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No, because it leads to an incoherent policy. Reddit's original policy, for better or for worse, was "anything that isn't illegal." They had to add one or two

No, because it leads to an incoherent policy. Reddit's original policy, for better or for worse, was "anything that isn't illegal." They had to add one or two things to that over the years but they stuck to that. Reddit's policy then became, unofficially, "trust us to get rid of the crap." That sounds fine, but it has problems: 1. it's not the original policy. HN has a "trust us" policy and it works great but it's always had that. HN has never been billed as "come say what you want." Changing the policy is a bait and switch to the old community. 2. It was never admitted to. While switching to the new policy, the official line was that the old policy was still in place. 3. It requires positive social capital. Remember Philip Greenspun's infamous article describing the VCs at ArsDigita as "a group of nursery school children who've stolen a Boeing 747 and are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off"[1]? That's what the reddit admin has been like for months, and it leads to negative social capital. Some guy was shadowbanned but didn't know it for years, patiently posting in subreddits all along. The CEO didn't use the company's only product. If you've ever experienced a dysfunctional internet community -- and who hasn't -- you recognize the patterns of decisions made in a hurry to stop whomever is immediately yelling at you and then trying to justify it with whatever they can cobble together afterwards, and that explanation will be completely unsuitable for the next crisis which will require yet another made up explanation. [1] http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/ http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/

aiiane 11y ago
Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good isn't great either.
- danielweber 11y ago
  This isn't responsive to anything I said. It's a response to a different comment that says "they should only get rid of all toxic communities, not just some of them." Building a community requires trust from the community members, especially the community members who are volunteers donating their time to help the long-term health of it. If the people in charge consistently act like they don't know what the fuck they are doing the volunteers quickly feel put upon. The hardest part of managing a user community is dealing with all the users.
mcphage 11y ago
I agree that they're changing their policy, and that it has been—and always was going to be—a painful process. But the failures of their original policy get splashed across the Internet every few months. So they can either stick their head in the sand, pretend it's not the problem it always has been, and watch their community get turned into the world's largest bastion of hate speech, or they can fix their mistakes and clean house. Are they doing a good job? Not particularly. I don't think they really know how. But they'll figure it out eventually. Hopefully meanwhile not fucking everything else up, too.

aiiane 11y ago

Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good isn't great either.

danielweber 11y ago
This isn't responsive to anything I said. It's a response to a different comment that says "they should only get rid of all toxic communities, not just some of them." Building a community requires trust from the community members, especially the community members who are volunteers donating their time to help the long-term health of it. If the people in charge consistently act like they don't know what the fuck they are doing the volunteers quickly feel put upon. The hardest part of managing a user community is dealing with all the users.

mcphage 11y ago

I agree that they're changing their policy, and that it has been—and always was going to be—a painful process. But the failures of their original policy get splashed across the Internet every few months. So they can either stick their head in the sand, pretend it's not the problem it always has been, and watch their community get turned into the world's largest bastion of hate speech, or they can fix their mistakes and clean house. Are they doing a good job? Not particularly. I don't think they really know how. But they'll figure it out eventually. Hopefully meanwhile not fucking everything else up, too.