6 ms·

r/all removals over time

47 points by beefman 3y ago

beefman 3y ago
From https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/ https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/
adhesive_wombat 3y ago
I really don't get why so many posts need to be removed. Other than bullying and harassment, isn't that what the vote buttons are for?
- beefman 3y ago
  Funny enough, this post was initially shadow-blocked here. But I noticed I couldn't comment on it and wrote to dang asking why. He unblocked it and explained that submissions pointing to redd.it are automatically shadow-blocked.
- 130e13a 3y ago
  they're actively trying to make the site more "family-friendly" (i.e., advertiser-friendly), since they have their IPO coming up later this year.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    And yet they still have porn subreddits. Also I've bern hearing about that "upcoming IPO" for like 5 years now and it still doesn't happen.
    - account42 3y ago
      Not on /r/all anymore though. Reddit is probably aware that removing those parts in one stroke is likely going to spawn a competitor that might eventually overtake Reddit and has chosen to kill them slowly instead with more and more restrictions.
  - geraldhh 3y ago
    once reddit get's bought, it's on a trajectory to irrelevance, because nobody will buy that cesspit w/o a massive "betterment agenda".
  - red_admiral 3y ago
    I think the general direction you're describing is correct, but it might also be that occasionally someone at reddit looks at the front page of voat and thinks "let's not become that".
    - account42 3y ago
      Voat and and similar sites came into existence because of the moderation on reddit, not the other way around.
      - hnbad 3y ago
        If anything, reddit's moderation policies were an attempt to curtail the channification brought by edgelord subreddits like "fat people hate", "jailbait" and eventually "The Donald". Going down that route is an entirely plausible decision but it not only alienates most normies (not to mention the demographics typically on the receiving hand of the hate and harassment embraced by these groups) but also makes a site much less appealing to advertisers or investors. Of course Voat promoting itself as a "free speech alternative to reddit" predictably led to it mostly attracting those affected by the reddit moderation policies, which led to them becoming exactly what reddit wanted to avoid and predictably failing eventually.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Natsu 3y ago
  There's a lot of power in shaping how people see the world, and with more of our experience of the world being virtual, it's easier to shape than ever before.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    Thankfully I can go outside, talk to people and find out that they don't have the same opinions as reddit mods/admins.
    - geraldhh 3y ago
      not that covid demonstrated how fragile this Privilege is rooted
      - zirgs 3y ago
        Even during peak-covid I could still communicate with my friends and family members using uncensored means of communication.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        account42 3y ago
        This time yes. Legislation in most countries seems to be moving only in one direction: More surveillance of all communication methods. We've already had people being arrested/charged for private gatherings among a small number of friends just because the government(s) decided to impose arbitrary restrictions on who you could meet. We are also seening more and more arrests and fines for public speech that happens to offend someone. You can bet that once the capability is there this will eventually also happen with private digital communications.
        suddenclarity 3y ago
        Hence governments are trying to ban Signal/Telegram and there was a leak yesterday from Spain about the government trying to ban encrypted messages all together. Newspapers losing control over the narrative over the last 15 years have been "extremely dangerous for our democracy" and it's no surprise politicians are pushing back against Internet in an attempt to regain the control. At the moment it seems impossible to predict what the future will look like, but it doesn't look promising in my view.
- tsss 3y ago
