8 ms·

Reddit downgrades technology community after censorship

80 points by richardwigley 13y ago

dvcc 13y ago
Censorship or decent moderation?
- RickS 13y ago
  Lazy moderation. An auto-delete filter for major news keywords is a poor way to run a news subreddit. They're throwing the baby out with the bath water.
  - dvcc 13y ago
    Automoderator wiki was posted here: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/wiki/automoderator http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/wiki/automoderator. Honestly, it does not look too bad for what was being filtered out.
  - baby 13y ago
    You have no idea how hard it is to moderate a subreddit that is a default one. This is not "lazy" moderation. This is to avoid all the spam in /new
    - sillysaurus3 13y ago
      Deleting all stories containing the word "Tesla" is lazy moderation. That policy was in place for at least some period of time.
      - baby 13y ago
        I think that spending a day trying to moderate /r/technology would make a lot of people understand "why". Tesla got relevant suddenly with the apple news, then with the texas law, but then it was just spams to get the interest around Tesla going on. Technology moves quickly and I can see why moderators wanted the discussion not to focus on ONE thing for too long.
        sillysaurus3 13y ago
        I mean, you can sympathize with their bad behavior, but ultimately they were de-listed for it. Their bad behavior was a mistake.
        SSLy 13y ago
        They were also unlisted for having (as you can see) too small moderation team. This is said to be fault of /u/maxwellhill and /u/anutensil. (They are one of the oldest mods -- they have whole power).
- baby 13y ago
  I've seen the posts back then, there was a list of words that were not really relevant to /r/technology OR not about "new" technology. two big examples : bitcoin, snowden there were a lot of words on that list but those were the most discussed. Bitcoin was relevant and it got plenty of article. I'm not surprised that the admin of /r/technology wanted to avoid all the spam and diminish the discussions on that topic after 2 years of bitcoin topics and a huge /r/bitcoin subreddit (which I'm part of). Snowden? Well it was talked about there a lot. Now is definitely not the time to keep talking about him on /r/technology. There are plenty of other relevant subreddits for that. I'm sure that they would have lifted the ban if something really relevant would have come around. Also, a lot of people tend to mix "censorship" and "moderation". I agree with PARENT, this is moderation. You cannot expect "total free speech" in a private subreddit on a private website. Shouting "censorship" at everything you don't agree with is just not relevant. And if we go down this road, the best subreddits are the ones that are the most moderated. /r/askscience and /r/games. No trolls, no racism.
- trendynoise 13y ago
  Do you consider banning any link that has one of these keywords in the title decent moderation (aside from breaking)? previous r/technology automatic filter list: Restore the Fourth NSA Comcast Anonymous Time Warner CISPA SOPA TPP Swartz FCC Flappy net neutrality Bitcoin GCHQ Snowden spying Clapper Congress Obama Feinstein Wyden anti-piracy FBI CIA DEA Condoleezza EFF ACLU National Security Agency Dogecoin breaking
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
prezjordan 13y ago
r/technology was an absolute disaster before this anyway.
drzaiusapelord 13y ago
This is great news. I was very surprised that the term "Tesla" was being blocked. Later, submitters were using "Telsa" to beat the auto-deleting mod script. When pressed on this subject the mods claimed that Tesla wasn't technology worthy and should go into a car subreddit, yet endless articles about how wonderful the new iphone is don't get shoved into /r/apple. It looks like a couple moderators decided that their pet fanboyism would define the sub. Reddit had a choice of intervening and getting rid of those mods or delisting them from the front page. I think delisting them was the right move. If you want to have your own personal subreddit running on your own personal bias, then go for it, but don't expect to be a default anymore. I find the mandatory default system to be more than a little broken. Instead, at account creation, show me all the defaults as checked checkboxes and the most popular non-defaults below, unchecked, and let me choose.
- 33W 13y ago
  The default status isn't as powerful with registered users as with unregistered lurkers. Hitting the main site for the first time will bring one to the defaults, and (likely) influences who joins or does not join the site.
- Deusdies 13y ago
  I wonder at what point did Tesla stop being Nikola Tesla, and started being nothing more than a car?
  - Crito 13y ago
    In the context of a news aggregator? Pretty much as soon as the company was founded and named. Nikola Tesla has been dead for decades, there isn't much news about him these days.
- bsdetector 13y ago
  And then Tesla fanboys voted up spam pages like this: http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-how-tesla-pushes-auto-technology-20140321,0,7268712.story http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-how-tesla-pus... Which reinforce the notion that, maybe the moderators banned Tesla over the quality of the submissions after all not some personal bias.
ebbv 13y ago
This is just one of basically countless examples of how the Reddit model of moderation does not scale. Moderators are chosen by other moderators, and the subs become fiefdoms.
alrs 13y ago
We lost USENET, and it has been replaced by a website owned by Conde Nast. We had an open and decentralized discussion system that was globally replicated. We had scores of NNTP clients to choose from. Now it is 2014 and I am lamenting what was lost by editing a post on a webpage. This is a catastrophe.
- im3w1l 13y ago
  Check freenet message system. It is open, decentralized and uses a web of trust for spam filtering.
  - vonuebelgarten 13y ago
    Or Retroshare
- ToastyMallows 13y ago
