13 ms·

Let's talk content. AMA

117 points by ssclafani 11y ago

cag_ii 11y ago
Seems completely reasonable, maybe just a bit vague... The only surprising thing to me about this announcement is that they didn't already have such a policy in place.
comrh 11y ago
> Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people (these behaviors intimidate others into silence) > /r/coontown will be reclassified. The content there is offensive to many, but does not violate our current rules for banning. Seriously? /r/coontown isn't harassing, bulling, or abusing a group of people? This AMA didn't clarify anything at all, these were always the vague, sometimes enforced, rules.
- lazzlazzlazz 11y ago
  Having hateful beliefs is not in itself harassing, bullying, or abusing individuals.
  - comrh 11y ago
    Doesn't it abuse "groups of people" then?
    - DanBC 11y ago
      Apparently users of coontown say a lot of hateful but keep it to that subReddit. People in FPH said a lot of hateful stuff, but they didn't keep it to their sub, they posted it in other subs and other forums and other social networks.
      - slg 11y ago
        >Apparently users of coontown say a lot of hateful but keep it to that subReddit. I think that is naive. People aren't going to segment their personality like that. I subscribe to /r/baseball because I'm a baseball fan. If baseball comes up on HN or /r/dataisbeautiful, I will often chime in because I'm still a baseball fan. Is that going to be any different for someone who subscribes to /r/coontown? They likely subscribe because they are racists and enjoy reinforcing that belief. Do we expect those same racist users to suddenly keep those ideas to themselves when they stumble upon Jesse Jackson posting in /r/iama?
        DanBC 11y ago
        Users of coontown are racist, yes, and that's probably detectable in their posts. But users of coontown apparently[1] don't post threads linking to other subs and then visit that other sub with thousand of votes and dozens of comments. FPH did. [1] i've never read coontown so maybe I am totally wrong. Maybe they do brigade but they're so small it doesn't matter?
        slg 11y ago
        Coontown makes Reddit an attractive place for racists to congregate. As the overall userbase of Reddit starts to include more racists, it will inherently lead to racist users voting and posting comments on other posts. Coontown doesn't necessarily need to promote users spreading their ideas to other subreddits, its mere existence helps to accomplish the same.
        rory096 11y ago
        So you argue that reddit should exclude people, rather than content? What if a user is found being racist on another site, should they be banned from reddit?
        slg 11y ago
        That is a step beyond anything I have said. I am just pointing out that we shouldn't say "Coontown is fine because they keep to themselves." The fact is that people are attracted to Reddit based on content. You don't need to ban any people if you change the content to attract (and repel) different people. Reddit is now the most popular site on the Internet for racists to congregate. I think that is a problem for the whole site. Making the site less accommodating to racists would seem to be a good first step in addressing that issue. Reddit doesn't appear willing to do that.
    - leereeves 11y ago
      By that vague definition, doesn't /r/politics "abuse" Republicans?
      - Balgair 11y ago
        Bingo.
      - nl 11y ago
        I just took a look at the /r/politics front page. I don't think there is anything there a reasonable person would think was harassment, bullying or abuse. The closest is a claim that "right wing extremists have no qualms destroying people's lives", but I don't think that would pass the reasonable person test.
        leereeves 11y ago
        I agree. /r/politics shouldn't be banned for harassment, bullying, or abuse, but it could qualify under some definitions. For example, check out the comments on https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/3di5ty/ben_carson_will_attend_iowa_religious_liberties/ https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/3di5ty/ben_carson...
        nl 11y ago
        Can you point to a specific comment? There is one where he is called a religious nut, but that seems as bad as it gets. I don't see any problem. It isn't useful presenting hypothetical situations. If there is a problem on /r/politics then point to it.
        leereeves 11y ago
        Well, we have the usual insults about Republicans: racist, crazy, bigots, stupid. > The GOP can't run a black guy. The rift between voting Republican and maintaining baseless hatred for minorities would cause too many voters' heads to explode. > You're talking as though the republican electorate has a memory. > Can you all just admit that the entire republican party represents the ideals that this guy embraces (hating gay people) and what Donald Trump continues to spew (hating immigrants and hispanics). The specific baseless suggestion for this post: Ben Carson wants to kill gays (because he accepted an invitation). > Ben "Compassionate Execution" Carson > i.e. gays are like insects? Wait, best not to give Carson any ideas... A random suggestion that Ben Carson is a drug abuser: > I can't comprehend how a Doctor that graduated from John Hopkins and Yale turned out the way he did. > ... > unfettered access to the best drugs? Some random insults: > Bobby "Stupid Party" Jindal, Tom "Tehran" Cotton, James "Senator Snowball" Inhofe, Bobby "the exorcist" Jindal > Alas, it is true...Ben Carson does not have a neocortex. All fairly typical for a political discussion, I know. Still disgusting. (Speaking as a liberal-leaning independent.)
  - NeutronBoy 11y ago
    Well they banned a sub that was just fat-shaming, which was really what started this off. Shaming fat people is off limits, but hateful beliefs based on race is all a-ok?
    - DanBC 11y ago
      No they didn't; no it wasn't. FPH brigaded other subs - and this is something that has always been ban-worthy on Reddit. "No vote manipulation" was always one of the rules. FPH didn't just vote brigade; users would travel from FPH to other subs to harass people in those other subs, and FPH travelled to other sites and harassed people on those other sites. If they'd kept it all in FPH they'd have been fine. And there's a clue in all the other FPH-style subs that didn't get banned. Identical content (ideas), different behaviour.
      - NeutronBoy 11y ago
        > If they'd kept it all in FPH they'd have been fine. And there's a clue in all the other FPH-style subs that didn't get banned. Identical content (ideas), different behaviour. Ah ok, I didn't pick that nuance up. I browse Reddit a bit but stay away from the main subs, and try to ignore the drama as well. I still don't know my opinion on this issue - while I fully support 'free speech' (as it applies in this context), if companies don't want hateful speech and groups on their platforms then I think they should be able to remove them. But it's a slippery slope :/
        rory096 11y ago
        > I think they should be able to remove them. I've seen this argument come up a few times, but I don't think it's relevant. Of course reddit has the right to restrict whatever they want, but why should that affect your opinion on what they should restrict? (After all, that's what spez is asking for in his AMA.)
slg 11y ago
TL;DR - We will still allow almost all the same hateful stuff we have previously allowed, but we will do our best to hide it so people will stop complaining.
