6 ms·

My take: science has been politicized. As a result people feel like they are entitled to share their (often naive and inexperienced) opinion. Problem is this:

by otikik 4y ago

My take: science has been politicized. As a result people feel like they are entitled to share their (often naive and inexperienced) opinion. Problem is this: science is not democratic. Consensus plays a role, but not everyone getting to the point were you are equipped to peer review others often takes years of effort and study. That’s unavoidable, given that the easy questions have already been answered. A single … “folkloric” comment is not problematic. When 60% or 75% of the comments are like that, the problem is that the subreddit isn’t science any more. It has become “wacky theory time”. So at that time you have a choice: either you moderate, in order to keep the channel on-topic, or you accept everything, at which point the guys who benefit from science not being available to the general public have won. Of course this moderation process isn’t going to be perfect and there will be false positives. I have been on the receiving end of a campaign organized by a somewhat popular forum in order to fill up a direct democracy platform with as many memes and random shit as possible. The worst night I just had to hide everything that was posted, the signal to noise was too high. This meant that some legitimate proposals where lost. It wasn’t a perfect solution either, but it was the only one we had. From my experience, I think without moderation r/science would become “aliens built the pyramids” in a week.

rhaksw 4y ago
> science is not democratic I strongly disagree, it's inherently democratic. The scientific method is all about making mistakes and trying again. Discourse is all about sharing knowledge. Open societies do this effectively. Jonathan Rauch, in Kindly Inquisitors (1993) wrote, > Authoritarian systems have their intellectual giants. What they lack is the capacity to organize and exploit their masses of middling thinkers. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=uZUVAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA74&lpg=PA74&q=%22Authoritarian+systems+have+their+intellectual+giants.+What+they+lack+is+the+capacity+to+organize+and+exploit+their+masses+of+middling+thinkers.%22 https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=uZUVAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA74... > From my experience, I think without moderation r/science would become “aliens built the pyramids” in a week. It might. What would happen then? I'd argue there'd be a lot of good discussion. The reason people don't think it's possible to change people's minds over the last 7-8 years is because during this whole period you didn't know about shadow moderation. Watch the linked talk, look at the examples. Deception is being crowdsourced and it is happening across every ideology, geography, and on every major platform.
- matthewmacleod 4y ago
  It might. What would happen then? I'd argue there'd be a lot of good discussion. Why bother though? There are thousands of places you can have that discussion, including on Reddit. You can set up, say, /r/scienceforall right now and establish the rules you want. The /r/science sub has decided that it’s a space which should have heavy moderation - a totally legitimate viewpoint with obvious benefits and costs. You might not agree with the balance, but the beauty is you don’t have to.
  - rhaksw 4y ago
    > Why bother though? See 18:20 [1] and 19:52 [2] in the talk linked on this post. Nobody will visit r/scienceforall because r/science will remove references to it. Plus, forcing me to set up a group doesn't sound like a solution, it sounds like a shake down. To get an open discussion space I have to moderate it, and then have the social media site threaten removal of my mod powers if I fail to remove something they don't like within their desired time frame. That means I have to review every piece of user-submitted content. No thanks. Transparency and light-touch moderation would be more efficient. > The /r/science sub has decided that it’s a space which should have heavy moderation - a totally legitimate viewpoint with obvious benefits and costs. You might not agree with the balance, but the beauty is you don’t have to. My issue is with the system, not moderators. Legally speaking, shadow moderation may be in the clear, but it's still harmful for society while we have just a few major platforms. We should all know and share what's going on. [1] https://youtu.be/aCadmiIfbcI?t=18m20s https://youtu.be/aCadmiIfbcI?t=18m20s [2] https://youtu.be/aCadmiIfbcI?t=19m52s https://youtu.be/aCadmiIfbcI?t=19m52s
    - x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
      If nobody will visit your subreddit, then that might be an indication of how it's actually being perceived, and not evidence of some great injustice surrounding "free speech".
      - rhaksw 4y ago
mike_hock 4y ago