  Reddit isn't owned by Conde Nast[0]. [0]: http://www.redditblog.com/2013/08/reddit-myth-busters_6.html http://www.redditblog.com/2013/08/reddit-myth-busters_6.html (See myth 4)
  - sillysaurus3 13y ago
    The best characterization might be to say that reddit is a “part-sibling-once-removed” of Condé Nast. What does this even mean? Someone ultimately has power over Reddit, and it can't be Reddit itself since they sold. So who is it? The blog doesn't answer that.
    - ToastyMallows 13y ago
      > Then in 2012, reddit was spun out into a re-incorporated independent entity with its own board and control of its own finances, hiring a new CEO and bringing back co-founder Alexis Ohanian to serve on the board. Right now, Advance Publications[0], which owns Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder of an independent Reddit. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
belorn 13y ago
Do not HN also use a very similar list? I know they don't get deleted, but I remember their position decaying faster compared to threads without those keywords.
- baby 13y ago
  I know a lot of domains get deleted directly. HN uses a heavy moderation, way heavier than reddit, and it works.
  - falcolas 13y ago
    For some definition of works. I come here from hckrnews.com, which displays all submissions in chronological order, and it surprises me how much very interesting stuff gains 20-30 upvotes and still falls off the front page before older content with similar upvote counts. Of course, it's ycombinator's web site, so it's their choice, but a lot of interesting articles and discussion are just... lost.
    - baby 13y ago
      When you have one post every minute in /new it is inevitable that a lot of interesting articles will get lost.
      - falcolas 13y ago
        I'm not talking about /new, I'm talking about articles which received a non-trivial number of upvotes (enough to land on the front page in the first place), which are pushed off the front page while an older story with an identical, or lower, number of upvotes remains on the front page. Whatever the mechanism, good posts and discussions are being lost.
    - dang 13y ago
      Can you provide some examples of such very interesting stuff?
  - Houshalter 12y ago
ThrustVectoring 13y ago
That headline is a good example of a garden path sentence. I thought reddit was making a technical change to their website for a few seconds.
minimaxir 13y ago
Reddit had another moderator scandal that happened son after the /r/technology incident: On Reddit, it was recently discovered that a moderator on r/hearthstone was upvoting links to a certain Hearthstone fansite and flagging all others (even when the other sites have better info). That site was owned by gaming network Curse, and it was discovered that said moderator was employed by Curse. It wasn't pretty. (more information here: http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23cf60/blizzard_game_subreddits_are_run_by_curse_network/ http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23cf60/blizz... ) The "first-dibs" system of selecting moderator for subreddits may not be the best system nowadays.
- dublinben 13y ago
  What's the alternative?
  - minimaxir 13y ago
    There are a few alternatives: 1) Have each subreddit democractically elect/delect its moderators after N period of time. 2) Make moderation log public to provide more accountability to moderator actions 3) Pay the moderators, either from the Reddit business itself, profit-sharing from ads on the subreddit, or through community donations. All 3 would disincentivize the moderators from behaving badly. However, the methods may not scale easily.
    - dublinben 13y ago
      I think moderator elections are a bad idea. First, participation will never be very high. Second, there is no way to make the elections reliable. Public moderation logs have been tried in the past, and nobody bothers to read them. They're an important move towards transparency, but they are powerless without user engagement. Paying moderators might sound fair, but it would lead to all sorts of perverse incentives. How would the revenue be split? What is to stop top moderators from removing others in order to keep more money for themselves?
drcross 13y ago
This is slightly off topic but I spend a lot of time on /r/bitcoin (I have done for about two years now). Over the past 60 days there has been a sustained attack by some group or entity, I am sure of this. The subtilty of attack is really astonishing, I never thought that I would witness something with coordination that seems on a scale of a nation state. These users are employing advanced techniques to trip up and stall discussion, causing in-fighting, promote other agendas (really gently) and just generally destroy the group. In times like this we need heavy moderation to stop it in it's tracks until everything clears up.
- DanBC 13y ago
  A small number of dedicated coordinated trolls can destroy a forum, especially when users do not have the discipline to ignore the trolls. alt.syntax.tactical was really good at this (at the beginning). Even a shitty group like snuh good cause havoc if it took off on Reddit.
- FroshKiller 13y ago
  This sounds really paranoid. Do you have some concrete evidence? What does "coordination on a scale of a nation state" even look like with respect to a subreddit?
  - etherael 13y ago
    I think he's onto something also. There will be some heavily upvoted story that soaks a lot of attention and the top comment will be some throwaway nonsense to promote the "Bitcoin is not serious/is just a scam/this is all bullshit" angle, any reasonable comments will be downvoted in righteous fury, any suggestions that something untoward is going on even more so. This will go on for about a day, then a couple days later the exact same topic will come up again, and the response will be completely normal and the shill brigade obviously absent. See this for example, shill brigade in effect; http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/22zl2w/bitcoin_among_list_of_keywords_that_earn_an/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/22zl2w/bitcoin_amon... And a day later, same subject, shill brigade absent; http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/23495x/reddit_mods_are_censoring_dozens_of_words_from/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/23495x/reddit_mods_... This is not the only time I have seen this happen there, just the most obvious instance.
