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Reddit’s Politics Section Bans Salon, Mother Jones, HuffPost for Bad Journalism

79 points by wikiburner 13y ago

antr 13y ago
The second to last comment says it all: This sort of violates the point of Reddit, right? Users are supposed to upvote material they find interesting, rather than have editors sequester content they find relevant.
- cryptoz 13y ago
  Indeed. cryptoz boycotts r/politics for editor-censored user submissions
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- zokier 13y ago
  Disagree. The point of Reddit (imho) is to function as a platform for communities, each with their own rules. Some have stricter moderation, some are laxer.
  - scarlson 13y ago
    I've been a redditor from the beginning, and have always agreed with the sentiment that communities should reflect their userbase. The issue comes when in the case of /r/politics moderators do something outside what the majority sentiment is. Change comes slow, it's far easier to get a mod removed than it is to get 3 million subscribers to move to a new subreddit with a "better" moderator team.
    - 001sky 13y ago
      But this is just political hijacking of the subreddit. I don't see why anyone at reddit should support this as a strategy. What you will end up with is a bunch of astro-turfed sub-reddits. The greas roots will make r/_x_ popular, then some PR firm will get someone to "a "better" moderator team" so that their clients can hijack _million users.
- abat 13y ago
  Only if Reddit.com blocked the sites. Each subreddit is its own privately moderated world. Some subreddits only allow self-posts, which means you can't post third party sites at all. Some subreddits only allow scholarly journals. Some subreddits filter based on political bias. Everyone chooses what subreddits they want to subscribe to, and if you want a different set of rules you can create your own subreddit.
  - a3voices 13y ago
    That's true but r/politics is a default subreddit.
    - rthomas6 13y ago
      Actually not anymore. They recently updated the defaults, imho for the better. /r/atheism is off the default list, too.
    - ohwait8 13y ago
      Not as of a few months ago. It was removed from default for... obvious... reasons.
    - nknighthb 13y ago
      Not only has r/politics not been a default for a while now (at least a couple months, I think), it wouldn't matter if it was -- default subs are still not managed by the Reddit admins. How a sub is run obviously can influence which ones are chosen as defaults, but being a default doesn't itself change anything.
  - baddox 13y ago
    Admins and members of subreddit tend to have a slightly confused idea about what a subreddit it supposed to be. On one hand, the fundamental idea is clearly that the quality of articles is determined by the aggregate of users' votes. On the other hand, many people still appeal to some individual or objective measure of "quality," and insist that admin moderation is necessary to maintain this level of quality.
- pfraze 13y ago
  The subreddits have always enforced culture through mod rules. The (often-cited) example of this is /r/AskHistorians, which is very stringently moderated.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Many subs on Reddit have embraced the fact that upvotes as the sole metric do not always create the most valuable/enjoyable sub. Other forms of curation can often improve the quality of the sub, and quality content is the primary reason anyone goes to an aggregator.
zokier 13y ago
At least it's just one sub-reddit this time instead of the site-wide ban they implemented last time.
- redthrowaway 13y ago
  The site-wide ban was for gaming the system and buying votes, not "low-quality journalism". That was the admins telling content sites to fuck off and stop hiring voting rings to cheat reddit. This is the mods of /r/politics (ostensibly) trying to increase quality on their sub.
  - sanskritabelt 13y ago
    Which sites were banned on grounds of reporting about reddit protecting that "violentacrez" pervert?
    - redthrowaway 13y ago
      None. Some subreddits banned Gawker, not for "reporting about reddit protecting" anyone, which they didn't, but for posting what was then only his suspected real name and encouraging an internet-wide witch hunt which resulted in death threats, the man in question being fired and his marriage ending, etc. You might claim that that's what he deserves for moderating subreddits whose content you don't like (I'd disagree), but it could easily have been a case of mistaken identity and an innocent man's life would have been ruined. That's why witch hunts are bad, and that's why Gawker was banned from those subreddits whose moderators felt, as I do, that encouraging that kind of behaviour is immensely irresponsible and should not be tolerated.
tptacek 13y ago
It would be funny if the standards for /r/politics stories became more rigorous than the one for HN.
- zokier 13y ago
  Seems to me that the standards became more arbitrary than rigorous.
  - bstrand 13y ago
    The ban list changes are pretty clearly ideologically driven, not arbitrary.
    - 001sky 13y ago