smegel 11y ago
Not exactly the change people were anticipating. In fact, I'm not sure there is a change.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  The biggest change is making subs that violate "common decency" opt-in. I predict they'll find a new phrase for that criteria as "common decency" pretty obviously would re-classify subs that are not what they're really after.
  - ForHackernews 11y ago
    "Unpalatable to advertisers"
    - res0nat0r 11y ago
      What's wrong with that honestly? I'm totally fine with them removing subs/content that exists only because assholes on the internet are anonymous. This whole nerd rage is from nothing in my opinion, they are telling the idiots to take it somewhere else, and the majority of the rest of us can read content on our subs and the staff doesn't have to waste time with the back and forth or lawyers that comes with questionable content.
      - ForHackernews 11y ago
        I didn't say there was anything wrong with it. I totally agree that they should ban racist/sexist/bigoted garbage. I do think it's kind of pathetic how transparently Reddit's owners only ever respond when they get bad press from the mainstream media, instead of showing some spine and real moral leadership. It's sad that Coke's ad buying team is what passes for a conscience today.
        res0nat0r 11y ago
        Spez is hosting an AMA right now with 15k comments, and 2k new ones since I last refreshed, I'd hardly call that only responding in mainstream media.
nl 11y ago
Prohibited: Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people (these behaviors intimidate others into silence) About time.
- ttrashh 11y ago
  I consider your comment harassment. I think it should be removed. Slippery slope don't you think?
  - ForHackernews 11y ago
    No, I don't. I'll submit to the Reasonable Person Test here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person
  - zorpner 11y ago
    One my favorite things about the anti-SJW movement is how they fundamentally don't understand what they're opposing. They see people using words like "harassment" and achieving results, so they go full cargo cult and start spewing those same words in the belief that they'll be able to achieve something as well. It reminds me of the sovereign citizen movement, a belief that there's some set of magic words that gets results, rather than actually interacting with society.
    - meowface 11y ago
      I don't know, in an Internet context "harassment" can be very ambiguous. In real life situations it's usually pretty clear, but some people may consider certain Internet activities harassment while others may strongly disagree.
    - vacri 11y ago
      One of my favourite things about the anti-SJW movement is how they confuse privately-run forums for government-imposed law. Nothing is stopping them from running to one of the great many zero-moderation forums that exist online, but of course those forums aren't very attractive to a critical mass of users, so they have less content and fewer third-party tools to integrate with. The irony is, of course, that by demanding that Reddit cater to their demands, they're impinging on Reddit's freedom of expression. It's their toy; they get to set the rules on how it is used.
thisisdallas 11y ago
From the comments: Q: In Ellen Pao's op-ed in the Washington Post today, she said "But to attract more mainstream audiences and bring in the big-budget advertisers, you must hide or remove the ugly." How much of the push toward removing "ugly" elements of Reddit comes from the motivation to monetize Reddit? A: Zero. _____________________ His reply currently has -1022 points. The censorship of Reddit for advertisement purposes has been a topic of discussion in a select few subreddits for quite awhile. It looks like the rest of reddit is finally realizing what is going on. I don't have anything against it, people have to make money and with free services like reddit, the users are the product that is sold to advertisers. What I don't understand is, why not just admit it? From my ~20 years of internet usage, I have learned the one constant is you never lie to the internet. Also, from the list of prohibited content: >Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people This sounds like a rule that some teenager made up for guild forums. How in the world does Huffman think using something so vague as an actual punishable rule will turn out well? Anyway, good luck to Huffman he is going to need it. I feel like voat.co is going to see a very huge increase in numbers during the next few months.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- fweespeech 11y ago
  Its pretty clear that they tested out the "remove" option, pushed Ellen Pao out when it got ugly, and are switching to the "Hide" option. Yishan [ "Not our problem" ] -> Pao [ "Remove" ] -> Spez [ "Hide"] That seems to the be evolution at the moment, and honestly, I think "Hide" is the right answer. People have a right to avoid content that offends them. Voat's problem [honestly] is as drama-filled as this transition has been...Voat really isn't offering anything other than "Reddit with more transparency". Assuming Spez doesn't screw this up, I'm not seeing how Voat.co will benefit. As for vagueness, I'm not surprised...its like the legal definition of Obscenity or Pornography, its a community-tested definition based on social norms. You can't really quantify it the way you can numbers on a spreadsheet or "Marijuana is illegal". As long as Spez is transparent, communicates effectively, and doesn't come across as arbitrary I think it'll work out fine.
briholt 11y ago
This doesn't solve the problem. Banning "[a]nything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people" is so open-ended that it could include minor criticism or it could exclude flagrant bigotry, depending on the interpreter. They've replaced the de facto policy of arbitrarily banning things they don't like with an official policy of arbitrarily banning things they don't like.
- gooeyblob 11y ago
  When was reddit arbitrarily banning things they don't like?
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    Can we agree a large percentage of the Reddit population felt that Reddit Inc acted arbitrarily [in general, not nesc the bans] regardless of your feelings on the matter?
  - leereeves 11y ago
    Reddit still lacks an objective definition for "harassment". (So does the world, I think.) > When was reddit arbitrarily banning things they don't like? When they banned five subreddits (actually quite a few more than that, but five were announced), without a clear policy that could be fairly enforced on all subs.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      That banning was consistant with existing reddit rules at the time and was not out of the blue. FPH especially had been warned several times about vote brigading; many of the FPH users got shadow bans for vote brigading.
      - leereeves 11y ago
        FPH wasn't the only sub banned, and brigading was not mentioned by reddit as a reason for the bans. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removing_harassing_subreddits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/remov...
tptacek 11y ago
They're going to require a login to see the "indecent" subreddits. I wonder, are they going to take any other measures to make them difficult to reach from, e.g., search engines? Will they run advertisements on "indecent" subreddits?
- shock-value 11y ago