juvoni 13y ago
Joe Rogan recently had alexis ohanian (4.11) and then David Seaman (4.16) on his podcast and David Seaman brought up the fact that the technology subreddit was using a bot to censor certain keywords. With over a million listeners listening to that podcast I think that may have had some influence in getting more people aware and eventually leading to this decision. http://podcasts.joerogan.net/ http://podcasts.joerogan.net/
giulianob 13y ago
The mods of the default subreddits are basically handed millions of users but can a lot of the times run the subreddits however they see fit. I would rather let the site moderate itself instead of relying on automated mod scripts and often highly biased people.
- baby 13y ago
  > I would rather let the site moderate itself This is how it moderate itself, by having admins moderating their communities. What do you propose?
  - giulianob 13y ago
    Moderators should keep obvious spam, explicit behavior, vote manipulation, etc... out but not to decide which content gets posted. Otherwise, let the members of the community judge content I mean that's the whole point of the site after all. You basically have to read an article before posting on a subreddit because who knows what the moderators have decided is allowed on that subreddit. For example, look at /r/games. They allow "quality" gaming content only but the definition of that is extremely subjective and the list of things you aren't allowed to post is huge ( http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/wiki/rules http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/wiki/rules ). Now maybe its possible to be less strict w/ non default subreddits and make the default ones adhere to a global set of rules instead of letting each default subreddit pick its own rules. They are handed millions of users so they should be less subjective imo.
    - Houshalter 12y ago
      I agree with you, however /r/Games was explicitly created to be heavily moderated. The original /r/gaming isn't moderated nearly as much and a lot of people dislike it.
baby 13y ago
I see this as a weird failure of reddit. You have creators of a subreddit that want to move discussions in a certain way. As I understood they didn't want "old news", "political" or "spammy" topics. They get a huge amount of posts in /new as they're now a default subreddit. One of the efficient thing to do to narrow the job is to ban keywords. I really don't blame them, some defaults subreddits don't get moderated at all (looking at you /r/funny). And as I said in another comments, the community that I find the most interesting are the ones which are the most heavily moderated : /r/askscience, /r/games and HN. Less trolls, less spam, less racism.
- gdulli 13y ago
  I agree that one of the major failures with reddit is lack of moderation. (Highly inconsistent moderation, at best.) The problem is, it can't be fixed because of the attitude of so many of its users that moderation equals censorship. Appealing to youth is a double-edged sword.
- tfgg 13y ago
  > And as I said in another comments, the community that I find the most interesting are the ones which are the most heavily moderated : /r/askscience, /r/games and HN. Less trolls, less spam, less racism. I agree, and it just reminds me of how Something Awful is probably the best quality community I've been a member of, and that's mostly down to its $5 joining fee and fascist mods. It's just a pity that that didn't scale and 4chan and later reddit ate its lunch.
- danford 13y ago
  Reddits designed to moderate its self. This has it's downfalls, but for the most part things that aren't related to a subreddit don't make it to the top unless the users want it to. IMO Snowden and the NSA is heavily related to technology and banning those terms was one of the dumbest moves they could have made. The reason they get upvoted is because the community cares about that kind of stuff. Plus the comments in a snowden thread on r/technology actually discuss the technological aspects of it while r/politics commenters focus on other aspects. Isn't it kind of Orwellian to know your government is spying on you, yet go to the biggest tech forum on the net and no one is even talking about it?
Kiro 13y ago
Did they revoke the filter? I would love a tech news site where all those things are banned.
Pxtl 13y ago
Funny how getting reddit to take action in their most toxic communities had traditionally been a teeth-pulling affair, but censorship actually gets them to move fast.
mintplant 13y ago
It was less the "censorship" and more the complete collapse of the mod team that led to /r/technology's removal from the default set. See the SubredditDrama recap [1] for more information about the situation there, and the leaked notice from one of the reddit admins [2] which gives the reasoning behind the action. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23dyes/recap_the_failed_moderation_and_gaming_of/ http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23dyes/recap... [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23aunv/rtechnology_removed_from_the_default_list_of_subs/cgv6dlx http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23aunv/rtech...
nikolak 13y ago
Without better moderator tools to manage large subreddits they didn't really have an option other than remove all threads seeing how majority of bitcoin, tesla etc related stories was not really for /r/technology. Even for that they had to use 3rd party tool. Just because Tesla Motors is more tech oriented company than its competitors that does not mean every mention of teslas should be posted in /r/technology - and pretty much everything was posted. Same goes for bitcoin related stories. It also depends on personal interpretation of word "technology", I'm sure that pretty much any topic can be somehow be tied to technology sector but that does not, and should not, mean that every news article about a topic should be posted in /r/technology. On the other hand the vote brigading that happens from related subreddits is, even though it is against reddit rules, ignored by reddit administrators...