      That's not clear. The list is rather more interesting than what you (or the article's author) suggest. Its also rooted in logic (arguable, but laid out ex-ante). Some of these are also autobanned on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6657066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6657066). [eg] The following is a list of major domains that have been banned by the moderators of /r/Politics and listed here in the interest of transparency: aattp.org alternet.org amazon.com americanthinker.com avaaz.org b4in.info beforeitsnews.com blacklistednews.com borderlessnewsandviews.com breitbart.com breitbartunmasked.com change.org citypaper.com constitutioncampaign.org courthousenews.com crooksandliars.com dailybail.com dailycaller.com dailycurrant.com dailykos.com dailypaul.com democraticunderground.com deviantart.com dirtyuglypolitics.wordpress.com drudgereport.com eclectablog.com ecominoes.com facebook.com funnyordie.com Gawker and all affiliates generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com heavy.com heritage.org hotair.com huffingtonpost.com inagist.com indiegogo.com informationliberation.com infowars.com isidewith.com lifenews.com linkedin.com littlegreenfootballs.com mediamatters.org minx.cc motherjones.com myspace.com nation.foxnews.com nationalmemo.com nationalreport.net nationalreview.com nationsmith.com Newsbusters.org newsmakeup.wordpress.com newsvine.com newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/ njspin.com omegle.com pensitoreview.com petitions.whitehouse.gov photographyisnotacrime.com policymic.com politicalwire.com politicususa.com politilady.com pollcode.com powerlineblog.com prisonplanet.com rawstory.com reason.com redd.it reddit.com redgage.com rightwingwatch.org salon.com signon.org smirkingchimp.com techdirt.com thebackbencher.co.uk theblaze.com thedailybanter.com thegatewaypundit.com theonion.com thepetitionsite.com therightscoop.com thinkprogress.org townhall.com truth-out.org twitchy.com twitter.com upworthy.com vice.com voiceblaze.com wallstreetonparade.com weaselzippers.us wikimedia.org wikipedia.org wnd.com*
dragontamer 13y ago
I thought Reddit was full of Libertarians who were against censorship?
- a3voices 13y ago
  They're mostly against government censorship.
  - baddox 13y ago
    Or really, any censorship applied to property by anyone other than the property owner. Reddit (specifically, the physical servers running the site) is private property, so any rules Reddit makes (or allows the moderators of its subreddits to make) probably won't be considered objectionable censorship. If the government, or any external entity, forcefully censored Reddit, that would likely be considered objectionable censorship. Compare it to the government forcefully preventing a physical newspaper from publishing certain things, versus the editor of a newspaper choosing which articles to publish.
  - dragontamer 13y ago
    I thought they were for freedom of speech. There was a giant shitstorm when Jailbait was shutdown, with many cries towards "unfair censorship". But when censorship agrees with their biased views, all of a sudden its okay.
- rthomas6 13y ago
  I think you're confusing Reddit with a site called "Hacker News".
  - BrainInAJar 13y ago
    Nah, that site is just a circle-jerk for self important silicon valley startup types. "How I made a million dollars with my idiotic website idea and you absolutely will also!"
minimax 13y ago
It's good to see Slate standing up for its competitors.
ilamont 13y ago
Does HN do this for certain source that have been flagged too many times, or otherwise considered low-quality?
- wikiburner 13y ago
  My impression is pg has banned some sources manually: Huffingtonpost.com - for linkbait blogspam. theonion.com and buzzfeed.com - off topic entertainment. gawker.com and its other domains - general sleaziness. pg might want to consider unbanning Buzzfeed, though. In the past year or two they've added tons of reporters who do pretty decent long form articles you would expect to see on Slate, The Atlantic, or Forbes, and the risk that HNers will upvote "The 50 Greatest Cat Photos of All Time" is probably pretty low.
  - te_chris 13y ago
    You can hate Gawker all you want, but I find they consistently produce great prose that I enjoy reading and often find educational and valuable. Not all the time, but you can't write off the entire org just because of defamer. Sure it's snarky, I appreciate that sometimes though, especially when you're writing about something as pathetically retarded as the US govt. shutdown or Sean Parker's wedding and his ridiculous defences hence.
- jamesbritt 13y ago
  There are some domains that, should submit a URL for them, are auto-instantly marked [dead].
minimaxir 13y ago
It's worth noting that /r/politics is only the 13th biggest subreddit, by number of submissions. It's a relative drop in the water. http://i.imgur.com/9FLPgsW.png http://i.imgur.com/9FLPgsW.png https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjPFdCURhZvddGQzd0dIQkk1aXRRRkxEY3g0ZmQtWGc&usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjPFdCURhZvddGQ...
- CaveTech 13y ago
  Number of submissions is a bad metric, number of readers per submission is much more telling. /r/politic only has 13k readers, but /r/politics has over 3 million. Blocking these domains will have a relatively large impact as far as referrals from reddit are concerned. How big of an impact to their viewership in general, it's too hard to say.