  He answers that directly. > This classification will require a login, must be opted into, will not appear in search results or public listings, and will generate no revenue for Reddit.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    Thanks! I didn't notice that.
  - waterlesscloud 11y ago
    "Not appear in search results" likely just means the internal search engine. Such as it is. I'm not sure that implies anything about whether or not they'll show up in Google and Bing.
    - fweespeech 11y ago
      They view the site as "Guest" so: > This classification will require a login, must be opted into That would prevent them from being visible.
      - waterlesscloud 11y ago
        Hmm. True. Though obviously crawlers can be allowed different access. Doesn't Google have a policy that sites must allow access from Google links in order to have content indexed? See for example the New York Times and their paywall, which is famously circumvented via Google. That seems to indicate it's not that clear cut. My suspicion is they haven't really thought about it yet.
oldmanjay 11y ago
It strikes me that nearly every problem Reddit faces is a result of centralization and scale. The right answer is for users to go back to a self-hosted model, which will never happen because people follow crowds instinctively.
- kelseydh 11y ago
  Almost reminds me of the Silk Road, and the move towards decentralized markets. Someone needs to make a decentralized reddit where anyone can go wherever they wish easily, and no one is tasked with serious governance issues -- let each subreddit govern themselves.
  - spc476 11y ago
    A network where the users are in control of what they see and hear. A ... user net of some sort. You could probably call it usenet. Yeah, that has a nice ring to it.
    - oldmanjay 11y ago
      You could call it usenet, but someone would have to give it a better interface than the thing we call usenet now. People in general are not going to give up the modern comforts of the web for freedom.
- kelseydh 11y ago
  Almost reminds me of the Silk Road, and the move towards decentralized markets. Someone needs to make a decentralized reddit where anyone can go wherever they wish easily, and no one is tasked with serious governance issues -- let each subreddit govern themselves.
andrewstuart2 11y ago
> The reason we’re careful to restrict speech is because people have more open and authentic discussions when they aren't worried about the speech police knocking down their door. Am I reading this right? As in, we restrict speech because people speak more freely when they're not free to speak?
- ikeboy 11y ago
  That was meant to be a reason not to restrict speech.
- mwfunk 11y ago
  You may be reading it wrong. It sounds like they don't want an environment in which people aren't sure what is allowed or not allowed. "Careful to restrict speech" in the sense that you don't want to go overboard with rules and moderation because you end up trading one problem (bad behavior from bad citizens) for another (an overly sanitized and controlled environment). OTOH, even your interpretation makes some degree of sense to me. When a community turns toxic, the bad behavior from the bad citizens drives away all of the good citizens who are positive contributors. It's just like mailing lists or discussion sites like HN. Personal attacks beget more personal attacks, and eventually so much of the comments are malicious or stupid that people who actually have something to contribute go elsewhere. An extreme example would be YouTube comments. If you see a bunch of terrible comments that barely parse as human language, you are that much more unlikely to leave a well-written comment because why bother? It'd be pearls before swine (if all the comments are terrible, then the people who bother reading the comments are likely also terrible). It sounds like Reddit is just trying to avoid the downward spiral that almost every electronic community goes through eventually, but are aware that taking this too far could have a chilling effect on the larger, more constructive community that they want to retain.
- tikhonj 11y ago
  That's the reason they're careful about it. Presumably, they want to it in ways that are limited, reasonable and predictable so that people can have open discussions without worry. This is obviously a good goal, but it's the sort of thing that can easily get swamped in implementation details.
seany 11y ago
This is actually much better than I was hoping for. edit I'm particularly interested in the possibility, of public modlogs and being able to opt into seeing deleted content.
boards2x 11y ago
Hilarious. Spam is strictly prohibited, while hate-speech is tolerated, unless inciting. spam must be lethal. Anywho, I've never liked Reddit and like it even less seeing what's going in there. >> These types of content are prohibited [1]: >> Spam
- mrkurt 11y ago
  Spam is easy to recognize. Hate-speech isn't, there's a tremendous range of speech that may-or-may not be hate speech.
  - bluecalm 11y ago
    Yeah but... racism is well established as a harmful thing by now. If you host subs dedicated to it you are making the world a worse place. It might be a tough call with other things but this one is as clear-cut as it gets.
- tikhonj 11y ago
  That's because spam is an attack on the service. More like DDoS traffic than commentary. It's a matter of operating the site, not policing the ideas therein. "Hate speech", on the other hand, is about voicing particular modern taboos. It's inherently politicized and controversial. Banning it site-wide would be little more than moralistic.
jewbacca 11y ago
For very many habitual users of Reddit, the way in which it is probably most valuable is as the canonical general discussion forum of the web. An important part of the infrastructure of their perception and interpretation of the world around them, for pretty much any domain beyond the most incommunicably personal. To read Reddit can be, in a surprisingly real way, like participating in a collective consciousness -- with all the addictive dependence [I say that in a non-judgemental way, not being able to come up with a less negative way to characterize it at the moment] that the type of speculative fiction which imagines such living arrangements usually predicts. The practical side of this is that, for any given news event, cultural phenomenon, popularly-circulating idea, whatever: for these users it is instinctive to consult the reddit threads on the topic, as a deeply-ingrained part of their process for digesting and interpreting it. That those reddit threads will exist and have an active discussion on any given topic is a given. Even if the local source of a news piece has a forum/thread of its own, it is fundamentally not the same thing. It's been, in a hazy golden age that may have never actually existed, something close a total function for processing the events of the world, big and small. One day, there was an event, a dumb internet drama event, but one for which the primary Reddit discussion thread was displaying a count of 20 thousand comments -- but on inspection, every single last one of those was showing up as [deleted]. That was the start of it for most users. Many have fixated on the specific topic of that initial drama as the source of the problem with Reddit, and many others have fixated on this fixation as the source of the problem with Reddit. But there is a general sense that this is growing, spreading, and mutating, and seems to be cropping up in places that are not strictly predictable. For example, there are persistent rumours that several of the more