- danford 13y ago
  >they didn't really have an option other than remove all threads Aw dang, really? No other options except to remove 100% of threads containing the words "snowden" and "national security agency" and "tesla"? It's too bad the community has no way of moderating it's self by somehow giving submissions "scores" to rank them. Then only threads that a majority of people like would make it to the top. If you think about it, a system like this would allow for stories that only partly relate to technology, but are still hot topics that tech enthusiasts want to talk about, to make it to the top.
  - minimaxir 13y ago
    > Then only threads that a majority of people like would make it to the top. That's the problem with social media aggregators. Sometimes the hive mind isn't the best judge of quality. (this happens on all aggregators, including Hacker News itself; that's why having the flag option be so potent in killing threads is necessary).
  - nikolak 13y ago
    >Aw dang, really? No other options except to remove 100% of threads containing the words "snowden" and "national security agency" and "tesla"? No. Either allow the posts and remove them once the discussion start and then deal with 100 "MUH FREEDOM OF SPEECH, !!CENSORSHIP!!, MY PRECIOUS KARMA!" threads or remove them as soon as they're posted. >Then only threads that a majority of people like would make it to the top That's part of the problem. People want to see thread like this - you'd see "NSA spying people" thread upvoted in EVERY SINGLE default subreddit if it was posted and allowed by moderators. Votes are horrible for determining what kind of content should or shouldn't be allowed. Especially for default subreddits since majority of people vote from frontpage and are not familiar with subreddit rules, or don't even notice which subreddit it is. People don't even read more than titles! You'll often see threads marked with "false information" flair, or people pointing out in the comments how the whole story is fake/wrong/etc. Those threads continue to gain upvotes after it has been proved to be wrong information. Do you really think that people would notice the subreddit and/or rules regarding that submission? >If you think about it, a system like this would allow for stories that only partly relate to technology, but are still hot topics that tech enthusiasts want to talk about, to make it to the top. Nope, read above. It would allow for stories people like (upvote) to make it to the top. And plus you have threads linked in other subreddits, IRC etc. that skews up votes too. ____ tl;dr: votes work in theory but fail miserably in practice, especially when dealing with large amount of voters.
bane 13y ago
I think the real problem is that Reddit's core mod tools are pretty woeful and age-old problems haven't been fixed. /r/modhelp is basically full of the same problems and issues that mods have been having for years. Some examples: * Want to run your sub without downvotes? Sorry (you can hide the button via css, but people can still hotkey it) * Have a sockpuppet downvote brigade screwing up your sub? Message the reddit admins and hope they bother reading your message and doing anything about it. Because you have no idea who's doing it and can't really do anything about it. Current best advice is (this is not a joke) "wait for them to get bored". * Somebody was granted admin access, kicked the rest of the mods off and has turned the sub to private (and the sub creator is incommunicado?) Tough luck. * Want to delete a sub I created? Too bad. * Fuzzed numbers, votes, subscribers, current people on the sub, etc. Some mods don't want it in their sub. Too bad. * want to ban some URLs from your sub? try and use the spam filter, but good luck otherwise. and on and on. I think practically what the sub's admins wanted to do was to just push down submissions on certain topics so a wider variety of things floated up, this happens on here all the time. But Reddit's tool set to do the same is pretty ham fisted. It's like changing the battery on a watch using a mallet. Given the choice of using the mallet or not, they decided to go ahead and use it, I disagree with this and they're suffering the consequences of it.
- DanBC 13y ago
  The only times I had to contact the admins (sex pest approaching children; sub linked to from other sub causing massive brigading) I got quick responses that took action. The sex pest was banned from Reddit; his sock puppets were banned. (I hope, but do not know, that the admins reported him to one of the law enforcement agencies. He was pretty clearly unpleasant and definitely breaking US laws). I had worse experience when I tried to report stuff to Tinychat, who appear to ignore their own TOS.
  - arbitrage 13y ago
    You got quick action because the admins faced a legal and monetary penalty for not acting. And reddit has gotten massive bad press in the past for attracting kiddy fiddlers. If their necks aren't on the line, casual neglect and indifference seems to be the overriding M.O. from the reddit admins.
dfa0 13y ago
It is breath-taking how much Reddit has changed since 2006. That said, I thought the whole idea of Digg/Reddit/Hacker News is that the community moderates itself via voting. Mods should only have the power to ban users who abuse the system. That is it. The content moderation is the sole domain of the users.
ZenPro 13y ago
This makes me realise now why my AMA was denied and trolled into oblivion. I had started a successful AMA (being former Military Intelligence/Palantir) regarding the realities of the role. Regardless of ID, Letters of Service Commendation and scanned evidence of having served in Afghanistan/Iraq the mods would not have it and refused to respond to my emails. Within an hour it was trolled to obscurity. Almost all of the terms on the filter list published in this article were contained in my AMA. Ha, you live and learn.
cratermoon 13y ago
What does that mean, 'censorship'? http://xkcd.com/1357/ http://xkcd.com/1357/