  - minimaxir 13y ago
    Incoroporating number of subscribers may be skewed though since the default subreddits auto-subscribe, and even active users might not opt-out.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Your concept of "a drop in the bucket" and mine are a little different, it seems.
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  As a League player, I am amazed and gratified that it is more popular that /r/politics. Not that I hate politics, I just love League.
  - scarlson 13y ago
    If you were to list the hobbies of reddit users, gaming is going to trump political involvement. reddit is a social platform first, it makes sense that the 20 year old crowd that populates it will have subscribed more to their hobbies over broader general topics. See /r/television vs /r/breakingbad, /r/gameofthrones, /r/thewalkingdead, etc.
xacaxulu 13y ago
Good. The Puffington Host is nothing but linkbait.
- charlesism 13y ago
  I like that the columns get progressively less intelligent from left to right. If you ever finish the entire third column, call an ambulance immediately. You may have suffered a stroke.
christopherryan 13y ago
GOSPEL ARTIST POSES NUDE! Evon Latrail is the author of a children's book "When Mommy Went to Heaven". She wrote/recorded a few songs; "Lord Bless My Enemies" and "It Is Time" happens to be two of the titles. She even has a song entitled, "Can't You See (Abortion Is Murder). She went Pro-life after having a abortion! Really???? Now here is a photo of her posing in chocolate as a "Swamp Girl". The word Hypocrite is floating around somewhere. This story has made front page news in the local paper. How can this so called "Gospel Artist" be a role model is she's posing news? For more on this story.....Go to Google or YouTube and search, Evon Latrail.
thisiswrong 13y ago
Reddit has been compromised. Just look at what happened on r/worldnews with the u/douglasmacarther and the RT censorship thing, or how the NSA-Israel Memorandum submissions were purposely 'buried' http://rt.com/news/rt-reddit-ban-censorship-169/ http://rt.com/news/rt-reddit-ban-censorship-169/
stefantalpalaru 13y ago
It's not Reddit's "politics section" but one of the many subreddits - independently managed forums, each with its own policy. This distinction should be obvious to anyone familiar with the platform and a more accurate title would be "the /r/politics subreddit bans..."
- invalidOrTaken 13y ago
  Absolutely. Reddit is a platform more than a monolithic entity. There are portions of that site that consider each other mortal enemies.
- hackinthebochs 13y ago
  People love to say this, but a critical look at the structure of reddit shows how little this argument matches reality. Reddit is a strongly cohesive group of sub-forums. When millions of users are driven to subreddits by reddit's choice of defaults, when popular subreddits are driven more traffic by r/all, when linking to other subreddits is a part of the culture, etc, all of this points to a strong coupling. It is disingenuous to claim that subreddits are completely independent and thus one cannot claim reddit as a whole bears responsibility for its content. Yes, they are independently managed, but there are a thousand other ways in which the strong cohesiveness is created. This cohesiveness creates responsibility among the larger subreddits to the userbase as a whole. Unfortunately the rules of moderation don't recognize this and as a result you end up with essentially arbitrary users who have had massive amounts of power dumped in their lap through accident of timing (rather than proof that they have the capacity to cultivate a large community). Unilateral decisions are made and their userbase (that they had little to no hand in creating) is forced to suffer as a result. Reddit really needs to rethink how massive subreddits that are/were defaults are moderated.
diogenescynic 13y ago
The moderators of Reddit take bribes.
- zacharycohn 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure the competition aspect has nothing to do with it. The moderators are unpaid volunteers, and Conde Naste has historically been incredibly hands off.
  - diogenescynic 13y ago
    The way the moderators leverage their position is by blocking content, not promoting it. If you hang around Reddit for long enough you'll see the moderators are the weakpoint as they can arbitrarily remove a story that most users are engaging in and make up an arbirary reason for it. There should be some kind of process the moderators have to go through or at least be voted in.
    - zacharycohn 13y ago
      That is true if you want to maintain the direction the subreddit is going. But democracy doesn't work when the masses don't know what's best for them. I believe that nevitably, without strong leadership, a subreddit (or insert any other internet community) will fall to image macros, memes, and internet raging. And that's because the masses upvote that content. But maybe an appointed moderator is what the subreddit needs, even if that mod isn't what it deserves.
- MRSallee 13y ago
  Evidence?
- volune 13y ago