popular subreddits for which the news would be directly and explicitly on-topic, are systematically removing discussions about various global trade agreements currently being negotiated. Is it true? Maybe, maybe not, but the trust is broken. ---- The main thing is (the perception that): Now there is a partial function where before there was a total function. That is disastrous damage in an information processing system. ---- To these users, this is a very profound and frightening piece of damage, having extended a part of their cognition into this machinery that now seems to be failing. Panic sets in, which obviously means wild flailing at anything that pops its head up and can be in any way seen as responsible for the damage. Hence, the reaction to Ellen Pao (and what would have been the reaction to Steve Huffman here, had he unilaterally taken a more extreme stance than he has here). Especially after she made public statements of purpose that were easily interpretable by these users to the effect of "whatever else might be the source of the damage to your extended cognition, we intend to start deliberately doing some more damage to areas we don't consider important". ---- ---- Also important to understanding this: To the users I'm talking about, the "cognitive value" of Reddit is not entirely about directly being fed opinions to take up as one's own. Many of these users find great value to being exposed to, they deliberately seek out for their own enrichment: idiocy, malice, counterfactuals, cognitive dissonance, debate (honest and otherwise), the whole range of perceptions and opinions. To them, being exposed to these things is just as much of the value of Reddit as the "good stuff". And that seems to be the aspect of Reddit most strongly and immediately under threat. Anyone who does not value this kind of experience (which seems to be a very large proportion of the people participating in this conversation at the most visible levels) is going to see any attempt to frame this type of content as valuable in any way as totally incomprehensible, evil, and malicious itself. So this part of things is pretty close to an impossible conversation to have in public. ---- ---- (reposting a comment that I've made before, in a thread that was apparently soft-killed on HN)
kelseydh 11y ago
Reddit is in dire need of a UI/UX improvement. The site is unuseable without the Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) browser extension. Honestly it feels like developers have not made a significant change to Reddit in years. Screw advertising revenue, Reddit needs to begin making improvements gradually to its user interface or else it risks becoming a dinosaur.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  The site is unuseable without the Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) browser extension. Not much of a Redditor, but could you elaborate as to why the vanilla Reddit UI is "unuseable"?
  - theseatoms 11y ago
    Yeah, I hear this often, but I've never used RES and the site seems fine. Maybe I have some form of Stockholm Syndrome..
    - kelseydh 11y ago
      Once you use it, you'll be amazed at how behind the times Reddit is. The main improvement is loading all the images on one page, rather than needing to click and read each individually. RES has had this feature for years, it blows my mind Reddit hasn't made their feature set default for the site. Besides its impact on bandwidth, its such an obvious improvement to UI/UX.
    - ars 11y ago
      The most useful thing in it is the ability to load an image or video inline in the page. A single click and the image is there, and resizeable by dragging the mouse. It does other things too, but the images is the most important IMO. Without it you have to keep clicking back and forth from page to image.
      - qu4z-2 11y ago
        I actually prefer to open images in new tabs. I do use the keyboard shortcuts though. If I had to use the mouse to switch I'd probably go insane too.
ars 11y ago
> “We need people whose stupidity clashes against our values.” No. We don't. Those people are a detriment with no redeeming qualities. You can clash against values without being stupid. But in any case clashing against the hivemind on reddit is quite hard, and boy oh boy the hivemind can be stupid. If reddit actually want to make things better they can get rid of the downvote option.
- Retra 11y ago
  Removing down-votes doesn't help unless you've got a fairly sparse sub to begin with. Facebook doesn't have down-votes, and I consider that one of its poorer features.
pervycreeper 11y ago
>Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people This is incredibly ambiguous. I think it is important to specify what exactly harassment isn't, and explicitly permit that. Most people claiming 'harassment' are simply using it as a tool to silence and persecute people who dare to hold opinions that differ from their own. For example, the Twitter harassment trial that just finished yesterday in Toronto. [1] Merely saying that one 'feels harassed' should not count for anything. Furthermore there is a problem with labelling certain communities as being problematic, or whatever word they are searching for. This makes uncommon or novel viewpoints vulnerable to further marginalization if their opponents succeed in giving them that label. [1] http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchford-ruling-in-twitter-harassment-trial-could-have-enormous-fallout-for-free-speech http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchfor...
- alayne 11y ago
  That Toronto guy bothered that woman and her acquaintances for months and months and made ongoing personal comments. If that's not a form of harassment, I don't know what is. Christie Blatchford isn't exactly an impartial news source.
  - pervycreeper 11y ago
    Off-topic, but on that point, the full body of communications referenced in that case is publicly available online, and I invite readers to decide for themselves. > If that's not a form of harassment, I don't know what is. You may be right about that. By the way, Twitter has a 'block' function for dealing with 'mentions', as far as I am aware.
    - alayne 11y ago
      She did block him. He started using common hashtags of their activist network to still get attention. If you knew someone was trashing you, it would be very difficult to just ignore it even if you could block it. I'm sorry, I think this guy went too far and the situation needed some intervention. This is beyond just a difference of opinion. Why was he fired? Why is he the only person she is accusing of harassment despite many other people who didn't agree with what she was doing?
Fuzzwah 11y ago
> Anything illegal Illegal where?
- y-satellite 11y ago
  The US, since that is where reddit is based.
  - Fuzzwah 11y ago
    CA laws specifically then?
xacaxulu 11y ago
Pao has whatever the opposite of the Midas touch is.
interesting_att 11y ago
Am I the only one who didn't see anything of value in this AMA from /u/spez?
Pyxl101 11y ago
This Reddit comment (from the thread being linked to but not easy to see, at the time I write this) catalogs the various public statements that staff have made over time about Reddit being a place for free speech on the web: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_talk_content_ama/ct5r0ch https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_... It's interesting to see what was said in the past and how it compares to the narrative today.
em3rgent0rdr 11y ago
"Anything illegal" That's a pretty broad catch-all.