80 points by richardwigley 13y ago

dvcc 13y ago

Censorship or decent moderation?

RickS 13y ago
Lazy moderation. An auto-delete filter for major news keywords is a poor way to run a news subreddit. They're throwing the baby out with the bath water.
- dvcc 13y ago
  Automoderator wiki was posted here: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/wiki/automoderator http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/wiki/automoderator. Honestly, it does not look too bad for what was being filtered out.
- baby 13y ago
  You have no idea how hard it is to moderate a subreddit that is a default one. This is not "lazy" moderation. This is to avoid all the spam in /new
  - sillysaurus3 13y ago
    Deleting all stories containing the word "Tesla" is lazy moderation. That policy was in place for at least some period of time.
    - baby 13y ago
      I think that spending a day trying to moderate /r/technology would make a lot of people understand "why". Tesla got relevant suddenly with the apple news, then with the texas law, but then it was just spams to get the interest around Tesla going on. Technology moves quickly and I can see why moderators wanted the discussion not to focus on ONE thing for too long.
      - sillysaurus3 13y ago
        I mean, you can sympathize with their bad behavior, but ultimately they were de-listed for it. Their bad behavior was a mistake.
        SSLy 13y ago
        They were also unlisted for having (as you can see) too small moderation team. This is said to be fault of /u/maxwellhill and /u/anutensil. (They are one of the oldest mods -- they have whole power).
baby 13y ago
I've seen the posts back then, there was a list of words that were not really relevant to /r/technology OR not about "new" technology. two big examples : bitcoin, snowden there were a lot of words on that list but those were the most discussed. Bitcoin was relevant and it got plenty of article. I'm not surprised that the admin of /r/technology wanted to avoid all the spam and diminish the discussions on that topic after 2 years of bitcoin topics and a huge /r/bitcoin subreddit (which I'm part of). Snowden? Well it was talked about there a lot. Now is definitely not the time to keep talking about him on /r/technology. There are plenty of other relevant subreddits for that. I'm sure that they would have lifted the ban if something really relevant would have come around. Also, a lot of people tend to mix "censorship" and "moderation". I agree with PARENT, this is moderation. You cannot expect "total free speech" in a private subreddit on a private website. Shouting "censorship" at everything you don't agree with is just not relevant. And if we go down this road, the best subreddits are the ones that are the most moderated. /r/askscience and /r/games. No trolls, no racism.
trendynoise 13y ago
Do you consider banning any link that has one of these keywords in the title decent moderation (aside from breaking)? previous r/technology automatic filter list: Restore the Fourth NSA Comcast Anonymous Time Warner CISPA SOPA TPP Swartz FCC Flappy net neutrality Bitcoin GCHQ Snowden spying Clapper Congress Obama Feinstein Wyden anti-piracy FBI CIA DEA Condoleezza EFF ACLU National Security Agency Dogecoin breaking

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

prezjordan 13y ago

r/technology was an absolute disaster before this anyway.

drzaiusapelord 13y ago

This is great news. I was very surprised that the term "Tesla" was being blocked. Later, submitters were using "Telsa" to beat the auto-deleting mod script. When pressed on this subject the mods claimed that Tesla wasn't technology worthy and should go into a car subreddit, yet endless articles about how wonderful the new iphone is don't get shoved into /r/apple. It looks like a couple moderators decided that their pet fanboyism would define the sub. Reddit had a choice of intervening and getting rid of those mods or delisting them from the front page. I think delisting them was the right move. If you want to have your own personal subreddit running on your own personal bias, then go for it, but don't expect to be a default anymore. I find the mandatory default system to be more than a little broken. Instead, at account creation, show me all the defaults as checked checkboxes and the most popular non-defaults below, unchecked, and let me choose.

33W 13y ago
The default status isn't as powerful with registered users as with unregistered lurkers. Hitting the main site for the first time will bring one to the defaults, and (likely) influences who joins or does not join the site.
Deusdies 13y ago
I wonder at what point did Tesla stop being Nikola Tesla, and started being nothing more than a car?
- Crito 13y ago
  In the context of a news aggregator? Pretty much as soon as the company was founded and named. Nikola Tesla has been dead for decades, there isn't much news about him these days.
bsdetector 13y ago
And then Tesla fanboys voted up spam pages like this: http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-how-tesla-pushes-auto-technology-20140321,0,7268712.story http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-how-tesla-pus... Which reinforce the notion that, maybe the moderators banned Tesla over the quality of the submissions after all not some personal bias.

ebbv 13y ago

This is just one of basically countless examples of how the Reddit model of moderation does not scale. Moderators are chosen by other moderators, and the subs become fiefdoms.

alrs 13y ago

We lost USENET, and it has been replaced by a website owned by Conde Nast. We had an open and decentralized discussion system that was globally replicated. We had scores of NNTP clients to choose from. Now it is 2014 and I am lamenting what was lost by editing a post on a webpage. This is a catastrophe.

