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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. Wh

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.
- bigdubs 13y ago
  why can't the users and "knights of /new" sort that out? isn't that what feedback is for (and what makes sites like reddit great)
- minimaxir 13y ago
  A proper filter must have an infinitesimal chance of a false positive. A blanket-ban on the Tesla keyword will ban many legitimate articles.
- danford 13y ago
  Still not an excuse to ban the word 'tesla'. On a side note, isn't it a bit Orwellian to know for a fact that your government is participating in mass spying, but the largest tech forum on the internet isn't talking about it at all, and now you've come to find out that key words relating to the spying scandal have been censored on said forum? Not only that, but if you go and read the comments in the sticky over in r/technology, it seems the main problem mods are still in power (at least according to the community) and the mods that are being called out seem to have no comments and have actually removed posts calling them out. I assume the main mod accounts have been bought and sold over and over and the current owners are trying desperately to pass it on to the highest bidder. Kind of makes you wonder if banning terms like "National Security Agency" and "Snowden" was an honest mistake (HA!) or if they're just trying to pass it off as one now.
  - Phlarp 13y ago
    On a side note, isn't it a bit Orwellian to know for a fact that your government is participating in mass spying, but the largest tech forum on the internet isn't talking about it at all and now you've come to find out that key words like "NSA" and "Snowden" have an automatic downvote penalty applied to them on said forum? Not only that, but if you go and read the comments from moderators on Hacker News, it seems the main problem is mods either ignore criticism of this policy or spew boilerplate non-denials about automated rank penalties for submissions with more comments than votes or a high number of comments in a small period of time indicating flame wars.
Houshalter 13y ago
Hacker News does the exact same thing. Character strings like 'nsa' and possibly 'bitcoin' are heavily penalized by HN's algorithm. As are links to many sites. It also seems like it was more a case of the head mods being lazy and not wanting to bring on more moderators. So they tried to automate moderation with AutoModerator.

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.

bigdubs 13y ago
why can't the users and "knights of /new" sort that out? isn't that what feedback is for (and what makes sites like reddit great)
minimaxir 13y ago
A proper filter must have an infinitesimal chance of a false positive. A blanket-ban on the Tesla keyword will ban many legitimate articles.
danford 13y ago
Still not an excuse to ban the word 'tesla'. On a side note, isn't it a bit Orwellian to know for a fact that your government is participating in mass spying, but the largest tech forum on the internet isn't talking about it at all, and now you've come to find out that key words relating to the spying scandal have been censored on said forum? Not only that, but if you go and read the comments in the sticky over in r/technology, it seems the main problem mods are still in power (at least according to the community) and the mods that are being called out seem to have no comments and have actually removed posts calling them out. I assume the main mod accounts have been bought and sold over and over and the current owners are trying desperately to pass it on to the highest bidder. Kind of makes you wonder if banning terms like "National Security Agency" and "Snowden" was an honest mistake (HA!) or if they're just trying to pass it off as one now.
- Phlarp 13y ago
  On a side note, isn't it a bit Orwellian to know for a fact that your government is participating in mass spying, but the largest tech forum on the internet isn't talking about it at all and now you've come to find out that key words like "NSA" and "Snowden" have an automatic downvote penalty applied to them on said forum? Not only that, but if you go and read the comments from moderators on Hacker News, it seems the main problem is mods either ignore criticism of this policy or spew boilerplate non-denials about automated rank penalties for submissions with more comments than votes or a high number of comments in a small period of time indicating flame wars.

Houshalter 13y ago

Hacker News does the exact same thing. Character strings like 'nsa' and possibly 'bitcoin' are heavily penalized by HN's algorithm. As are links to many sites. It also seems like it was more a case of the head mods being lazy and not wanting to bring on more moderators. So they tried to automate moderation with AutoModerator.