117 points by ssclafani 11y ago

Seems completely reasonable, maybe just a bit vague... The only surprising thing to me about this announcement is that they didn't already have such a policy in place.

comrh 11y ago

> Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people (these behaviors intimidate others into silence) > /r/coontown will be reclassified. The content there is offensive to many, but does not violate our current rules for banning. Seriously? /r/coontown isn't harassing, bulling, or abusing a group of people? This AMA didn't clarify anything at all, these were always the vague, sometimes enforced, rules.

lazzlazzlazz 11y ago
Having hateful beliefs is not in itself harassing, bullying, or abusing individuals.
- comrh 11y ago
  Doesn't it abuse "groups of people" then?
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Apparently users of coontown say a lot of hateful but keep it to that subReddit. People in FPH said a lot of hateful stuff, but they didn't keep it to their sub, they posted it in other subs and other forums and other social networks.
    - slg 11y ago
      >Apparently users of coontown say a lot of hateful but keep it to that subReddit. I think that is naive. People aren't going to segment their personality like that. I subscribe to /r/baseball because I'm a baseball fan. If baseball comes up on HN or /r/dataisbeautiful, I will often chime in because I'm still a baseball fan. Is that going to be any different for someone who subscribes to /r/coontown? They likely subscribe because they are racists and enjoy reinforcing that belief. Do we expect those same racist users to suddenly keep those ideas to themselves when they stumble upon Jesse Jackson posting in /r/iama?
      - DanBC 11y ago
        Users of coontown are racist, yes, and that's probably detectable in their posts. But users of coontown apparently[1] don't post threads linking to other subs and then visit that other sub with thousand of votes and dozens of comments. FPH did. [1] i've never read coontown so maybe I am totally wrong. Maybe they do brigade but they're so small it doesn't matter?
        slg 11y ago
        Coontown makes Reddit an attractive place for racists to congregate. As the overall userbase of Reddit starts to include more racists, it will inherently lead to racist users voting and posting comments on other posts. Coontown doesn't necessarily need to promote users spreading their ideas to other subreddits, its mere existence helps to accomplish the same.
        rory096 11y ago
        So you argue that reddit should exclude people, rather than content? What if a user is found being racist on another site, should they be banned from reddit?
        slg 11y ago
        That is a step beyond anything I have said. I am just pointing out that we shouldn't say "Coontown is fine because they keep to themselves." The fact is that people are attracted to Reddit based on content. You don't need to ban any people if you change the content to attract (and repel) different people. Reddit is now the most popular site on the Internet for racists to congregate. I think that is a problem for the whole site. Making the site less accommodating to racists would seem to be a good first step in addressing that issue. Reddit doesn't appear willing to do that.
  - leereeves 11y ago
    By that vague definition, doesn't /r/politics "abuse" Republicans?
    - Balgair 11y ago
      Bingo.
    - nl 11y ago
      I just took a look at the /r/politics front page. I don't think there is anything there a reasonable person would think was harassment, bullying or abuse. The closest is a claim that "right wing extremists have no qualms destroying people's lives", but I don't think that would pass the reasonable person test.
      - leereeves 11y ago
        I agree. /r/politics shouldn't be banned for harassment, bullying, or abuse, but it could qualify under some definitions. For example, check out the comments on https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/3di5ty/ben_carson_will_attend_iowa_religious_liberties/ https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/3di5ty/ben_carson...
        nl 11y ago
        Can you point to a specific comment? There is one where he is called a religious nut, but that seems as bad as it gets. I don't see any problem. It isn't useful presenting hypothetical situations. If there is a problem on /r/politics then point to it.
        leereeves 11y ago
        Well, we have the usual insults about Republicans: racist, crazy, bigots, stupid. > The GOP can't run a black guy. The rift between voting Republican and maintaining baseless hatred for minorities would cause too many voters' heads to explode. > You're talking as though the republican electorate has a memory. > Can you all just admit that the entire republican party represents the ideals that this guy embraces (hating gay people) and what Donald Trump continues to spew (hating immigrants and hispanics). The specific baseless suggestion for this post: Ben Carson wants to kill gays (because he accepted an invitation). > Ben "Compassionate Execution" Carson > i.e. gays are like insects? Wait, best not to give Carson any ideas... A random suggestion that Ben Carson is a drug abuser: > I can't comprehend how a Doctor that graduated from John Hopkins and Yale turned out the way he did. > ... > unfettered access to the best drugs? Some random insults: > Bobby "Stupid Party" Jindal, Tom "Tehran" Cotton, James "Senator Snowball" Inhofe, Bobby "the exorcist" Jindal > Alas, it is true...Ben Carson does not have a neocortex. All fairly typical for a political discussion, I know. Still disgusting. (Speaking as a liberal-leaning independent.)
- NeutronBoy 11y ago
  Well they banned a sub that was just fat-shaming, which was really what started this off. Shaming fat people is off limits, but hateful beliefs based on race is all a-ok?
  - DanBC 11y ago
    No they didn't; no it wasn't. FPH brigaded other subs - and this is something that has always been ban-worthy on Reddit. "No vote manipulation" was always one of the rules. FPH didn't just vote brigade; users would travel from FPH to other subs to harass people in those other subs, and FPH travelled to other sites and harassed people on those other sites. If they'd kept it all in FPH they'd have been fine. And there's a clue in all the other FPH-style subs that didn't get banned. Identical content (ideas), different behaviour.
    - NeutronBoy 11y ago
      > If they'd kept it all in FPH they'd have been fine. And there's a clue in all the other FPH-style subs that didn't get banned. Identical content (ideas), different behaviour. Ah ok, I didn't pick that nuance up. I browse Reddit a bit but stay away from the main subs, and try to ignore the drama as well. I still don't know my opinion on this issue - while I fully support 'free speech' (as it applies in this context), if companies don't want hateful speech and groups on their platforms then I think they should be able to remove them. But it's a slippery slope :/
      - rory096 11y ago
        > I think they should be able to remove them. I've seen this argument come up a few times, but I don't think it's relevant. Of course reddit has the right to restrict whatever they want, but why should that affect your opinion on what they should restrict? (After all, that's what spez is asking for in his AMA.)

