6 ms·

Mod/admin censorship, government manipulation (out of Eglin AFB most likely), and corporate advertising/shilling are pretty blatantly huge in reddit right now,

Mod/admin censorship, government manipulation (out of Eglin AFB most likely), and corporate advertising/shilling are pretty blatantly huge in reddit right now, with many users openly looking for alternative websites. The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR. One of the founders (Alexis) has a PR firm, Antique Jetpack, which is on record [1] as cooperating with Stratfor of wikileaks fame. I can't quite see how the two are unconnected. A couple of years ago, one of the admins there tacitly admitted that he was under a National Security letter complete with gag order to give up user information. A few months ago, reddit changed its voting system in order to completely obfuscate user detection of large scale vote manipulation. The community was unanimously against this change, and has been overruled. I don't see a great future for reddit, honestly. I'll continue to use it until whoaverse or another alternative is populated enough. [1]: https://search.wikileaks.org/gifiles/?viewemailid=277352 https://search.wikileaks.org/gifiles/?viewemailid=277352

throwawayornot 12y ago
HN Gold to you, good sir!
icpmacdo 12y ago
The thing is there need to be something like Reddit that is not controlled at all by a company or corporation but completely by the users.
- T-hawk 12y ago
  Usenet is the closest thing we've got to that. Although it lacks any voting or ranking system to filter content. Whether that's a bug or feature is debatable.
  - ape4 12y ago
    Time for a hierarchy on reddit. I suggest: comp.* – computer-related discussions (comp.software, comp.sys.amiga) humanities.* – fine arts, literature, and philosophy (humanities.classics, humanities.design.misc) misc.* – miscellaneous topics (misc.education, misc.forsale, misc.kids) news.* – discussions and announcements about news (meaning Usenet, not current events) (news.groups, news.admin) rec.* – recreation and entertainment (rec.music, rec.arts.movies) sci.* – science related discussions (sci.psychology, sci.research) soc.* – social discussions (soc.college.org, soc.culture.african) talk.* – talk about various controversial topics (talk.religion, talk.politics, talk.origins)
AlwaysBCoding 12y ago
Perfect example is r/nfl censoring the Bill Simmons story last week.
IvyMike 12y ago
> The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR. They frame it quite differently--they broadly want to support legal free speech, even ugly free speech. They do so up until the point it would be impossible to do so without damaging the company. What do you prefer them to do?
- bane 12y ago
  Set a global policy and stick to it. When something gets banned it's because it violates the policy and not because of some half-hearted moralizing, while other clearly horrendous communities (like nightmare inducing) are allowed to sit around.
bane 12y ago
There's so much work being done on reddit right now that users don't like, don't won't or don't care about while things that users and mods need to effectively run their subs and enjoy the site (like better anti-spam measures, finer grained control on user behavior, disabled downvote buttons, logging of user activity so you can see who trolls are) aren't appearing. When prioritizing what gets developed, does anybody think that not showing up/down votes will bring more users or would an option to disable downvote buttons on a breast cancer survivor support group sub so that it feels like a safer place to share make more sense? Then there was that weird relationship with imgur (quickly becoming another major social network), where they were violating all kinds of content and promotion policies but were given free reign to do whatever and for the longest time nobody could figure out how imgur was funding itself. Oh, it turns out reddit is an investor in imgur. http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstrapping-imgur-raises-40-million-from-andreessen-reddit/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstr... Then there's all kinds of weird censorship policies, where entire groups of users and subs discussing bad things are killed but lists of subs involving rape, death, beastiality and various other horrible things sit around just fine. And you get half-assed explanations like https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_responsible_for_his_own_soul/ https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_r... Reddit's problem is that it doesn't really have a universal set of consistent policies, except for one, don't do anything to make us look bad in the press, everything else is random and capricious. I think lots of users would like to go somewhere else, but the network effect on reddit is effectively acting as a network lock-in. There's plenty of other aggregator sites, but they can't get traction with the 9000 lb gorilla in the room. It would be very hard for another digg->reddit shift to happen unless reddit does something on the order of the digg debacle to piss off the entire userbase.
alexis 12y ago
Seriously? I debunked that stratfor conspiracy with a deluge of sunlight - even getting top-voted comment on the r/conspiracy post http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1l4aiq/reddit_is_censoring_the_recent_wikileaks_leak/cbvovm4 http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1l4aiq/reddit_is...
- minimaxir 12y ago
  > even getting top-voted comment on the r/conspiracy post To be perfectly fair, any comment posted by a founder of Reddit would become a top-voted comment.
  - alexis 12y ago
    Totally false. Check my comment history: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/20r4o8/talking_bitcoin_and_rbitcoin_on_bloomberg_tv/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/20r4o8/talking_bitc...
    - anonbanker 12y ago
      Went through four pages, and didn't see a single zero-point comment. That's pretty rare for reddit.
      - Uhhrrr 12y ago
        Eh, there are plenty of 1's and 2's.
      - ryanmerket 12y ago
        Comments start at 1 point.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- ep103 12y ago
  The rest of his points are spot on, though, as is Bane's reply.
codexon 12y ago
Unfortunately I don't think most people will care. The vast majority of users don't comment, and few ever figure out if they or their submissions are shadow banned. If someone tries to make a replacement that fixes all the issues they will have to forgo whatever small amount of profitability there is in making a digg-like website. And it would probably have to be hosted in Iceland or some other obscure location.
smikims 12y ago
>Mod/admin censorship I'll admit that mods aren't always perfect, but they're (for the most part) regular users who are making communities the way they want to. I've very rarely seen people remove posts or ban users just to promote a particular agenda, and the ones that did were hated by their fellow mods. And I'd really like to see some good examples of admin censorship. The more common complaint I hear about the admins is that they're not active enough. >government manipulation I'd really like to see any sort of evidence whatsoever supporting this. >corporate advertising/shilling Again, I'd like to see some evidence. There have been a few high-profile cases like the Quickmeme guy, but I've never heard of large corporations wasting money on reddit. That's what Twitter and Facebook are for. >The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR. If you're talking about content, agreed. If you're talking about spammers and shilling, absolutely not. I think reddit is just about the best site of its kind around, in terms of software, users, and mods/admins when it comes to fighting spam. >One of the founders (Alexis) has a PR firm, Antique Jetpack, which is on record [1] as cooperating with Stratfor of wikileaks fame. I can't quite see how the two are unconnected. He released all of the emails he exchanged with them and it was never anything sinister.[1] >A couple of years ago, one of the admins there tacitly admitted that he was under a National Security letter complete with gag order to give up user information. Source? I don't remember this at all. >A few months ago, reddit changed its voting system in order to completely obfuscate user detection of large scale vote manipulation. The community was unanimously against this change, and has been overruled. No, the vote counts before, especially on popular posts, were almost completely wrong (intentionally). In exchange for taking away the individual vote counts, which were mostly bogus anyway, they made the "percent liked" statistic much more accurate. I dislike that they took away that ability completely from comments except for the "controversial" dagger, but I saw absolutely no sinister intent in what they were trying to do there. Your whole comment reads like you've been taking what /r/conspiracy and /r/undelete tell you at face value and have never actually dealt with the mods or admins on reddit, or even taken the time to understand how it really works. [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1l4aiq/reddit_is_censoring_the_recent_wikileaks_leak/cbvovm4 http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1l4aiq/reddit_is...
- rtx 12y ago
  Whenever Reddit fails it will because of the modding system. They should have a mod rotation policy.