  You ever been to reddit? Practically all of the large subreddits have been taking over by power moderators who are either karma whores and obviously paid to push ads or hobby political commissars who ban anything and everything not fitting into their ideological agenda.
- DharmaPolice 3y ago
  I'm often skeptical about Reddit moderators but one of the things the voting system doesn't handle very well is near duplicate submissions. On /r/soccer for example when there is a big story (e.g. Messi leaving Barcelona) there will be hundreds of submissions of essentially the same story (with different sources). There is some benefit in having discussion of the topic confined to a few threads (or maybe just one), rather than the entire subreddit be temporarily unusable until this storm passes. On traditional forums threads could be merged together - which was often confusing but it at least allowed comments made up to that point to be retained. Reddit doesn't seem to have that functionality (or at least I've never seen it).
  - account42 3y ago
    Merging is really the best solution here as ideally that would allow retaining not just all comments but also all aternative sources. HN kind of does this by moving comments and then referencing the duplicate discussion in a comment. But its also not always uncontroversial what should and shouldn't be merged. E.g. this allows moderators to select the article most favorable to their views and then give it all the comments, effectively boosting one viewpoint while hiding others.
  - mhh__ 3y ago
    Moderators (/r/soccer ones get accused repeatedly, no comment either way from me) get accused of removing posts so they can get the "scoop" too, rather than being solely due censorship.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  Because 99% of what people submit is crap. Any insufficiently moderated subreddit quickly devolves into spam, low effort content and memes. And when big events happen you'll have 20 people submitting the same thing, then 15 follow-up posts about "Why am I being censored?" Reddit is kinda crap at deduplication. It compares URLs exactly, and still doesn't know that youtube.com and youtu.be are the same place, or that the junk appended to a youtube URL is mostly irrelevant.
  - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    >Any insufficiently moderated subreddit quickly devolves into spam, low effort content and memes. Any sufficiently large subreddit, regardless of moderation. Once a subreddit reaches critical mass, its inundated with low quality posts as mentioned. One can argue that is due to poor moderation, which would be part of it, but I find it’s mostly just the Reddit “culture” to create stale memes of the same formats but with subreddit-specific things tacked on, instead of interesting discussion. The only times I don’t see this is in subreddits where posting is reserved to people who have to prove their worth in some degree, which naturally isn’t an ideal system either.
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      There are rare exceptions, like r/AskHistorians, where mods rule it with an iron fist. But that takes serious dedication, organization and effort, so it's rare to see.
  - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
    It seems strange to me that things like Reddit, Twitter, YouTube etc seem to be treated as inviolable constants, both by users and by their owners. It's kind of taken for granted that they just fell from the sky like that and need to be worked around. Which, yes, I suppose they kind of do, and even a million people wanting something is a rounding error, but it's very different to collaborative projects.
- unixhero 3y ago
  Remember that Reddit is trying to monetize. This drives them away from meme culture, and tries more and more to be politically correct with measures such as quarantined subreddits.
deofoo 3y ago
It could be interesting to compare with marketing efforts. Follow the money..
- suddenclarity 3y ago
  Whenever I visited /r/all, at least half of the posts were political posts. Either antiwork spinoffs or screenshots from Twitter/Facebook with the thread hating on the person's political views. Hardly marketing friendly. One period people would find tiny subreddits, post something, share it on private Discord servers and have people vote it to the frontpage. Trying to avoid political subreddits as a user was like playing Whac-A-Mole.
ro_bit 3y ago
Why does the graph stop at 50% (or what I assume to be percent)?
- joecool1029 3y ago