slg 11y ago

TL;DR - We will still allow almost all the same hateful stuff we have previously allowed, but we will do our best to hide it so people will stop complaining.

smegel 11y ago

Not exactly the change people were anticipating. In fact, I'm not sure there is a change.

waterlesscloud 11y ago
The biggest change is making subs that violate "common decency" opt-in. I predict they'll find a new phrase for that criteria as "common decency" pretty obviously would re-classify subs that are not what they're really after.
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  "Unpalatable to advertisers"
  - res0nat0r 11y ago
    What's wrong with that honestly? I'm totally fine with them removing subs/content that exists only because assholes on the internet are anonymous. This whole nerd rage is from nothing in my opinion, they are telling the idiots to take it somewhere else, and the majority of the rest of us can read content on our subs and the staff doesn't have to waste time with the back and forth or lawyers that comes with questionable content.
    - ForHackernews 11y ago
      I didn't say there was anything wrong with it. I totally agree that they should ban racist/sexist/bigoted garbage. I do think it's kind of pathetic how transparently Reddit's owners only ever respond when they get bad press from the mainstream media, instead of showing some spine and real moral leadership. It's sad that Coke's ad buying team is what passes for a conscience today.
      - res0nat0r 11y ago
        Spez is hosting an AMA right now with 15k comments, and 2k new ones since I last refreshed, I'd hardly call that only responding in mainstream media.

nl 11y ago

Prohibited: Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people (these behaviors intimidate others into silence) About time.

ttrashh 11y ago
I consider your comment harassment. I think it should be removed. Slippery slope don't you think?
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  No, I don't. I'll submit to the Reasonable Person Test here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person
- zorpner 11y ago
  One my favorite things about the anti-SJW movement is how they fundamentally don't understand what they're opposing. They see people using words like "harassment" and achieving results, so they go full cargo cult and start spewing those same words in the belief that they'll be able to achieve something as well. It reminds me of the sovereign citizen movement, a belief that there's some set of magic words that gets results, rather than actually interacting with society.
  - meowface 11y ago
    I don't know, in an Internet context "harassment" can be very ambiguous. In real life situations it's usually pretty clear, but some people may consider certain Internet activities harassment while others may strongly disagree.
  - vacri 11y ago
    One of my favourite things about the anti-SJW movement is how they confuse privately-run forums for government-imposed law. Nothing is stopping them from running to one of the great many zero-moderation forums that exist online, but of course those forums aren't very attractive to a critical mass of users, so they have less content and fewer third-party tools to integrate with. The irony is, of course, that by demanding that Reddit cater to their demands, they're impinging on Reddit's freedom of expression. It's their toy; they get to set the rules on how it is used.

thisisdallas 11y ago

From the comments: Q: In Ellen Pao's op-ed in the Washington Post today, she said "But to attract more mainstream audiences and bring in the big-budget advertisers, you must hide or remove the ugly." How much of the push toward removing "ugly" elements of Reddit comes from the motivation to monetize Reddit? A: Zero. _____________________ His reply currently has -1022 points. The censorship of Reddit for advertisement purposes has been a topic of discussion in a select few subreddits for quite awhile. It looks like the rest of reddit is finally realizing what is going on. I don't have anything against it, people have to make money and with free services like reddit, the users are the product that is sold to advertisers. What I don't understand is, why not just admit it? From my ~20 years of internet usage, I have learned the one constant is you never lie to the internet. Also, from the list of prohibited content: >Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people This sounds like a rule that some teenager made up for guild forums. How in the world does Huffman think using something so vague as an actual punishable rule will turn out well? Anyway, good luck to Huffman he is going to need it. I feel like voat.co is going to see a very huge increase in numbers during the next few months.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
fweespeech 11y ago
Its pretty clear that they tested out the "remove" option, pushed Ellen Pao out when it got ugly, and are switching to the "Hide" option. Yishan [ "Not our problem" ] -> Pao [ "Remove" ] -> Spez [ "Hide"] That seems to the be evolution at the moment, and honestly, I think "Hide" is the right answer. People have a right to avoid content that offends them. Voat's problem [honestly] is as drama-filled as this transition has been...Voat really isn't offering anything other than "Reddit with more transparency". Assuming Spez doesn't screw this up, I'm not seeing how Voat.co will benefit. As for vagueness, I'm not surprised...its like the legal definition of Obscenity or Pornography, its a community-tested definition based on social norms. You can't really quantify it the way you can numbers on a spreadsheet or "Marijuana is illegal". As long as Spez is transparent, communicates effectively, and doesn't come across as arbitrary I think it'll work out fine.

briholt 11y ago

This doesn't solve the problem. Banning "[a]nything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people" is so open-ended that it could include minor criticism or it could exclude flagrant bigotry, depending on the interpreter. They've replaced the de facto policy of arbitrarily banning things they don't like with an official policy of arbitrarily banning things they don't like.

gooeyblob 11y ago
When was reddit arbitrarily banning things they don't like?
- fweespeech 11y ago
  Can we agree a large percentage of the Reddit population felt that Reddit Inc acted arbitrarily [in general, not nesc the bans] regardless of your feelings on the matter?
- leereeves 11y ago
  Reddit still lacks an objective definition for "harassment". (So does the world, I think.) > When was reddit arbitrarily banning things they don't like? When they banned five subreddits (actually quite a few more than that, but five were announced), without a clear policy that could be fairly enforced on all subs.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    That banning was consistant with existing reddit rules at the time and was not out of the blue. FPH especially had been warned several times about vote brigading; many of the FPH users got shadow bans for vote brigading.
    - leereeves 11y ago
      FPH wasn't the only sub banned, and brigading was not mentioned by reddit as a reason for the bans. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removing_harassing_subreddits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/remov...