im3w1l 13y ago
Check freenet message system. It is open, decentralized and uses a web of trust for spam filtering.
- vonuebelgarten 13y ago
  Or Retroshare
ToastyMallows 13y ago
Reddit isn't owned by Conde Nast[0]. [0]: http://www.redditblog.com/2013/08/reddit-myth-busters_6.html http://www.redditblog.com/2013/08/reddit-myth-busters_6.html (See myth 4)
- sillysaurus3 13y ago
  The best characterization might be to say that reddit is a “part-sibling-once-removed” of Condé Nast. What does this even mean? Someone ultimately has power over Reddit, and it can't be Reddit itself since they sold. So who is it? The blog doesn't answer that.
  - ToastyMallows 13y ago
    > Then in 2012, reddit was spun out into a re-incorporated independent entity with its own board and control of its own finances, hiring a new CEO and bringing back co-founder Alexis Ohanian to serve on the board. Right now, Advance Publications[0], which owns Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder of an independent Reddit. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications

belorn 13y ago

Do not HN also use a very similar list? I know they don't get deleted, but I remember their position decaying faster compared to threads without those keywords.

baby 13y ago
I know a lot of domains get deleted directly. HN uses a heavy moderation, way heavier than reddit, and it works.
- falcolas 13y ago
  For some definition of works. I come here from hckrnews.com, which displays all submissions in chronological order, and it surprises me how much very interesting stuff gains 20-30 upvotes and still falls off the front page before older content with similar upvote counts. Of course, it's ycombinator's web site, so it's their choice, but a lot of interesting articles and discussion are just... lost.
  - baby 13y ago
    When you have one post every minute in /new it is inevitable that a lot of interesting articles will get lost.
    - falcolas 13y ago
      I'm not talking about /new, I'm talking about articles which received a non-trivial number of upvotes (enough to land on the front page in the first place), which are pushed off the front page while an older story with an identical, or lower, number of upvotes remains on the front page. Whatever the mechanism, good posts and discussions are being lost.
  - dang 13y ago
    Can you provide some examples of such very interesting stuff?
- Houshalter 12y ago

ThrustVectoring 13y ago

That headline is a good example of a garden path sentence. I thought reddit was making a technical change to their website for a few seconds.

minimaxir 13y ago

Reddit had another moderator scandal that happened son after the /r/technology incident: On Reddit, it was recently discovered that a moderator on r/hearthstone was upvoting links to a certain Hearthstone fansite and flagging all others (even when the other sites have better info). That site was owned by gaming network Curse, and it was discovered that said moderator was employed by Curse. It wasn't pretty. (more information here: http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23cf60/blizzard_game_subreddits_are_run_by_curse_network/ http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23cf60/blizz... ) The "first-dibs" system of selecting moderator for subreddits may not be the best system nowadays.

dublinben 13y ago
What's the alternative?
- minimaxir 13y ago
  There are a few alternatives: 1) Have each subreddit democractically elect/delect its moderators after N period of time. 2) Make moderation log public to provide more accountability to moderator actions 3) Pay the moderators, either from the Reddit business itself, profit-sharing from ads on the subreddit, or through community donations. All 3 would disincentivize the moderators from behaving badly. However, the methods may not scale easily.
  - dublinben 13y ago
    I think moderator elections are a bad idea. First, participation will never be very high. Second, there is no way to make the elections reliable. Public moderation logs have been tried in the past, and nobody bothers to read them. They're an important move towards transparency, but they are powerless without user engagement. Paying moderators might sound fair, but it would lead to all sorts of perverse incentives. How would the revenue be split? What is to stop top moderators from removing others in order to keep more money for themselves?

drcross 13y ago

This is slightly off topic but I spend a lot of time on /r/bitcoin (I have done for about two years now). Over the past 60 days there has been a sustained attack by some group or entity, I am sure of this. The subtilty of attack is really astonishing, I never thought that I would witness something with coordination that seems on a scale of a nation state. These users are employing advanced techniques to trip up and stall discussion, causing in-fighting, promote other agendas (really gently) and just generally destroy the group. In times like this we need heavy moderation to stop it in it's tracks until everything clears up.

DanBC 13y ago
A small number of dedicated coordinated trolls can destroy a forum, especially when users do not have the discipline to ignore the trolls. alt.syntax.tactical was really good at this (at the beginning). Even a shitty group like snuh good cause havoc if it took off on Reddit.
FroshKiller 13y ago
This sounds really paranoid. Do you have some concrete evidence? What does "coordination on a scale of a nation state" even look like with respect to a subreddit?
- etherael 13y ago
  I think he's onto something also. There will be some heavily upvoted story that soaks a lot of attention and the top comment will be some throwaway nonsense to promote the "Bitcoin is not serious/is just a scam/this is all bullshit" angle, any reasonable comments will be downvoted in righteous fury, any suggestions that something untoward is going on even more so. This will go on for about a day, then a couple days later the exact same topic will come up again, and the response will be completely normal and the shill brigade obviously absent. See this for example, shill brigade in effect; http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/22zl2w/bitcoin_among_list_of_keywords_that_earn_an/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/22zl2w/bitcoin_amon... And a day later, same subject, shill brigade absent; http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/23495x/reddit_mods_are_censoring_dozens_of_words_from/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/23495x/reddit_mods_... This is not the only time I have seen this happen there, just the most obvious instance.

