3 ms·
Seems a lot of people think Reddit should just "get better" at detecting this sort of stuff, as if effective anti-gaming systems are trivial to implement and wi
by lmkg 14y ago
Seems a lot of people think Reddit should just "get better" at detecting this sort of stuff, as if effective anti-gaming systems are trivial to implement and will keep out an adaptable foe. If Reddit could wave a magic wand and make all the shady bullcrap vanish, I'm sure they would, but that's an unrealistic scenario.
It looks to me, Reddit simply doesn't want to get involved in a land war in Asia. Trying to tinker with the rewards systems means investing a greater and greater fraction of their resources to fighting opponents who are better-funded and adaptable, in an asymmetric fight that favors the attacker. Even if they could succeed, that comes at an opportunity cost of what they could have done to improve Reddit in ways that actually have an impact, instead of just treading water.
Perma-banning these domains could be the full strategy. The long-term strategy could also just be to negotiate with these domains, with these initial bans acting as the "No really, I'm fucking serious" threat that gives themj real leverage. I would prefer their strategy is the latter, but I wouldn't really blame them for picking the former either.
- natesm 14y agoReddit presents themselves as a "platform for communities", not as a singular "community" (I'm paraphrasing kn0thing, I believe). This is directly in opposition to that ideal: previously, the administrators have only really interfered with, well, a bunch of subreddits targeted at pedophiles. Now, they're imposing blanket domain bans across every single Reddit community. I don't think that anyone would have a problem with allowing subreddit moderators to ban domains. I'd love to see image and meme hosts banned from almost everything to enforce high quality articles. The Atlantic is a common sight on TrueReddit. I don't care if it was posted by an employee, because TrueReddit subscribers are pretty good about downvoting anything that doesn't fit. What I do care about is being able to read the great articles from The Atlantic that are upvoted on TrueReddit. However, the Reddit administrators have decided that I, and every other TrueReddit subscriber, shouldn't be allowed to anymore. This is a fine technological decision, instead of spending years on heuristics, but it's implemented at the wrong level.
- planetguy 14y agoI love this decision just for the cold-hearted Keyser Soze game theory of it. It's a classic shoot-the-hostages-first move. It's not just about these publications, it's about whatever other publications are gonna show up next year, and the year after that, and the year after that, with ever-increasing levels of sophistication in attempting to game reddit. Reddit can fight the threat while it remains small in scope, but they can't fight it if it really gets big. So they demonstrate a willingness to annihilate their opponents, even if it's quite costly to themselves. If you can do that, pretty soon you won't have any opponents.
- pdubs 14y agoThe thing is that, according to the DailyDot article that's been posted around here, the account that lead to The Atlantic being banned was posting hundreds of links to The Atlantic and their subsidiaries. What's non-trivial about detecting that?
- starrhorne 14y agoIt becomes non trivial to detect when they start spamming using 100s of aged accounts run through proxies. You can detect that lots of people are submitting stories to the atlantic, but it looks organic.