tptacek 11y ago

They're going to require a login to see the "indecent" subreddits. I wonder, are they going to take any other measures to make them difficult to reach from, e.g., search engines? Will they run advertisements on "indecent" subreddits?

shock-value 11y ago
He answers that directly. > This classification will require a login, must be opted into, will not appear in search results or public listings, and will generate no revenue for Reddit.
- tptacek 11y ago
  Thanks! I didn't notice that.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  "Not appear in search results" likely just means the internal search engine. Such as it is. I'm not sure that implies anything about whether or not they'll show up in Google and Bing.
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    They view the site as "Guest" so: > This classification will require a login, must be opted into That would prevent them from being visible.
    - waterlesscloud 11y ago
      Hmm. True. Though obviously crawlers can be allowed different access. Doesn't Google have a policy that sites must allow access from Google links in order to have content indexed? See for example the New York Times and their paywall, which is famously circumvented via Google. That seems to indicate it's not that clear cut. My suspicion is they haven't really thought about it yet.

oldmanjay 11y ago

It strikes me that nearly every problem Reddit faces is a result of centralization and scale. The right answer is for users to go back to a self-hosted model, which will never happen because people follow crowds instinctively.

kelseydh 11y ago
Almost reminds me of the Silk Road, and the move towards decentralized markets. Someone needs to make a decentralized reddit where anyone can go wherever they wish easily, and no one is tasked with serious governance issues -- let each subreddit govern themselves.
- spc476 11y ago
  A network where the users are in control of what they see and hear. A ... user net of some sort. You could probably call it usenet. Yeah, that has a nice ring to it.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    You could call it usenet, but someone would have to give it a better interface than the thing we call usenet now. People in general are not going to give up the modern comforts of the web for freedom.
kelseydh 11y ago
Almost reminds me of the Silk Road, and the move towards decentralized markets. Someone needs to make a decentralized reddit where anyone can go wherever they wish easily, and no one is tasked with serious governance issues -- let each subreddit govern themselves.

andrewstuart2 11y ago

> The reason we’re careful to restrict speech is because people have more open and authentic discussions when they aren't worried about the speech police knocking down their door. Am I reading this right? As in, we restrict speech because people speak more freely when they're not free to speak?

ikeboy 11y ago
That was meant to be a reason not to restrict speech.
mwfunk 11y ago
You may be reading it wrong. It sounds like they don't want an environment in which people aren't sure what is allowed or not allowed. "Careful to restrict speech" in the sense that you don't want to go overboard with rules and moderation because you end up trading one problem (bad behavior from bad citizens) for another (an overly sanitized and controlled environment). OTOH, even your interpretation makes some degree of sense to me. When a community turns toxic, the bad behavior from the bad citizens drives away all of the good citizens who are positive contributors. It's just like mailing lists or discussion sites like HN. Personal attacks beget more personal attacks, and eventually so much of the comments are malicious or stupid that people who actually have something to contribute go elsewhere. An extreme example would be YouTube comments. If you see a bunch of terrible comments that barely parse as human language, you are that much more unlikely to leave a well-written comment because why bother? It'd be pearls before swine (if all the comments are terrible, then the people who bother reading the comments are likely also terrible). It sounds like Reddit is just trying to avoid the downward spiral that almost every electronic community goes through eventually, but are aware that taking this too far could have a chilling effect on the larger, more constructive community that they want to retain.
tikhonj 11y ago
That's the reason they're careful about it. Presumably, they want to it in ways that are limited, reasonable and predictable so that people can have open discussions without worry. This is obviously a good goal, but it's the sort of thing that can easily get swamped in implementation details.

seany 11y ago

This is actually much better than I was hoping for. edit I'm particularly interested in the possibility, of public modlogs and being able to opt into seeing deleted content.

boards2x 11y ago

Hilarious. Spam is strictly prohibited, while hate-speech is tolerated, unless inciting. spam must be lethal. Anywho, I've never liked Reddit and like it even less seeing what's going in there. >> These types of content are prohibited [1]: >> Spam

mrkurt 11y ago
Spam is easy to recognize. Hate-speech isn't, there's a tremendous range of speech that may-or-may not be hate speech.
- bluecalm 11y ago
  Yeah but... racism is well established as a harmful thing by now. If you host subs dedicated to it you are making the world a worse place. It might be a tough call with other things but this one is as clear-cut as it gets.
tikhonj 11y ago
That's because spam is an attack on the service. More like DDoS traffic than commentary. It's a matter of operating the site, not policing the ideas therein. "Hate speech", on the other hand, is about voicing particular modern taboos. It's inherently politicized and controversial. Banning it site-wide would be little more than moralistic.

