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It makes me think about comment sections here on HN when a study on psychedelics gets posted. Suddenly 90% of top comments are all personal anecdote about mushr

by feet 4y ago

It makes me think about comment sections here on HN when a study on psychedelics gets posted. Suddenly 90% of top comments are all personal anecdote about mushrooms or whatever.

sokoloff 4y ago
That seems normal to me. I click and comment on the articles on topics that interest me. Aviation articles will have aviation buffs over-represented. Math articles math buffs. EV articles will have EV buffs and people with an opinion about Teslas over-represented. For psychedelics, the effect might be more pronounced because there aren’t that many people casually interested and/or those who are are reading and not writing. (I’ve never taken any; what am I going to add to the discussion? If someone has and their comment is interesting, I’ll upvote it.)
- feet 4y ago
  Right, but it's all personal anecdote. Not commentary on studies or research. If the guidelines for the subreddit are to keep things more focused on research it would make sense to me for mods to remove the massive amount of anecdote that comes out of the woodwork. Sure people can be interested in using psychedelics themselves, but they want the discussion to focus on research
  - pixl97 4y ago
    This is what most people seem to miss in this HN thread. Go look at the average 'large' subreddit, and I'm talking about the ones where personal anecdotes are expected. You'll tend to have some top level posts that are decent, and generally longer post. You'll have hundreds of posts that are memes, crap like "5 out of 7, perfect", subarguments that go off topic, and plenty of bots posting comments from other threads. The format the /r/science requires is the antithesis of 99% of the rest of reddit. This leads to moderation fatigue. You have lots of stuff that should be summarily executed and takes up tons of your time. Then you have the minority of posts that require some thought on if it's just a controversial post, or that guy that just keeps making accounts and being an intentional malicious troll. But, you don't have any time to think on these post because another 3 crap posts ended up in the moderation queue in the 3 seconds you're looking at the first one. Eventually people get to the point that if a post ends up in the moderation queue it just gets blocked, which then trolls use to flag just about everything. It's a messy situation when you're asking volunteers to do this.
    - dmix 4y ago
      Building a culture of moderation that promotes transparency and not using mod tools as your pet ideological argument winning device is not a lot to ask. There seems to be zero ethical guidelines / pressure / consequences for any of this stuff. Of course the problem is hard but I've seen tons of high quality, on-topic comments with 500+ upvotes get removed because the mods obviously disagreed with it. The commenter won't even know it's gone and 99% of visitors will not realize how thoroughly editorialized the entire conversation threads are. I seriously recommend picking any even slightly controversial r/science post and look at the comments being removed. It's not just memes and trolling.

by feet 4y ago

It makes me think about comment sections here on HN when a study on psychedelics gets posted. Suddenly 90% of top comments are all personal anecdote about mushrooms or whatever.

sokoloff 4y ago

That seems normal to me. I click and comment on the articles on topics that interest me. Aviation articles will have aviation buffs over-represented. Math articles math buffs. EV articles will have EV buffs and people with an opinion about Teslas over-represented. For psychedelics, the effect might be more pronounced because there aren’t that many people casually interested and/or those who are are reading and not writing. (I’ve never taken any; what am I going to add to the discussion? If someone has and their comment is interesting, I’ll upvote it.)

feet 4y ago
Right, but it's all personal anecdote. Not commentary on studies or research. If the guidelines for the subreddit are to keep things more focused on research it would make sense to me for mods to remove the massive amount of anecdote that comes out of the woodwork. Sure people can be interested in using psychedelics themselves, but they want the discussion to focus on research
- pixl97 4y ago
  This is what most people seem to miss in this HN thread. Go look at the average 'large' subreddit, and I'm talking about the ones where personal anecdotes are expected. You'll tend to have some top level posts that are decent, and generally longer post. You'll have hundreds of posts that are memes, crap like "5 out of 7, perfect", subarguments that go off topic, and plenty of bots posting comments from other threads. The format the /r/science requires is the antithesis of 99% of the rest of reddit. This leads to moderation fatigue. You have lots of stuff that should be summarily executed and takes up tons of your time. Then you have the minority of posts that require some thought on if it's just a controversial post, or that guy that just keeps making accounts and being an intentional malicious troll. But, you don't have any time to think on these post because another 3 crap posts ended up in the moderation queue in the 3 seconds you're looking at the first one. Eventually people get to the point that if a post ends up in the moderation queue it just gets blocked, which then trolls use to flag just about everything. It's a messy situation when you're asking volunteers to do this.
  - dmix 4y ago
    Building a culture of moderation that promotes transparency and not using mod tools as your pet ideological argument winning device is not a lot to ask. There seems to be zero ethical guidelines / pressure / consequences for any of this stuff. Of course the problem is hard but I've seen tons of high quality, on-topic comments with 500+ upvotes get removed because the mods obviously disagreed with it. The commenter won't even know it's gone and 99% of visitors will not realize how thoroughly editorialized the entire conversation threads are. I seriously recommend picking any even slightly controversial r/science post and look at the comments being removed. It's not just memes and trolling.