanism for a group of people to organize a way to attack your own platform. So now you have to step back in and we're back to censorship. You can ban harassing behaviour without banning open discussions. Finally, I don't think the ACX proposal is exactly like reddit. Reddit still has moderation imposed by a third party, this moderation configuration is in your control.

tstrimple 4y ago
> You can ban harassing behaviour without banning open discussions. You can. But you'll still have people screaming about how they were actually silenced for their political views. Which is exactly the situation we have today.
- naasking 4y ago
  Banning harassing behaviour doesn't necessarily entail banning people. You can also make the reasons for suppression publicly visible and so auditable to expose any such lies. More transparent systems with less suppression or banning are clearly possible, but commercial entities don't want to hold themselves to strict rules which is why they keep the rules and processes opaque. This same trend is seen in both social media and app stores.

dalbasal 4y ago

I agree entirely. The new born baby approach is a bane of our time more broadly. A stupid descendant of an important, enlightenment idea. I think if you look at real-world examples with an actual history like reddit... you find that reality is complicated. All those problematic reddit dynamics that you describe exist. But, there were also some advantages/successes to their "moderation" approach. Above all, these approaches aren't just good/bad or successful/failed. There's a ton of texture. The moderation approach dictates a lot about the platform's character, and that isn't captured by binaries or spectrums.

matthewdgreen 4y ago

There is nothing wrong with the Reddit approach of having different communities with different moderation policies (well, except for the many edge cases you point out.) But presumably the unspoken motivation behind TFA is moderation on Twitter which is a very unique site that does not have specific “walled garden communities” with their own moderation, and is uniquely porous. If you want to use a moderated (ad-supported) site that lets each user define their own community, then you either need some global base moderation policies or else you need aggressive client-side filtering (and advertisers had better trust that it works effortlessly, since it will be their ads showing up next to the genocide posts.)

fluoridation 4y ago

lostgame 4y ago
LOL, tell that to the NSA/FBI and see how they feel about those conversations when they need to dig up dirt on you. :P It’s not technically illegal to have those conversations, but it’s in some kind of a grey area, because if you’re having conversations like those; the immediate question is of course why…it’s tough to find reasons to bring up that topic other than the obvious.
- fluoridation 4y ago
  That's a problem for those LEOs, not for the moderators.
SilverBirch 4y ago
They weren't just discussing the topics, they were literally posting child porn.
- fluoridation 4y ago
  Sure, delete the CP and allow the discussion. What's the problem?

bnralt 4y ago

> ACX here is essentially describing some key attributes of reddit. Each sub-reddit has it's own moderation team that decides what's acceptable and then you opt-in. This is pretty close to what ACX is proposing. This is like saying "no moderation is _essentially_ the same as moderation because you can just choose not to read posts." I suppose it's simplistically true if you squint hard enough and actively ignore the issues people care about, but in that case you're not left with a particularly useful statement. Let's look at the proposal vs. how Reddit currently works. Let's say you have a sub called /r/soda, there's a rule where you can't "promote sodas," and they'll ban you for rule violations if you say "Coke is my favorite" but not if you say "Pepsi is my favorite" (selective enforcement of rules, even by site administrators is common on Reddit). 45% of the users love Coke, 30% love Pepsi, but 100% of the posts about what soda people live are about Pepsi. So with the proposal you make a post about how much you love Coke, notice that the post is deleted, then choose to ignore moderation and see all the other posts by other Coke users of the sub that have had a similar journey. You continue to discuss things with many of the people on the sub like you did before. With the current way Reddit works, you get banned and then start your own sub. But no one knows about your sub, the vast majority of new subs die, and even the ones that are moderately successful take years of work to gain a community. No one in /r/soda might even realize that "Coke is my favorite" posts are banned if they hadn't made such posts themselves, since there's no way to see what's banned and what isn't. The users there are kept completely ignorant of the need to create another sub. So now you spend hours trying to promote your sub in various places and creating enough content for it that people who visit will actually use it and not just see a dead sub and move on. If you're lucky, and with a lot of work, in a year you might be able to reach a small fraction of the audience that was in /r/soda, and tell that small group of people "Coke is my favorite." And even then, Reddit admins can look at you askance and decide to shut down your sub. I've seen multiple subs say "We can't even have a friendly discussion about [particular_topic] because Reddit admins have said they'll shut us down if we do." Even things that other subs are allowed to talk about (again, the rules are applied rather arbitrarily). I can't see how the proposal is like Reddit in any meaningful way.

Linosaurus 4y ago
> So with the proposal you make a post about how much you love Coke, notice that the post is deleted, then choose to ignore moderation and see all the other posts by other Coke users of the sub that have had a similar journey. You continue to discuss things with many of the people on the sub like you did before. That’s a nice outcome, but also leave you vulnerable to outsiders deciding to ruin your sub by flooding it with discussions of table tennis or racism or arguing about moderation. But you make a good point if the differences between the OP and Reddit.

commandlinefan 4y ago

I don't believe that anybody who moderates content on reddit would actually say "it's fine for you to say _x_, but I just don't want you to say it here". EVERY reddit moderator wants _x_ not only not to be said, but not to be thought, either. They make do with the tools they have to eradicate _x_ as a concept and are disappointed that they can't go farther.

zby 4y ago

What frustrates me is when people argue about solutions before they clarify their language. The value of that ACX post is in the second - it clarifies the language - it shows that we can distinguish (at least in some fuzzy way) between moderation and censorship - and that is the very first step in analysing solutions.

bannedbybros 4y ago

btbuildem 4y ago

I think Reddit is a terrible example. The moderators are volunteers, the rules and their application seem entirely arbitrary, and there is no way to opt out. The key point the author of the article makes is the difference between moderation and censorship: you can opt-in to see moderated content, but you're unilaterally prevented from seeing censored content. What Reddit does (removing posts, comments, banning accounts) falls under the definition of censorship here -- within the platform itself, obviously.