jewbacca 11y ago

For very many habitual users of Reddit, the way in which it is probably most valuable is as the canonical general discussion forum of the web. An important part of the infrastructure of their perception and interpretation of the world around them, for pretty much any domain beyond the most incommunicably personal. To read Reddit can be, in a surprisingly real way, like participating in a collective consciousness -- with all the addictive dependence [I say that in a non-judgemental way, not being able to come up with a less negative way to characterize it at the moment] that the type of speculative fiction which imagines such living arrangements usually predicts. The practical side of this is that, for any given news event, cultural phenomenon, popularly-circulating idea, whatever: for these users it is instinctive to consult the reddit threads on the topic, as a deeply-ingrained part of their process for digesting and interpreting it. That those reddit threads will exist and have an active discussion on any given topic is a given. Even if the local source of a news piece has a forum/thread of its own, it is fundamentally not the same thing. It's been, in a hazy golden age that may have never actually existed, something close a total function for processing the events of the world, big and small. One day, there was an event, a dumb internet drama event, but one for which the primary Reddit discussion thread was displaying a count of 20 thousand comments -- but on inspection, every single last one of those was showing up as [deleted]. That was the start of it for most users. Many have fixated on the specific topic of that initial drama as the source of the problem with Reddit, and many others have fixated on this fixation as the source of the problem with Reddit. But there is a general sense that this is growing, spreading, and mutating, and seems to be cropping up in places that are not strictly predictable. For example, there are persistent rumours that several of the more popular subreddits for which the news would be directly and explicitly on-topic, are systematically removing discussions about various global trade agreements currently being negotiated. Is it true? Maybe, maybe not, but the trust is broken. ---- The main thing is (the perception that): Now there is a partial function where before there was a total function. That is disastrous damage in an information processing system. ---- To these users, this is a very profound and frightening piece of damage, having extended a part of their cognition into this machinery that now seems to be failing. Panic sets in, which obviously means wild flailing at anything that pops its head up and can be in any way seen as responsible for the damage. Hence, the reaction to Ellen Pao (and what would have been the reaction to Steve Huffman here, had he unilaterally taken a more extreme stance than he has here). Especially after she made public statements of purpose that were easily interpretable by these users to the effect of "whatever else might be the source of the damage to your extended cognition, we intend to start deliberately doing some more damage to areas we don't consider important". ---- ---- Also important to understanding this: To the users I'm talking about, the "cognitive value" of Reddit is not entirely about directly being fed opinions to take up as one's own. Many of these users find great value to being exposed to, they deliberately seek out for their own enrichment: idiocy, malice, counterfactuals, cognitive dissonance, debate (honest and otherwise), the whole range of perceptions and opinions. To them, being exposed to these things is just as much of the value of Reddit as the "good stuff". And that seems to be the aspect of Reddit most strongly and immediately under threat. Anyone who does not value this kind of experience (which seems to be a very large proportion of the people participating in this conversation at the most visible levels) is going to see any attempt to frame this type of content as valuable in any way as totally incomprehensible, evil, and malicious itself. So this part of things is pretty close to an impossible conversation to have in public. ---- ---- (reposting a comment that I've made before, in a thread that was apparently soft-killed on HN)

kelseydh 11y ago

Reddit is in dire need of a UI/UX improvement. The site is unuseable without the Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) browser extension. Honestly it feels like developers have not made a significant change to Reddit in years. Screw advertising revenue, Reddit needs to begin making improvements gradually to its user interface or else it risks becoming a dinosaur.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
The site is unuseable without the Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) browser extension. Not much of a Redditor, but could you elaborate as to why the vanilla Reddit UI is "unuseable"?
- theseatoms 11y ago
  Yeah, I hear this often, but I've never used RES and the site seems fine. Maybe I have some form of Stockholm Syndrome..
  - kelseydh 11y ago
    Once you use it, you'll be amazed at how behind the times Reddit is. The main improvement is loading all the images on one page, rather than needing to click and read each individually. RES has had this feature for years, it blows my mind Reddit hasn't made their feature set default for the site. Besides its impact on bandwidth, its such an obvious improvement to UI/UX.
  - ars 11y ago
    The most useful thing in it is the ability to load an image or video inline in the page. A single click and the image is there, and resizeable by dragging the mouse. It does other things too, but the images is the most important IMO. Without it you have to keep clicking back and forth from page to image.
    - qu4z-2 11y ago
      I actually prefer to open images in new tabs. I do use the keyboard shortcuts though. If I had to use the mouse to switch I'd probably go insane too.

ars 11y ago

> “We need people whose stupidity clashes against our values.” No. We don't. Those people are a detriment with no redeeming qualities. You can clash against values without being stupid. But in any case clashing against the hivemind on reddit is quite hard, and boy oh boy the hivemind can be stupid. If reddit actually want to make things better they can get rid of the downvote option.

Retra 11y ago
Removing down-votes doesn't help unless you've got a fairly sparse sub to begin with. Facebook doesn't have down-votes, and I consider that one of its poorer features.

pervycreeper 11y ago

>Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people This is incredibly ambiguous. I think it is important to specify what exactly harassment isn't, and explicitly permit that. Most people claiming 'harassment' are simply using it as a tool to silence and persecute people who dare to hold opinions that differ from their own. For example, the Twitter harassment trial that just finished yesterday in Toronto. [1] Merely saying that one 'feels harassed' should not count for anything. Furthermore there is a problem with labelling certain communities as being problematic, or whatever word they are searching for. This makes uncommon or novel viewpoints vulnerable to further marginalization if their opponents succeed in giving them that label. [1] http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchford-ruling-in-twitter-harassment-trial-could-have-enormous-fallout-for-free-speech http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchfor...

alayne 11y ago
That Toronto guy bothered that woman and her acquaintances for months and months and made ongoing personal comments. If that's not a form of harassment, I don't know what is. Christie Blatchford isn't exactly an impartial news source.
- pervycreeper 11y ago
  Off-topic, but on that point, the full body of communications referenced in that case is publicly available online, and I invite readers to decide for themselves. > If that's not a form of harassment, I don't know what is. You may be right about that. By the way, Twitter has a 'block' function for dealing with 'mentions', as far as I am aware.
  - alayne 11y ago
    She did block him. He started using common hashtags of their activist network to still get attention. If you knew someone was trashing you, it would be very difficult to just ignore it even if you could block it. I'm sorry, I think this guy went too far and the situation needed some intervention. This is beyond just a difference of opinion. Why was he fired? Why is he the only person she is accusing of harassment despite many other people who didn't agree with what she was doing?

Fuzzwah 11y ago

> Anything illegal Illegal where?

y-satellite 11y ago
The US, since that is where reddit is based.
- Fuzzwah 11y ago
  CA laws specifically then?

xacaxulu 11y ago

Pao has whatever the opposite of the Midas touch is.

interesting_att 11y ago

Am I the only one who didn't see anything of value in this AMA from /u/spez?

Pyxl101 11y ago

This Reddit comment (from the thread being linked to but not easy to see, at the time I write this) catalogs the various public statements that staff have made over time about Reddit being a place for free speech on the web: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_talk_content_ama/ct5r0ch https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_... It's interesting to see what was said in the past and how it compares to the narrative today.

em3rgent0rdr 11y ago

"Anything illegal" That's a pretty broad catch-all.