Subs like /r/askscience and /r/science have always needed moderation even before Reddit became cancer. The problem is the unauditable censorship. This is especially important on political forums but it also becomes relevant on science forums when scientific issues are starting to be politicized. Of course, Reddit can be whatever it wants, but as it stands, you can only treat it as a propaganda outlet, as you have no way of knowing what gets removed. The way we can make moderation trustworthy is the same way we make software trustworthy: By putting it out in the open so anyone can scrutinize it and raise a stink when they discover something suspicious, and can't be silenced. There is almost zero legitimate reason to completely scrub any comment, hiding them by default would work just fine. The only reason to really delete a comment would be if it directly puts a person in danger, such as by containing personally identifying information. Hard censorship must be a rare enough event that it becomes a scandal and everybody hears about it. The normalization of censorship allows moderators to do basically anything they want, because comments being removed is just expected and doesn't raise any eyebrows anymore. "Oh yeah, those 75% removed comments were just memes and hate speech." The other side of the coin is that flooding forums with memes, hate speech, and inane nonsense is a quick and easy way to drown out meaningful discussion and actual information, so soft censorship is necessary. They are two different attack vectors, and we need a defense against both of them. To prevent infiltration of the mod team, speech that we accept to be censored completely must require actual effort so mods can't plausibly claim it was "just memes" when comments get removed on a daily basis. To prevent exterior soft censorship by flooding, we ironically need moderation with power to implement soft censorship, but one that we can trust. We also cannot accept "hate speech" (or any other combination of words) that requires zero effort to produce to be a reason to force moderators to implement hard censorship. That allows anyone to censor any platform they like or at a minimum to force its moderators to destroy the trust the platform's users can objectively have in them. Of course, this isn't completely implementable due to unreasonable laws in pretty much every country in the world, but a trustworthy platform would at least try to approximate it as closely as possible under the laws they're bound by. Reddit certainly isn't one, at least it hasn't been since Aaron Swartz was bullied out a long time ago.
- rhaksw 4y ago
  > The problem is the unauditable censorship. It's not even that. The biggest problem is more basic, that authors themselves are shown their removed content as if it's not removed! You can see that in action here [1]. It's happening everywhere, on every issue, on every side, in every geography and on every major platform. Start there. We don't even need to ask to see everything that gets removed yet. Asking for users to be able to know when their content gets removed is enough. And as I said elsewhere [1], this transparency must be citizen provided by raising awareness and through newly built Reveddit-like technology for other social media sites. Expecting the government do achieve this for us will only delay the inevitable realization that we must build these systems ourselves. As I mention in the talk linked on this post at 26:10, don't ask someone to fix it for you– that's handing power over to authorities. You fix it. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/about/sticky/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/about/sticky/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33480576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33480576
tsol 4y ago
>Problem is this: science is not democratic. The problem with this; who gets to decide what's right? The institution of science has had this issue before, and decided no one group is capable of always doing that. Hence it is decided using consensus and the scientific method. It's easy to say 'only allow professionals' but there ARE professionals with controversial opinions that will still get mobbed.
- otikik 4y ago
  As I mentioned it is far from perfect. Scientists are still human. It is still the best system we have, and it is definitely better than “opening the gates and letting everyone in”. If you want that, try MTV.
  - rhaksw 4y ago
    > it is definitely better than “opening the gates and letting everyone in”. Letting users discover when their content is removed is not "letting everyone in". You can have both moderation and transparency. They're not mutually exclusive, and many people will alter their behavior in a group after being told their content was removed. They're less likely to change when they're not told. For those who persist, consider what Jonathan Rauch says about speaking in a public forum, > The person you're talking to isn't the person you're directly talking to. You're not going to be able to persuade that hardcore LGBT left-wing activist that your point of view is correct. The person you're talking to is [the one overhearing your conversation]... They're seeing you sound reasonable, and the other person sound dogmatic and censorious... [1] In other words, don't compromise your values to deal with a minority of very persistent people with whom most people don't find alignment anyway. When you do compromise your values, that person will shift to attack you on the basis of censorship, and you've just given them the very platform they needed to gain followers. At that point you're no longer the open discussion forum to whatever degree you claimed. So you can't convince everyone of your viewpoint. So what? Leave it at that. Accepting that someone may not agree with you right away, or possibly ever, is the grown up thing to do. After all, in some cases it may be your mind that gets changed. To the extent you don't do this, you are your own worst enemy. And when you can see it through, you will have become your best advocate. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0T9XSG73kY&t=4889s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0T9XSG73kY&t=4889s