  Reddit was spun off from Conde Nast quite a while ago and is a individual company. So not only are you making claims without evidence, they are plainly false.
  - 13y ago
danso 13y ago
Site-wide bans really rub me the wrong way. It implies a very simpleminded, idealistic understanding of organizations, as if all the writers and editors were a single hivemind -- as one spams, so do all the others. But the reality is more complicated than that, and while there are pragmatic considerations at play here, it's sad that there can't be a more granular-kind of ban, because each of these organizations put out some fine works of journalism, no matter what your gut reaction to the organization may be. Huffington Post, for example, won a Pulitzer last year for an extremely important (and still undercovered) topic: http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2012-National-Reporting http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2012-National-Reporting As far as HN goes, I wish HN could remove the site-level ban on Buzzfeed. Yes, mercilessly flag the shit out of its "23 Gifs about some Linkbait topic" articles, but they've been investing some money and resources into serious and original work. They have a longform section: http://www.buzzfeed.com/longform http://www.buzzfeed.com/longform They were the employer of Michael Hastings, the late-investigative reporter who died in a LA car wreck: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/michael-hastings-rolling-stone-contributor-dead-at-33-20130618 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/michael-hastings-r... And they recently hired one of my former colleagues, Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Schoofs, from ProPublica, to lead a new investigative team: http://jimromenesko.com/2013/10/21/mark-schoofs-leaves-propublica-to-head-buzzfeeds-investigative-unit/ http://jimromenesko.com/2013/10/21/mark-schoofs-leaves-propu... Then again, you could always argue that BuzzFeed's (and their linkbaity peers) good contributions aren't yet enough to outweigh the burden of modding their junk.
dageshi 13y ago
I would hazard a guess that it's more to do with the reaction of the commentators on r/politics to the articles these sites put out than anything else. Here on HN there are certain topics which tend to descend into pointless roundabout arguments and typically these tend to disappear off the front page fairly quickly. I'm guessing the mods got fed up with policing the same tedious/endless/toxic conversation and decided to kill off the major causes of them.
austenallred 13y ago
It seems quite ironic that this was written in Slate - I have seen just as many examples of bad journalism from Slate as from HuffPo/Mother Jones.
revscat 13y ago
This episode exposes a weakness in Reddit's overall structure, namely the opaque process whereby moderators are chosen. When domains are banned completely and against the wishes of the broader community it shows that Reddit's otherwise democratic processes can be fairly autocratic. The solution is a system where users can vote on who is a moderator. Between this and /r/worldnews Banning of Russia Today it is apparent that moderators have far too much power over the content of various subteddit's. Such voting could be limited to once per month, and two users who have a certain karma. There might even be an opportunity for a competitor site which does this very thing. Edit: The number of moderators should be a function of the number of subscribers as well.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- staringispolite 13y ago
  Users do vote: with their subreddit subscriptions (also PMs to moderators, and/or text submissions complaining about policy). I don't get the sense that this was unwanted from the community either. I don't know if this makes me biased, but I for one welcome fewer low-quality, link-bait, and/or recycled-story articles.
  - ferdo 13y ago
    > "I don't get the sense that this was unwanted from the community either." It was unwanted. The mods' announcement was even downvoted to zero by the community: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1pedlv/concerning_recent_changes_in_allowed_domains/ http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1pedlv/concerning_...
    - shitlord 13y ago
      But the users are idiots. The users on the thread you linked think that filtering out shitty new sources is some kind of right-wing conspiracy. r/politics is the opposite of a place you would visit for reasonable political discussion. It was so bad that it got dropped from the list of default subs, and even before that, people created accounts just to filter out stuff from that sub. The sub needed quality control for a really long time, and now it's finally getting it.
awt 13y ago
This is great. Salon has just gotten so bad. The series of editorials bashing Sam Harris were really over the top. Every day I see articles on Salon that are so biased it's just hard to stomach.
ferdo 13y ago
I suspect that reddit's management is looking for the kind of audience that's perfectly content just staring at a TV screen no matter what's on. This appears to be an active push to chase away people with higher functioning intellects. The market for dumb is huge. I can't say that I blame them for going after it, but I won't be one of their users anymore.