juvoni 13y ago

Joe Rogan recently had alexis ohanian (4.11) and then David Seaman (4.16) on his podcast and David Seaman brought up the fact that the technology subreddit was using a bot to censor certain keywords. With over a million listeners listening to that podcast I think that may have had some influence in getting more people aware and eventually leading to this decision. http://podcasts.joerogan.net/ http://podcasts.joerogan.net/

giulianob 13y ago

The mods of the default subreddits are basically handed millions of users but can a lot of the times run the subreddits however they see fit. I would rather let the site moderate itself instead of relying on automated mod scripts and often highly biased people.

baby 13y ago
> I would rather let the site moderate itself This is how it moderate itself, by having admins moderating their communities. What do you propose?
- giulianob 13y ago
  Moderators should keep obvious spam, explicit behavior, vote manipulation, etc... out but not to decide which content gets posted. Otherwise, let the members of the community judge content I mean that's the whole point of the site after all. You basically have to read an article before posting on a subreddit because who knows what the moderators have decided is allowed on that subreddit. For example, look at /r/games. They allow "quality" gaming content only but the definition of that is extremely subjective and the list of things you aren't allowed to post is huge ( http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/wiki/rules http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/wiki/rules ). Now maybe its possible to be less strict w/ non default subreddits and make the default ones adhere to a global set of rules instead of letting each default subreddit pick its own rules. They are handed millions of users so they should be less subjective imo.
  - Houshalter 12y ago
    I agree with you, however /r/Games was explicitly created to be heavily moderated. The original /r/gaming isn't moderated nearly as much and a lot of people dislike it.

baby 13y ago

I see this as a weird failure of reddit. You have creators of a subreddit that want to move discussions in a certain way. As I understood they didn't want "old news", "political" or "spammy" topics. They get a huge amount of posts in /new as they're now a default subreddit. One of the efficient thing to do to narrow the job is to ban keywords. I really don't blame them, some defaults subreddits don't get moderated at all (looking at you /r/funny). And as I said in another comments, the community that I find the most interesting are the ones which are the most heavily moderated : /r/askscience, /r/games and HN. Less trolls, less spam, less racism.

gdulli 13y ago
I agree that one of the major failures with reddit is lack of moderation. (Highly inconsistent moderation, at best.) The problem is, it can't be fixed because of the attitude of so many of its users that moderation equals censorship. Appealing to youth is a double-edged sword.
tfgg 13y ago
> And as I said in another comments, the community that I find the most interesting are the ones which are the most heavily moderated : /r/askscience, /r/games and HN. Less trolls, less spam, less racism. I agree, and it just reminds me of how Something Awful is probably the best quality community I've been a member of, and that's mostly down to its $5 joining fee and fascist mods. It's just a pity that that didn't scale and 4chan and later reddit ate its lunch.
danford 13y ago
Reddits designed to moderate its self. This has it's downfalls, but for the most part things that aren't related to a subreddit don't make it to the top unless the users want it to. IMO Snowden and the NSA is heavily related to technology and banning those terms was one of the dumbest moves they could have made. The reason they get upvoted is because the community cares about that kind of stuff. Plus the comments in a snowden thread on r/technology actually discuss the technological aspects of it while r/politics commenters focus on other aspects. Isn't it kind of Orwellian to know your government is spying on you, yet go to the biggest tech forum on the net and no one is even talking about it?

Kiro 13y ago

Did they revoke the filter? I would love a tech news site where all those things are banned.

Pxtl 13y ago

Funny how getting reddit to take action in their most toxic communities had traditionally been a teeth-pulling affair, but censorship actually gets them to move fast.

mintplant 13y ago

It was less the "censorship" and more the complete collapse of the mod team that led to /r/technology's removal from the default set. See the SubredditDrama recap [1] for more information about the situation there, and the leaked notice from one of the reddit admins [2] which gives the reasoning behind the action. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23dyes/recap_the_failed_moderation_and_gaming_of/ http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23dyes/recap... [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23aunv/rtechnology_removed_from_the_default_list_of_subs/cgv6dlx http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23aunv/rtech...

nikolak 13y ago

Without better moderator tools to manage large subreddits they didn't really have an option other than remove all threads seeing how majority of bitcoin, tesla etc related stories was not really for /r/technology. Even for that they had to use 3rd party tool. Just because Tesla Motors is more tech oriented company than its competitors that does not mean every mention of teslas should be posted in /r/technology - and pretty much everything was posted. Same goes for bitcoin related stories. It also depends on personal interpretation of word "technology", I'm sure that pretty much any topic can be somehow be tied to technology sector but that does not, and should not, mean that every news article about a topic should be posted in /r/technology. On the other hand the vote brigading that happens from related subreddits is, even though it is against reddit rules, ignored by reddit administrators...