  > The bot posts every 12 hours, so each datapoint is the recorded number of /r/all removals in each post, or every 12 hours. The lines between the datapoints represent the change between those two datapoints, which makes it easier to see the trend.[1] [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/comments/mbsafj/heres_an_updated_graph_of_rall_deletions_over/hj1n0j0/ https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/comments/mbsafj/her...
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    I've read this 5 times and I'm having a really hard time parsing what he's trying to say here. Can anyone help out?
    - SifJar 3y ago
      the methodolgy of the bot that posts the deleted posts every 12 hours is explained here: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/wiki/index https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/wiki/index the graph just shows the number of posts that this bot has found "missing" each 12 hours
- SifJar 3y ago
  it's labelled as number of removals, I think it's an absolute number of removed posts per day(?) edit: sibling comment points out it's per 12 hour period, not per day edit: as for the cap of 50 - it seems that is the number of posts shown on a first page of r/all (using old reddit), so it seems that means that all 50 slots "should" be filled with posts that have been removed
- banana_giraffe 3y ago
  It's showing 50 of the top 50 posts to /r/all in each 12 hour window have been removed. It's the results of the bot that generates posts to /r/RedditMinusMods/ tracking such deletes that looks like https://imgur.com/21qaLjx https://imgur.com/21qaLjx .
carabiner 3y ago
This would be way better as a scatter plot. It is not meaningful to interpolate between points, and so there's no reason to connect the points with a line. The line forms a solid color block that obscures possible trends.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Krssst 3y ago
I think this should have been %removed posts, otherwise it could very well just be proportional to the amount of posts submitted and follow reddit's popularity.
- account42 3y ago
  It seems to only count removals of posts that would have been on the first page, that's why it caps at 50.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cr3ative 3y ago
The utility of /r/all has all but gone. It was a useful view to "what's the most popular anywhere on the site", but for various good reasons, many subreddits don't qualify to show there - either by being removed or opting out of display there. It's a bit of a shame.
zecg 3y ago
"with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back..."
zapdrive 3y ago
Up until 2016ish, discussions on reddit used to be very balanced politically. You could find the top voted comment leaning extreme left, and the second top voted comment leaning to the right. Now you all the top comments are left and any right leaning comment is highly down voted to the negatives. Either the country suddenly shifted far left or reddit is getting highly moderated to make it look like that.
- nannal 3y ago
  It's a shame there's no discernible external reason, or series of events, that would push young people towards left leaning ideologies. Furthermore it's extraordinarily strange this began back in 2016.
  - account42 3y ago
    Yes, almost like one "side" got spooked and really embraced the idea of censorship to manufacture consent around that time.
    - nannal 3y ago
      That must be the answer, conspiracy.
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      Everyone likes censorship. I've never met anyone who didn't like it. People only complain about it when their side is losing. Eg, on reddit /r/conservative is one of the most censored subreddits, and they're not even subtle about it. They regularly have "flaired users only" threads that are explicitly not open to anyone but the mod-approved people, but you'll see the regulars venture to the outside and whine about free speech and "safe spaces" anyway. The few actually true unrestricted places quickly degenerate into something like Voat, that was such a cess-pool that even TheDonald couldn't take it. They made a huge deal about Reddit being too restrictive and moving to voat, then quietly crawled back because just like /r/conservative they were very used to having a conversation on their terms. Even in places like Voat I suspect the way most people work in an unmoderated space is that the toxicity kind of naturally filters the content to what they prefer.