79 points by wikiburner 13y ago

antr 13y ago

The second to last comment says it all: This sort of violates the point of Reddit, right? Users are supposed to upvote material they find interesting, rather than have editors sequester content they find relevant.

cryptoz 13y ago
Indeed. cryptoz boycotts r/politics for editor-censored user submissions
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
zokier 13y ago
Disagree. The point of Reddit (imho) is to function as a platform for communities, each with their own rules. Some have stricter moderation, some are laxer.
- scarlson 13y ago
  I've been a redditor from the beginning, and have always agreed with the sentiment that communities should reflect their userbase. The issue comes when in the case of /r/politics moderators do something outside what the majority sentiment is. Change comes slow, it's far easier to get a mod removed than it is to get 3 million subscribers to move to a new subreddit with a "better" moderator team.
  - 001sky 13y ago
    But this is just political hijacking of the subreddit. I don't see why anyone at reddit should support this as a strategy. What you will end up with is a bunch of astro-turfed sub-reddits. The greas roots will make r/_x_ popular, then some PR firm will get someone to "a "better" moderator team" so that their clients can hijack _million users.
abat 13y ago
Only if Reddit.com blocked the sites. Each subreddit is its own privately moderated world. Some subreddits only allow self-posts, which means you can't post third party sites at all. Some subreddits only allow scholarly journals. Some subreddits filter based on political bias. Everyone chooses what subreddits they want to subscribe to, and if you want a different set of rules you can create your own subreddit.
- a3voices 13y ago
  That's true but r/politics is a default subreddit.
  - rthomas6 13y ago
    Actually not anymore. They recently updated the defaults, imho for the better. /r/atheism is off the default list, too.
  - ohwait8 13y ago
    Not as of a few months ago. It was removed from default for... obvious... reasons.
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    Not only has r/politics not been a default for a while now (at least a couple months, I think), it wouldn't matter if it was -- default subs are still not managed by the Reddit admins. How a sub is run obviously can influence which ones are chosen as defaults, but being a default doesn't itself change anything.
- baddox 13y ago
  Admins and members of subreddit tend to have a slightly confused idea about what a subreddit it supposed to be. On one hand, the fundamental idea is clearly that the quality of articles is determined by the aggregate of users' votes. On the other hand, many people still appeal to some individual or objective measure of "quality," and insist that admin moderation is necessary to maintain this level of quality.
pfraze 13y ago
The subreddits have always enforced culture through mod rules. The (often-cited) example of this is /r/AskHistorians, which is very stringently moderated.
sliverstorm 13y ago
Many subs on Reddit have embraced the fact that upvotes as the sole metric do not always create the most valuable/enjoyable sub. Other forms of curation can often improve the quality of the sub, and quality content is the primary reason anyone goes to an aggregator.

zokier 13y ago

At least it's just one sub-reddit this time instead of the site-wide ban they implemented last time.

redthrowaway 13y ago
The site-wide ban was for gaming the system and buying votes, not "low-quality journalism". That was the admins telling content sites to fuck off and stop hiring voting rings to cheat reddit. This is the mods of /r/politics (ostensibly) trying to increase quality on their sub.
- sanskritabelt 13y ago
  Which sites were banned on grounds of reporting about reddit protecting that "violentacrez" pervert?
  - redthrowaway 13y ago
    None. Some subreddits banned Gawker, not for "reporting about reddit protecting" anyone, which they didn't, but for posting what was then only his suspected real name and encouraging an internet-wide witch hunt which resulted in death threats, the man in question being fired and his marriage ending, etc. You might claim that that's what he deserves for moderating subreddits whose content you don't like (I'd disagree), but it could easily have been a case of mistaken identity and an innocent man's life would have been ruined. That's why witch hunts are bad, and that's why Gawker was banned from those subreddits whose moderators felt, as I do, that encouraging that kind of behaviour is immensely irresponsible and should not be tolerated.

tptacek 13y ago

It would be funny if the standards for /r/politics stories became more rigorous than the one for HN.