mistermann 4y ago
> I have been on the receiving end of a campaign organized by a somewhat popular forum in order to fill up a direct democracy platform with as many memes and random shit as possible. I'm curious what platform you are referring to here?
- otikik 4y ago
  Decide Madrid, for the Madrid City Hall: https://decide.madrid.es/ https://decide.madrid.es/ It was built on Ruby on Rails. There’s an Open Source white label platform generator project called Consul. I came up with that name (it comes from “consulta ciudadana”, not from an ancient Roman politician). https://consulproject.org/ https://consulproject.org/ My last involvement with the project was 6 years ago. My understanding is that the site took a downward dive with regards to code quality after me and other founding members left the project, and with the change in government.
rhaksw 4y ago
Moderation is fine, but what about secret moderation? The issue here is that users are being shown their removed comments as if they are publicly visible. I share my thoughts on the impact at 19:54 [1] in the video linked in this post. > So at that time you have a choice: either you moderate, in order to keep the channel on-topic, or you accept everything, at which point the guys who benefit from science not being available to the general public have won. There is another way to view this. I think there is a message in all of that hate speech you see. I'll paraphrase how I perceive it: "I don't see why this is wrong, and I'm frustrated that nobody will debate me about this issue from where I stand, so I'll get angrier and angrier until I get someone's attention." We could debate over whether this is reasonable, but personally I find it harder and harder to see the merits in the secretive removal of any content. We do need mods to curate according to group rules and the law. I also think the removals should be reviewable at least by the author of the content. [1] https://youtu.be/aCadmiIfbcI?t=1194 https://youtu.be/aCadmiIfbcI?t=1194
- otikik 4y ago
  If moderation isn’t silent then r/silence becomes “r/hey why has my comment been moderated, this is bullshit”. Same result as not moderating - The conversation about science gets diluted by the noise people lacking the basic skill level make.
  - rhaksw 4y ago
    > If moderation isn’t silent then r/silence becomes “r/hey why has my comment been moderated, this is bullshit”. Same result as not moderating - The conversation about science gets diluted by the noise people lacking the basic skill level make. That's a myth. Discourse tells me when my content is moderated. Plenty of forums have worked this way by default without being overwhelmed by spam. The widespread use of secret removals is unique to the social media era. It may have even helped create today's social media monopolies. There is another harmful effect. The more you secretly remove toxic users' commentary from view, the less signal they get that their views are not approved. In fact, removing them from view makes society worse off since you're also taking away agency from other users who could be preparing counter arguments. Then, when these two disconnected groups meet in the real world, there's a shouting match (or worse) because they never had to deal with those arguments before. What's more, extremists in otherwise upstanding groups won't realize they're being censored. They may, as a result, think they're of the same mind since their extreme viewpoints were not challenged (as they would be in the real world). By the time they act in the real world, they're far removed from reality. Secretly removing commentary is different from just ignoring someone in the real world. IRL if you ignore someone, they know you've ignored them. Online if you "ignore" them by secretly removing their comments, they don't know they've been ignored, and thousands or millions of other users don't know that that line of argument even existed as a thought in someone else's mind. It's incomprehensible to them. It's sad that hundreds of thousands of online moderators think they're helping society by secretly removing such commentary, while in doing so they may actually be creating the environment they seek to avoid. Everyone is trying to create pristine corners online, and it ends up covering the whole map. Meanwhile the real world goes down the drain. Many of us spend too much time using systems whose operations we aren't reviewing. Every day more people are becoming aware of the importance of transparency, and I think at this point the only question is when and to what degree it comes about.
searsoysters 4y ago
ur the definition of a flaming redditor soyjack