47 points by beefman 3y ago

From https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/ https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/

I really don't get why so many posts need to be removed. Other than bullying and harassment, isn't that what the vote buttons are for?

beefman 3y ago
Funny enough, this post was initially shadow-blocked here. But I noticed I couldn't comment on it and wrote to dang asking why. He unblocked it and explained that submissions pointing to redd.it are automatically shadow-blocked.
130e13a 3y ago
they're actively trying to make the site more "family-friendly" (i.e., advertiser-friendly), since they have their IPO coming up later this year.
- zirgs 3y ago
  And yet they still have porn subreddits. Also I've bern hearing about that "upcoming IPO" for like 5 years now and it still doesn't happen.
  - account42 3y ago
    Not on /r/all anymore though. Reddit is probably aware that removing those parts in one stroke is likely going to spawn a competitor that might eventually overtake Reddit and has chosen to kill them slowly instead with more and more restrictions.
- geraldhh 3y ago
  once reddit get's bought, it's on a trajectory to irrelevance, because nobody will buy that cesspit w/o a massive "betterment agenda".
- red_admiral 3y ago
  I think the general direction you're describing is correct, but it might also be that occasionally someone at reddit looks at the front page of voat and thinks "let's not become that".
  - account42 3y ago
    Voat and and similar sites came into existence because of the moderation on reddit, not the other way around.
    - hnbad 3y ago
      If anything, reddit's moderation policies were an attempt to curtail the channification brought by edgelord subreddits like "fat people hate", "jailbait" and eventually "The Donald". Going down that route is an entirely plausible decision but it not only alienates most normies (not to mention the demographics typically on the receiving hand of the hate and harassment embraced by these groups) but also makes a site much less appealing to advertisers or investors. Of course Voat promoting itself as a "free speech alternative to reddit" predictably led to it mostly attracting those affected by the reddit moderation policies, which led to them becoming exactly what reddit wanted to avoid and predictably failing eventually.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Natsu 3y ago
There's a lot of power in shaping how people see the world, and with more of our experience of the world being virtual, it's easier to shape than ever before.
- zirgs 3y ago
  Thankfully I can go outside, talk to people and find out that they don't have the same opinions as reddit mods/admins.
  - geraldhh 3y ago
    not that covid demonstrated how fragile this Privilege is rooted
    - zirgs 3y ago
      Even during peak-covid I could still communicate with my friends and family members using uncensored means of communication.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - account42 3y ago
        This time yes. Legislation in most countries seems to be moving only in one direction: More surveillance of all communication methods. We've already had people being arrested/charged for private gatherings among a small number of friends just because the government(s) decided to impose arbitrary restrictions on who you could meet. We are also seening more and more arrests and fines for public speech that happens to offend someone. You can bet that once the capability is there this will eventually also happen with private digital communications.
      - suddenclarity 3y ago
        Hence governments are trying to ban Signal/Telegram and there was a leak yesterday from Spain about the government trying to ban encrypted messages all together. Newspapers losing control over the narrative over the last 15 years have been "extremely dangerous for our democracy" and it's no surprise politicians are pushing back against Internet in an attempt to regain the control. At the moment it seems impossible to predict what the future will look like, but it doesn't look promising in my view.
tsss 3y ago
You ever been to reddit? Practically all of the large subreddits have been taking over by power moderators who are either karma whores and obviously paid to push ads or hobby political commissars who ban anything and everything not fitting into their ideological agenda.
DharmaPolice 3y ago
I'm often skeptical about Reddit moderators but one of the things the voting system doesn't handle very well is near duplicate submissions. On /r/soccer for example when there is a big story (e.g. Messi leaving Barcelona) there will be hundreds of submissions of essentially the same story (with different sources). There is some benefit in having discussion of the topic confined to a few threads (or maybe just one), rather than the entire subreddit be temporarily unusable until this storm passes. On traditional forums threads could be merged together - which was often confusing but it at least allowed comments made up to that point to be retained. Reddit doesn't seem to have that functionality (or at least I've never seen it).
- account42 3y ago
  Merging is really the best solution here as ideally that would allow retaining not just all comments but also all aternative sources. HN kind of does this by moving comments and then referencing the duplicate discussion in a comment. But its also not always uncontroversial what should and shouldn't be merged. E.g. this allows moderators to select the article most favorable to their views and then give it all the comments, effectively boosting one viewpoint while hiding others.
- mhh__ 3y ago
  Moderators (/r/soccer ones get accused repeatedly, no comment either way from me) get accused of removing posts so they can get the "scoop" too, rather than being solely due censorship.
dale_glass 3y ago
Because 99% of what people submit is crap. Any insufficiently moderated subreddit quickly devolves into spam, low effort content and memes. And when big events happen you'll have 20 people submitting the same thing, then 15 follow-up posts about "Why am I being censored?" Reddit is kinda crap at deduplication. It compares URLs exactly, and still doesn't know that youtube.com and youtu.be are the same place, or that the junk appended to a youtube URL is mostly irrelevant.
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  >Any insufficiently moderated subreddit quickly devolves into spam, low effort content and memes. Any sufficiently large subreddit, regardless of moderation. Once a subreddit reaches critical mass, its inundated with low quality posts as mentioned. One can argue that is due to poor moderation, which would be part of it, but I find it’s mostly just the Reddit “culture” to create stale memes of the same formats but with subreddit-specific things tacked on, instead of interesting discussion. The only times I don’t see this is in subreddits where posting is reserved to people who have to prove their worth in some degree, which naturally isn’t an ideal system either.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    There are rare exceptions, like r/AskHistorians, where mods rule it with an iron fist. But that takes serious dedication, organization and effort, so it's rare to see.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  It seems strange to me that things like Reddit, Twitter, YouTube etc seem to be treated as inviolable constants, both by users and by their owners. It's kind of taken for granted that they just fell from the sky like that and need to be worked around. Which, yes, I suppose they kind of do, and even a million people wanting something is a rounding error, but it's very different to collaborative projects.
unixhero 3y ago
Remember that Reddit is trying to monetize. This drives them away from meme culture, and tries more and more to be politically correct with measures such as quarantined subreddits.