zokier 13y ago
Seems to me that the standards became more arbitrary than rigorous.
- bstrand 13y ago
  The ban list changes are pretty clearly ideologically driven, not arbitrary.
  - 001sky 13y ago
    That's not clear. The list is rather more interesting than what you (or the article's author) suggest. Its also rooted in logic (arguable, but laid out ex-ante). Some of these are also autobanned on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6657066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6657066). [eg] The following is a list of major domains that have been banned by the moderators of /r/Politics and listed here in the interest of transparency: aattp.org alternet.org amazon.com americanthinker.com avaaz.org b4in.info beforeitsnews.com blacklistednews.com borderlessnewsandviews.com breitbart.com breitbartunmasked.com change.org citypaper.com constitutioncampaign.org courthousenews.com crooksandliars.com dailybail.com dailycaller.com dailycurrant.com dailykos.com dailypaul.com democraticunderground.com deviantart.com dirtyuglypolitics.wordpress.com drudgereport.com eclectablog.com ecominoes.com facebook.com funnyordie.com Gawker and all affiliates generalstrikeusa.wordpress.com heavy.com heritage.org hotair.com huffingtonpost.com inagist.com indiegogo.com informationliberation.com infowars.com isidewith.com lifenews.com linkedin.com littlegreenfootballs.com mediamatters.org minx.cc motherjones.com myspace.com nation.foxnews.com nationalmemo.com nationalreport.net nationalreview.com nationsmith.com Newsbusters.org newsmakeup.wordpress.com newsvine.com newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/ njspin.com omegle.com pensitoreview.com petitions.whitehouse.gov photographyisnotacrime.com policymic.com politicalwire.com politicususa.com politilady.com pollcode.com powerlineblog.com prisonplanet.com rawstory.com reason.com redd.it reddit.com redgage.com rightwingwatch.org salon.com signon.org smirkingchimp.com techdirt.com thebackbencher.co.uk theblaze.com thedailybanter.com thegatewaypundit.com theonion.com thepetitionsite.com therightscoop.com thinkprogress.org townhall.com truth-out.org twitchy.com twitter.com upworthy.com vice.com voiceblaze.com wallstreetonparade.com weaselzippers.us wikimedia.org wikipedia.org wnd.com*

dragontamer 13y ago

I thought Reddit was full of Libertarians who were against censorship?

a3voices 13y ago
They're mostly against government censorship.
- baddox 13y ago
  Or really, any censorship applied to property by anyone other than the property owner. Reddit (specifically, the physical servers running the site) is private property, so any rules Reddit makes (or allows the moderators of its subreddits to make) probably won't be considered objectionable censorship. If the government, or any external entity, forcefully censored Reddit, that would likely be considered objectionable censorship. Compare it to the government forcefully preventing a physical newspaper from publishing certain things, versus the editor of a newspaper choosing which articles to publish.
- dragontamer 13y ago
  I thought they were for freedom of speech. There was a giant shitstorm when Jailbait was shutdown, with many cries towards "unfair censorship". But when censorship agrees with their biased views, all of a sudden its okay.
rthomas6 13y ago
I think you're confusing Reddit with a site called "Hacker News".
- BrainInAJar 13y ago
  Nah, that site is just a circle-jerk for self important silicon valley startup types. "How I made a million dollars with my idiotic website idea and you absolutely will also!"

minimax 13y ago

It's good to see Slate standing up for its competitors.

ilamont 13y ago

Does HN do this for certain source that have been flagged too many times, or otherwise considered low-quality?

wikiburner 13y ago
My impression is pg has banned some sources manually: Huffingtonpost.com - for linkbait blogspam. theonion.com and buzzfeed.com - off topic entertainment. gawker.com and its other domains - general sleaziness. pg might want to consider unbanning Buzzfeed, though. In the past year or two they've added tons of reporters who do pretty decent long form articles you would expect to see on Slate, The Atlantic, or Forbes, and the risk that HNers will upvote "The 50 Greatest Cat Photos of All Time" is probably pretty low.
- te_chris 13y ago
  You can hate Gawker all you want, but I find they consistently produce great prose that I enjoy reading and often find educational and valuable. Not all the time, but you can't write off the entire org just because of defamer. Sure it's snarky, I appreciate that sometimes though, especially when you're writing about something as pathetically retarded as the US govt. shutdown or Sean Parker's wedding and his ridiculous defences hence.
jamesbritt 13y ago
There are some domains that, should submit a URL for them, are auto-instantly marked [dead].

minimaxir 13y ago

It's worth noting that /r/politics is only the 13th biggest subreddit, by number of submissions. It's a relative drop in the water. http://i.imgur.com/9FLPgsW.png http://i.imgur.com/9FLPgsW.png https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjPFdCURhZvddGQzd0dIQkk1aXRRRkxEY3g0ZmQtWGc&usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjPFdCURhZvddGQ...

CaveTech 13y ago
Number of submissions is a bad metric, number of readers per submission is much more telling. /r/politic only has 13k readers, but /r/politics has over 3 million. Blocking these domains will have a relatively large impact as far as referrals from reddit are concerned. How big of an impact to their viewership in general, it's too hard to say.
- minimaxir 13y ago
  Incoroporating number of subscribers may be skewed though since the default subreddits auto-subscribe, and even active users might not opt-out.
sliverstorm 13y ago
Your concept of "a drop in the bucket" and mine are a little different, it seems.
jamesaguilar 13y ago
As a League player, I am amazed and gratified that it is more popular that /r/politics. Not that I hate politics, I just love League.
- scarlson 13y ago
  If you were to list the hobbies of reddit users, gaming is going to trump political involvement. reddit is a social platform first, it makes sense that the 20 year old crowd that populates it will have subscribed more to their hobbies over broader general topics. See /r/television vs /r/breakingbad, /r/gameofthrones, /r/thewalkingdead, etc.

xacaxulu 13y ago

Good. The Puffington Host is nothing but linkbait.

charlesism 13y ago
I like that the columns get progressively less intelligent from left to right. If you ever finish the entire third column, call an ambulance immediately. You may have suffered a stroke.

christopherryan 13y ago

GOSPEL ARTIST POSES NUDE! Evon Latrail is the author of a children's book "When Mommy Went to Heaven". She wrote/recorded a few songs; "Lord Bless My Enemies" and "It Is Time" happens to be two of the titles. She even has a song entitled, "Can't You See (Abortion Is Murder). She went Pro-life after having a abortion! Really???? Now here is a photo of her posing in chocolate as a "Swamp Girl". The word Hypocrite is floating around somewhere. This story has made front page news in the local paper. How can this so called "Gospel Artist" be a role model is she's posing news? For more on this story.....Go to Google or YouTube and search, Evon Latrail.

thisiswrong 13y ago

Reddit has been compromised. Just look at what happened on r/worldnews with the u/douglasmacarther and the RT censorship thing, or how the NSA-Israel Memorandum submissions were purposely 'buried' http://rt.com/news/rt-reddit-ban-censorship-169/ http://rt.com/news/rt-reddit-ban-censorship-169/

stefantalpalaru 13y ago

It's not Reddit's "politics section" but one of the many subreddits - independently managed forums, each with its own policy. This distinction should be obvious to anyone familiar with the platform and a more accurate title would be "the /r/politics subreddit bans..."

invalidOrTaken 13y ago
Absolutely. Reddit is a platform more than a monolithic entity. There are portions of that site that consider each other mortal enemies.
hackinthebochs 13y ago
People love to say this, but a critical look at the structure of reddit shows how little this argument matches reality. Reddit is a strongly cohesive group of sub-forums. When millions of users are driven to subreddits by reddit's choice of defaults, when popular subreddits are driven more traffic by r/all, when linking to other subreddits is a part of the culture, etc, all of this points to a strong coupling. It is disingenuous to claim that subreddits are completely independent and thus one cannot claim reddit as a whole bears responsibility for its content. Yes, they are independently managed, but there are a thousand other ways in which the strong cohesiveness is created. This cohesiveness creates responsibility among the larger subreddits to the userbase as a whole. Unfortunately the rules of moderation don't recognize this and as a result you end up with essentially arbitrary users who have had massive amounts of power dumped in their lap through accident of timing (rather than proof that they have the capacity to cultivate a large community). Unilateral decisions are made and their userbase (that they had little to no hand in creating) is forced to suffer as a result. Reddit really needs to rethink how massive subreddits that are/were defaults are moderated.

diogenescynic 13y ago

The moderators of Reddit take bribes.