by otikik 4y ago

rhaksw 4y ago

> science is not democratic I strongly disagree, it's inherently democratic. The scientific method is all about making mistakes and trying again. Discourse is all about sharing knowledge. Open societies do this effectively. Jonathan Rauch, in Kindly Inquisitors (1993) wrote, > Authoritarian systems have their intellectual giants. What they lack is the capacity to organize and exploit their masses of middling thinkers. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=uZUVAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA74&lpg=PA74&q=%22Authoritarian+systems+have+their+intellectual+giants.+What+they+lack+is+the+capacity+to+organize+and+exploit+their+masses+of+middling+thinkers.%22 https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=uZUVAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA74... > From my experience, I think without moderation r/science would become “aliens built the pyramids” in a week. It might. What would happen then? I'd argue there'd be a lot of good discussion. The reason people don't think it's possible to change people's minds over the last 7-8 years is because during this whole period you didn't know about shadow moderation. Watch the linked talk, look at the examples. Deception is being crowdsourced and it is happening across every ideology, geography, and on every major platform.

matthewmacleod 4y ago
It might. What would happen then? I'd argue there'd be a lot of good discussion. Why bother though? There are thousands of places you can have that discussion, including on Reddit. You can set up, say, /r/scienceforall right now and establish the rules you want. The /r/science sub has decided that it’s a space which should have heavy moderation - a totally legitimate viewpoint with obvious benefits and costs. You might not agree with the balance, but the beauty is you don’t have to.
- rhaksw 4y ago
  > Why bother though? See 18:20 [1] and 19:52 [2] in the talk linked on this post. Nobody will visit r/scienceforall because r/science will remove references to it. Plus, forcing me to set up a group doesn't sound like a solution, it sounds like a shake down. To get an open discussion space I have to moderate it, and then have the social media site threaten removal of my mod powers if I fail to remove something they don't like within their desired time frame. That means I have to review every piece of user-submitted content. No thanks. Transparency and light-touch moderation would be more efficient. > The /r/science sub has decided that it’s a space which should have heavy moderation - a totally legitimate viewpoint with obvious benefits and costs. You might not agree with the balance, but the beauty is you don’t have to. My issue is with the system, not moderators. Legally speaking, shadow moderation may be in the clear, but it's still harmful for society while we have just a few major platforms. We should all know and share what's going on. [1] https://youtu.be/aCadmiIfbcI?t=18m20s https://youtu.be/aCadmiIfbcI?t=18m20s [2] https://youtu.be/aCadmiIfbcI?t=19m52s https://youtu.be/aCadmiIfbcI?t=19m52s
  - x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
    If nobody will visit your subreddit, then that might be an indication of how it's actually being perceived, and not evidence of some great injustice surrounding "free speech".
    - rhaksw 4y ago

mike_hock 4y ago

Subs like /r/askscience and /r/science have always needed moderation even before Reddit became cancer. The problem is the unauditable censorship. This is especially important on political forums but it also becomes relevant on science forums when scientific issues are starting to be politicized. Of course, Reddit can be whatever it wants, but as it stands, you can only treat it as a propaganda outlet, as you have no way of knowing what gets removed. The way we can make moderation trustworthy is the same way we make software trustworthy: By putting it out in the open so anyone can scrutinize it and raise a stink when they discover something suspicious, and can't be silenced. There is almost zero legitimate reason to completely scrub any comment, hiding them by default would work just fine. The only reason to really delete a comment would be if it directly puts a person in danger, such as by containing personally identifying information. Hard censorship must be a rare enough event that it becomes a scandal and everybody hears about it. The normalization of censorship allows moderators to do basically anything they want, because comments being removed is just expected and doesn't raise any eyebrows anymore. "Oh yeah, those 75% removed comments were just memes and hate speech." The other side of the coin is that flooding forums with memes, hate speech, and inane nonsense is a quick and easy way to drown out meaningful discussion and actual information, so soft censorship is necessary. They are two different attack vectors, and we need a defense against both of them. To prevent infiltration of the mod team, speech that we accept to be censored completely must require actual effort so mods can't plausibly claim it was "just memes" when comments get removed on a daily basis. To prevent exterior soft censorship by flooding, we ironically need moderation with power to implement soft censorship, but one that we can trust. We also cannot accept "hate speech" (or any other combination of words) that requires zero effort to produce to be a reason to force moderators to implement hard censorship. That allows anyone to censor any platform they like or at a minimum to force its moderators to destroy the trust the platform's users can objectively have in them. Of course, this isn't completely implementable due to unreasonable laws in pretty much every country in the world, but a trustworthy platform would at least try to approximate it as closely as possible under the laws they're bound by. Reddit certainly isn't one, at least it hasn't been since Aaron Swartz was bullied out a long time ago.

rhaksw 4y ago
> The problem is the unauditable censorship. It's not even that. The biggest problem is more basic, that authors themselves are shown their removed content as if it's not removed! You can see that in action here [1]. It's happening everywhere, on every issue, on every side, in every geography and on every major platform. Start there. We don't even need to ask to see everything that gets removed yet. Asking for users to be able to know when their content gets removed is enough. And as I said elsewhere [1], this transparency must be citizen provided by raising awareness and through newly built Reveddit-like technology for other social media sites. Expecting the government do achieve this for us will only delay the inevitable realization that we must build these systems ourselves. As I mention in the talk linked on this post at 26:10, don't ask someone to fix it for you– that's handing power over to authorities. You fix it. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/about/sticky/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/about/sticky/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33480576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33480576

tsol 4y ago

>Problem is this: science is not democratic. The problem with this; who gets to decide what's right? The institution of science has had this issue before, and decided no one group is capable of always doing that. Hence it is decided using consensus and the scientific method. It's easy to say 'only allow professionals' but there ARE professionals with controversial opinions that will still get mobbed.