deofoo 3y ago

It could be interesting to compare with marketing efforts. Follow the money..

suddenclarity 3y ago
Whenever I visited /r/all, at least half of the posts were political posts. Either antiwork spinoffs or screenshots from Twitter/Facebook with the thread hating on the person's political views. Hardly marketing friendly. One period people would find tiny subreddits, post something, share it on private Discord servers and have people vote it to the frontpage. Trying to avoid political subreddits as a user was like playing Whac-A-Mole.

ro_bit 3y ago

Why does the graph stop at 50% (or what I assume to be percent)?

joecool1029 3y ago
> The bot posts every 12 hours, so each datapoint is the recorded number of /r/all removals in each post, or every 12 hours. The lines between the datapoints represent the change between those two datapoints, which makes it easier to see the trend.[1] [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/comments/mbsafj/heres_an_updated_graph_of_rall_deletions_over/hj1n0j0/ https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/comments/mbsafj/her...
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  I've read this 5 times and I'm having a really hard time parsing what he's trying to say here. Can anyone help out?
  - SifJar 3y ago
    the methodolgy of the bot that posts the deleted posts every 12 hours is explained here: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/wiki/index https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/wiki/index the graph just shows the number of posts that this bot has found "missing" each 12 hours
SifJar 3y ago
it's labelled as number of removals, I think it's an absolute number of removed posts per day(?) edit: sibling comment points out it's per 12 hour period, not per day edit: as for the cap of 50 - it seems that is the number of posts shown on a first page of r/all (using old reddit), so it seems that means that all 50 slots "should" be filled with posts that have been removed
banana_giraffe 3y ago
It's showing 50 of the top 50 posts to /r/all in each 12 hour window have been removed. It's the results of the bot that generates posts to /r/RedditMinusMods/ tracking such deletes that looks like https://imgur.com/21qaLjx https://imgur.com/21qaLjx .

carabiner 3y ago

This would be way better as a scatter plot. It is not meaningful to interpolate between points, and so there's no reason to connect the points with a line. The line forms a solid color block that obscures possible trends.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Krssst 3y ago

I think this should have been %removed posts, otherwise it could very well just be proportional to the amount of posts submitted and follow reddit's popularity.

account42 3y ago
It seems to only count removals of posts that would have been on the first page, that's why it caps at 50.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

cr3ative 3y ago

The utility of /r/all has all but gone. It was a useful view to "what's the most popular anywhere on the site", but for various good reasons, many subreddits don't qualify to show there - either by being removed or opting out of display there. It's a bit of a shame.

zecg 3y ago

"with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back..."

zapdrive 3y ago

Up until 2016ish, discussions on reddit used to be very balanced politically. You could find the top voted comment leaning extreme left, and the second top voted comment leaning to the right. Now you all the top comments are left and any right leaning comment is highly down voted to the negatives. Either the country suddenly shifted far left or reddit is getting highly moderated to make it look like that.

nannal 3y ago
It's a shame there's no discernible external reason, or series of events, that would push young people towards left leaning ideologies. Furthermore it's extraordinarily strange this began back in 2016.
- account42 3y ago
  Yes, almost like one "side" got spooked and really embraced the idea of censorship to manufacture consent around that time.
  - nannal 3y ago
    That must be the answer, conspiracy.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    Everyone likes censorship. I've never met anyone who didn't like it. People only complain about it when their side is losing. Eg, on reddit /r/conservative is one of the most censored subreddits, and they're not even subtle about it. They regularly have "flaired users only" threads that are explicitly not open to anyone but the mod-approved people, but you'll see the regulars venture to the outside and whine about free speech and "safe spaces" anyway. The few actually true unrestricted places quickly degenerate into something like Voat, that was such a cess-pool that even TheDonald couldn't take it. They made a huge deal about Reddit being too restrictive and moving to voat, then quietly crawled back because just like /r/conservative they were very used to having a conversation on their terms. Even in places like Voat I suspect the way most people work in an unmoderated space is that the toxicity kind of naturally filters the content to what they prefer.