zacharycohn 13y ago
I'm pretty sure the competition aspect has nothing to do with it. The moderators are unpaid volunteers, and Conde Naste has historically been incredibly hands off.
- diogenescynic 13y ago
  The way the moderators leverage their position is by blocking content, not promoting it. If you hang around Reddit for long enough you'll see the moderators are the weakpoint as they can arbitrarily remove a story that most users are engaging in and make up an arbirary reason for it. There should be some kind of process the moderators have to go through or at least be voted in.
  - zacharycohn 13y ago
    That is true if you want to maintain the direction the subreddit is going. But democracy doesn't work when the masses don't know what's best for them. I believe that nevitably, without strong leadership, a subreddit (or insert any other internet community) will fall to image macros, memes, and internet raging. And that's because the masses upvote that content. But maybe an appointed moderator is what the subreddit needs, even if that mod isn't what it deserves.
MRSallee 13y ago
Evidence?
volune 13y ago
Reddit was spun off from Conde Nast quite a while ago and is a individual company. So not only are you making claims without evidence, they are plainly false.
- 13y ago

danso 13y ago

Site-wide bans really rub me the wrong way. It implies a very simpleminded, idealistic understanding of organizations, as if all the writers and editors were a single hivemind -- as one spams, so do all the others. But the reality is more complicated than that, and while there are pragmatic considerations at play here, it's sad that there can't be a more granular-kind of ban, because each of these organizations put out some fine works of journalism, no matter what your gut reaction to the organization may be. Huffington Post, for example, won a Pulitzer last year for an extremely important (and still undercovered) topic: http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2012-National-Reporting http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2012-National-Reporting As far as HN goes, I wish HN could remove the site-level ban on Buzzfeed. Yes, mercilessly flag the shit out of its "23 Gifs about some Linkbait topic" articles, but they've been investing some money and resources into serious and original work. They have a longform section: http://www.buzzfeed.com/longform http://www.buzzfeed.com/longform They were the employer of Michael Hastings, the late-investigative reporter who died in a LA car wreck: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/michael-hastings-rolling-stone-contributor-dead-at-33-20130618 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/michael-hastings-r... And they recently hired one of my former colleagues, Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Schoofs, from ProPublica, to lead a new investigative team: http://jimromenesko.com/2013/10/21/mark-schoofs-leaves-propublica-to-head-buzzfeeds-investigative-unit/ http://jimromenesko.com/2013/10/21/mark-schoofs-leaves-propu... Then again, you could always argue that BuzzFeed's (and their linkbaity peers) good contributions aren't yet enough to outweigh the burden of modding their junk.

dageshi 13y ago

I would hazard a guess that it's more to do with the reaction of the commentators on r/politics to the articles these sites put out than anything else. Here on HN there are certain topics which tend to descend into pointless roundabout arguments and typically these tend to disappear off the front page fairly quickly. I'm guessing the mods got fed up with policing the same tedious/endless/toxic conversation and decided to kill off the major causes of them.

austenallred 13y ago

It seems quite ironic that this was written in Slate - I have seen just as many examples of bad journalism from Slate as from HuffPo/Mother Jones.

revscat 13y ago

This episode exposes a weakness in Reddit's overall structure, namely the opaque process whereby moderators are chosen. When domains are banned completely and against the wishes of the broader community it shows that Reddit's otherwise democratic processes can be fairly autocratic. The solution is a system where users can vote on who is a moderator. Between this and /r/worldnews Banning of Russia Today it is apparent that moderators have far too much power over the content of various subteddit's. Such voting could be limited to once per month, and two users who have a certain karma. There might even be an opportunity for a competitor site which does this very thing. Edit: The number of moderators should be a function of the number of subscribers as well.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
staringispolite 13y ago
Users do vote: with their subreddit subscriptions (also PMs to moderators, and/or text submissions complaining about policy). I don't get the sense that this was unwanted from the community either. I don't know if this makes me biased, but I for one welcome fewer low-quality, link-bait, and/or recycled-story articles.
- ferdo 13y ago
  > "I don't get the sense that this was unwanted from the community either." It was unwanted. The mods' announcement was even downvoted to zero by the community: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1pedlv/concerning_recent_changes_in_allowed_domains/ http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1pedlv/concerning_...
  - shitlord 13y ago
    But the users are idiots. The users on the thread you linked think that filtering out shitty new sources is some kind of right-wing conspiracy. r/politics is the opposite of a place you would visit for reasonable political discussion. It was so bad that it got dropped from the list of default subs, and even before that, people created accounts just to filter out stuff from that sub. The sub needed quality control for a really long time, and now it's finally getting it.

awt 13y ago

This is great. Salon has just gotten so bad. The series of editorials bashing Sam Harris were really over the top. Every day I see articles on Salon that are so biased it's just hard to stomach.

ferdo 13y ago

I suspect that reddit's management is looking for the kind of audience that's perfectly content just staring at a TV screen no matter what's on. This appears to be an active push to chase away people with higher functioning intellects. The market for dumb is huge. I can't say that I blame them for going after it, but I won't be one of their users anymore.