throwawayornot 12y ago

HN Gold to you, good sir!

icpmacdo 12y ago

The thing is there need to be something like Reddit that is not controlled at all by a company or corporation but completely by the users.

T-hawk 12y ago
Usenet is the closest thing we've got to that. Although it lacks any voting or ranking system to filter content. Whether that's a bug or feature is debatable.
- ape4 12y ago
  Time for a hierarchy on reddit. I suggest: comp.* – computer-related discussions (comp.software, comp.sys.amiga) humanities.* – fine arts, literature, and philosophy (humanities.classics, humanities.design.misc) misc.* – miscellaneous topics (misc.education, misc.forsale, misc.kids) news.* – discussions and announcements about news (meaning Usenet, not current events) (news.groups, news.admin) rec.* – recreation and entertainment (rec.music, rec.arts.movies) sci.* – science related discussions (sci.psychology, sci.research) soc.* – social discussions (soc.college.org, soc.culture.african) talk.* – talk about various controversial topics (talk.religion, talk.politics, talk.origins)

AlwaysBCoding 12y ago

Perfect example is r/nfl censoring the Bill Simmons story last week.

IvyMike 12y ago

> The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR. They frame it quite differently--they broadly want to support legal free speech, even ugly free speech. They do so up until the point it would be impossible to do so without damaging the company. What do you prefer them to do?

bane 12y ago
Set a global policy and stick to it. When something gets banned it's because it violates the policy and not because of some half-hearted moralizing, while other clearly horrendous communities (like nightmare inducing) are allowed to sit around.