otikik 4y ago
As I mentioned it is far from perfect. Scientists are still human. It is still the best system we have, and it is definitely better than “opening the gates and letting everyone in”. If you want that, try MTV.
- rhaksw 4y ago
  > it is definitely better than “opening the gates and letting everyone in”. Letting users discover when their content is removed is not "letting everyone in". You can have both moderation and transparency. They're not mutually exclusive, and many people will alter their behavior in a group after being told their content was removed. They're less likely to change when they're not told. For those who persist, consider what Jonathan Rauch says about speaking in a public forum, > The person you're talking to isn't the person you're directly talking to. You're not going to be able to persuade that hardcore LGBT left-wing activist that your point of view is correct. The person you're talking to is [the one overhearing your conversation]... They're seeing you sound reasonable, and the other person sound dogmatic and censorious... [1] In other words, don't compromise your values to deal with a minority of very persistent people with whom most people don't find alignment anyway. When you do compromise your values, that person will shift to attack you on the basis of censorship, and you've just given them the very platform they needed to gain followers. At that point you're no longer the open discussion forum to whatever degree you claimed. So you can't convince everyone of your viewpoint. So what? Leave it at that. Accepting that someone may not agree with you right away, or possibly ever, is the grown up thing to do. After all, in some cases it may be your mind that gets changed. To the extent you don't do this, you are your own worst enemy. And when you can see it through, you will have become your best advocate. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0T9XSG73kY&t=4889s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0T9XSG73kY&t=4889s

mistermann 4y ago

> I have been on the receiving end of a campaign organized by a somewhat popular forum in order to fill up a direct democracy platform with as many memes and random shit as possible. I'm curious what platform you are referring to here?

otikik 4y ago
Decide Madrid, for the Madrid City Hall: https://decide.madrid.es/ https://decide.madrid.es/ It was built on Ruby on Rails. There’s an Open Source white label platform generator project called Consul. I came up with that name (it comes from “consulta ciudadana”, not from an ancient Roman politician). https://consulproject.org/ https://consulproject.org/ My last involvement with the project was 6 years ago. My understanding is that the site took a downward dive with regards to code quality after me and other founding members left the project, and with the change in government.

rhaksw 4y ago

Moderation is fine, but what about secret moderation? The issue here is that users are being shown their removed comments as if they are publicly visible. I share my thoughts on the impact at 19:54 [1] in the video linked in this post. > So at that time you have a choice: either you moderate, in order to keep the channel on-topic, or you accept everything, at which point the guys who benefit from science not being available to the general public have won. There is another way to view this. I think there is a message in all of that hate speech you see. I'll paraphrase how I perceive it: "I don't see why this is wrong, and I'm frustrated that nobody will debate me about this issue from where I stand, so I'll get angrier and angrier until I get someone's attention." We could debate over whether this is reasonable, but personally I find it harder and harder to see the merits in the secretive removal of any content. We do need mods to curate according to group rules and the law. I also think the removals should be reviewable at least by the author of the content. [1] https://youtu.be/aCadmiIfbcI?t=1194 https://youtu.be/aCadmiIfbcI?t=1194

otikik 4y ago
If moderation isn’t silent then r/silence becomes “r/hey why has my comment been moderated, this is bullshit”. Same result as not moderating - The conversation about science gets diluted by the noise people lacking the basic skill level make.
- rhaksw 4y ago
  > If moderation isn’t silent then r/silence becomes “r/hey why has my comment been moderated, this is bullshit”. Same result as not moderating - The conversation about science gets diluted by the noise people lacking the basic skill level make. That's a myth. Discourse tells me when my content is moderated. Plenty of forums have worked this way by default without being overwhelmed by spam. The widespread use of secret removals is unique to the social media era. It may have even helped create today's social media monopolies. There is another harmful effect. The more you secretly remove toxic users' commentary from view, the less signal they get that their views are not approved. In fact, removing them from view makes society worse off since you're also taking away agency from other users who could be preparing counter arguments. Then, when these two disconnected groups meet in the real world, there's a shouting match (or worse) because they never had to deal with those arguments before. What's more, extremists in otherwise upstanding groups won't realize they're being censored. They may, as a result, think they're of the same mind since their extreme viewpoints were not challenged (as they would be in the real world). By the time they act in the real world, they're far removed from reality. Secretly removing commentary is different from just ignoring someone in the real world. IRL if you ignore someone, they know you've ignored them. Online if you "ignore" them by secretly removing their comments, they don't know they've been ignored, and thousands or millions of other users don't know that that line of argument even existed as a thought in someone else's mind. It's incomprehensible to them. It's sad that hundreds of thousands of online moderators think they're helping society by secretly removing such commentary, while in doing so they may actually be creating the environment they seek to avoid. Everyone is trying to create pristine corners online, and it ends up covering the whole map. Meanwhile the real world goes down the drain. Many of us spend too much time using systems whose operations we aren't reviewing. Every day more people are becoming aware of the importance of transparency, and I think at this point the only question is when and to what degree it comes about.

searsoysters 4y ago

ur the definition of a flaming redditor soyjack