danford 13y ago
>they didn't really have an option other than remove all threads Aw dang, really? No other options except to remove 100% of threads containing the words "snowden" and "national security agency" and "tesla"? It's too bad the community has no way of moderating it's self by somehow giving submissions "scores" to rank them. Then only threads that a majority of people like would make it to the top. If you think about it, a system like this would allow for stories that only partly relate to technology, but are still hot topics that tech enthusiasts want to talk about, to make it to the top.
- minimaxir 13y ago
  > Then only threads that a majority of people like would make it to the top. That's the problem with social media aggregators. Sometimes the hive mind isn't the best judge of quality. (this happens on all aggregators, including Hacker News itself; that's why having the flag option be so potent in killing threads is necessary).
- nikolak 13y ago
  >Aw dang, really? No other options except to remove 100% of threads containing the words "snowden" and "national security agency" and "tesla"? No. Either allow the posts and remove them once the discussion start and then deal with 100 "MUH FREEDOM OF SPEECH, !!CENSORSHIP!!, MY PRECIOUS KARMA!" threads or remove them as soon as they're posted. >Then only threads that a majority of people like would make it to the top That's part of the problem. People want to see thread like this - you'd see "NSA spying people" thread upvoted in EVERY SINGLE default subreddit if it was posted and allowed by moderators. Votes are horrible for determining what kind of content should or shouldn't be allowed. Especially for default subreddits since majority of people vote from frontpage and are not familiar with subreddit rules, or don't even notice which subreddit it is. People don't even read more than titles! You'll often see threads marked with "false information" flair, or people pointing out in the comments how the whole story is fake/wrong/etc. Those threads continue to gain upvotes after it has been proved to be wrong information. Do you really think that people would notice the subreddit and/or rules regarding that submission? >If you think about it, a system like this would allow for stories that only partly relate to technology, but are still hot topics that tech enthusiasts want to talk about, to make it to the top. Nope, read above. It would allow for stories people like (upvote) to make it to the top. And plus you have threads linked in other subreddits, IRC etc. that skews up votes too. ____ tl;dr: votes work in theory but fail miserably in practice, especially when dealing with large amount of voters.

bane 13y ago

I think the real problem is that Reddit's core mod tools are pretty woeful and age-old problems haven't been fixed. /r/modhelp is basically full of the same problems and issues that mods have been having for years. Some examples: * Want to run your sub without downvotes? Sorry (you can hide the button via css, but people can still hotkey it) * Have a sockpuppet downvote brigade screwing up your sub? Message the reddit admins and hope they bother reading your message and doing anything about it. Because you have no idea who's doing it and can't really do anything about it. Current best advice is (this is not a joke) "wait for them to get bored". * Somebody was granted admin access, kicked the rest of the mods off and has turned the sub to private (and the sub creator is incommunicado?) Tough luck. * Want to delete a sub I created? Too bad. * Fuzzed numbers, votes, subscribers, current people on the sub, etc. Some mods don't want it in their sub. Too bad. * want to ban some URLs from your sub? try and use the spam filter, but good luck otherwise. and on and on. I think practically what the sub's admins wanted to do was to just push down submissions on certain topics so a wider variety of things floated up, this happens on here all the time. But Reddit's tool set to do the same is pretty ham fisted. It's like changing the battery on a watch using a mallet. Given the choice of using the mallet or not, they decided to go ahead and use it, I disagree with this and they're suffering the consequences of it.

DanBC 13y ago
The only times I had to contact the admins (sex pest approaching children; sub linked to from other sub causing massive brigading) I got quick responses that took action. The sex pest was banned from Reddit; his sock puppets were banned. (I hope, but do not know, that the admins reported him to one of the law enforcement agencies. He was pretty clearly unpleasant and definitely breaking US laws). I had worse experience when I tried to report stuff to Tinychat, who appear to ignore their own TOS.
- arbitrage 13y ago
  You got quick action because the admins faced a legal and monetary penalty for not acting. And reddit has gotten massive bad press in the past for attracting kiddy fiddlers. If their necks aren't on the line, casual neglect and indifference seems to be the overriding M.O. from the reddit admins.

dfa0 13y ago

It is breath-taking how much Reddit has changed since 2006. That said, I thought the whole idea of Digg/Reddit/Hacker News is that the community moderates itself via voting. Mods should only have the power to ban users who abuse the system. That is it. The content moderation is the sole domain of the users.

ZenPro 13y ago

This makes me realise now why my AMA was denied and trolled into oblivion. I had started a successful AMA (being former Military Intelligence/Palantir) regarding the realities of the role. Regardless of ID, Letters of Service Commendation and scanned evidence of having served in Afghanistan/Iraq the mods would not have it and refused to respond to my emails. Within an hour it was trolled to obscurity. Almost all of the terms on the filter list published in this article were contained in my AMA. Ha, you live and learn.

cratermoon 13y ago

What does that mean, 'censorship'? http://xkcd.com/1357/ http://xkcd.com/1357/