bane 12y ago

There's so much work being done on reddit right now that users don't like, don't won't or don't care about while things that users and mods need to effectively run their subs and enjoy the site (like better anti-spam measures, finer grained control on user behavior, disabled downvote buttons, logging of user activity so you can see who trolls are) aren't appearing. When prioritizing what gets developed, does anybody think that not showing up/down votes will bring more users or would an option to disable downvote buttons on a breast cancer survivor support group sub so that it feels like a safer place to share make more sense? Then there was that weird relationship with imgur (quickly becoming another major social network), where they were violating all kinds of content and promotion policies but were given free reign to do whatever and for the longest time nobody could figure out how imgur was funding itself. Oh, it turns out reddit is an investor in imgur. http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstrapping-imgur-raises-40-million-from-andreessen-reddit/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/after-five-years-of-bootstr... Then there's all kinds of weird censorship policies, where entire groups of users and subs discussing bad things are killed but lists of subs involving rape, death, beastiality and various other horrible things sit around just fine. And you get half-assed explanations like https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_responsible_for_his_own_soul/ https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_r... Reddit's problem is that it doesn't really have a universal set of consistent policies, except for one, don't do anything to make us look bad in the press, everything else is random and capricious. I think lots of users would like to go somewhere else, but the network effect on reddit is effectively acting as a network lock-in. There's plenty of other aggregator sites, but they can't get traction with the 9000 lb gorilla in the room. It would be very hard for another digg->reddit shift to happen unless reddit does something on the order of the digg debacle to piss off the entire userbase.

alexis 12y ago

Seriously? I debunked that stratfor conspiracy with a deluge of sunlight - even getting top-voted comment on the r/conspiracy post http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1l4aiq/reddit_is_censoring_the_recent_wikileaks_leak/cbvovm4 http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1l4aiq/reddit_is...

minimaxir 12y ago
> even getting top-voted comment on the r/conspiracy post To be perfectly fair, any comment posted by a founder of Reddit would become a top-voted comment.
- alexis 12y ago
  Totally false. Check my comment history: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/20r4o8/talking_bitcoin_and_rbitcoin_on_bloomberg_tv/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/20r4o8/talking_bitc...
  - anonbanker 12y ago
    Went through four pages, and didn't see a single zero-point comment. That's pretty rare for reddit.
    - Uhhrrr 12y ago
      Eh, there are plenty of 1's and 2's.
    - ryanmerket 12y ago
      Comments start at 1 point.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
ep103 12y ago
The rest of his points are spot on, though, as is Bane's reply.

codexon 12y ago

Unfortunately I don't think most people will care. The vast majority of users don't comment, and few ever figure out if they or their submissions are shadow banned. If someone tries to make a replacement that fixes all the issues they will have to forgo whatever small amount of profitability there is in making a digg-like website. And it would probably have to be hosted in Iceland or some other obscure location.

smikims 12y ago

>Mod/admin censorship I'll admit that mods aren't always perfect, but they're (for the most part) regular users who are making communities the way they want to. I've very rarely seen people remove posts or ban users just to promote a particular agenda, and the ones that did were hated by their fellow mods. And I'd really like to see some good examples of admin censorship. The more common complaint I hear about the admins is that they're not active enough. >government manipulation I'd really like to see any sort of evidence whatsoever supporting this. >corporate advertising/shilling Again, I'd like to see some evidence. There have been a few high-profile cases like the Quickmeme guy, but I've never heard of large corporations wasting money on reddit. That's what Twitter and Facebook are for. >The admin team has shown again and again that they're willing to tolerate anything until there's bad PR. If you're talking about content, agreed. If you're talking about spammers and shilling, absolutely not. I think reddit is just about the best site of its kind around, in terms of software, users, and mods/admins when it comes to fighting spam. >One of the founders (Alexis) has a PR firm, Antique Jetpack, which is on record [1] as cooperating with Stratfor of wikileaks fame. I can't quite see how the two are unconnected. He released all of the emails he exchanged with them and it was never anything sinister.[1] >A couple of years ago, one of the admins there tacitly admitted that he was under a National Security letter complete with gag order to give up user information. Source? I don't remember this at all. >A few months ago, reddit changed its voting system in order to completely obfuscate user detection of large scale vote manipulation. The community was unanimously against this change, and has been overruled. No, the vote counts before, especially on popular posts, were almost completely wrong (intentionally). In exchange for taking away the individual vote counts, which were mostly bogus anyway, they made the "percent liked" statistic much more accurate. I dislike that they took away that ability completely from comments except for the "controversial" dagger, but I saw absolutely no sinister intent in what they were trying to do there. Your whole comment reads like you've been taking what /r/conspiracy and /r/undelete tell you at face value and have never actually dealt with the mods or admins on reddit, or even taken the time to understand how it really works. [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1l4aiq/reddit_is_censoring_the_recent_wikileaks_leak/cbvovm4 http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1l4aiq/reddit_is...

rtx 12y ago
Whenever Reddit fails it will because of the modding system. They should have a mod rotation policy.