zlacker

>>feross+(OP)
I think something that really bothers me about this discussion about moderation is how many people approach this debate like a new born baby. They have an idea and then speculate on how it fixes everything. There's never any discussion of what exists in the real world. ACX here is essentially describing some key attributes of reddit. Each sub-reddit has it's own moderation team that decides what's acceptable and then you opt-in. This is pretty close to what ACX is proposing.

So let's look at what happened in reality. Almost immediately sub-reddits pop up that are at the very least attempting to skirt the law, and often directly breaching the law- popular topics on reddit included creative interpretations of the age of consent for example, or indeed the requirement for consent at all. Oh and because anyone can create one these communities, the site turns into whack-a-mole.

The second thing that happened was communities popped up pretty much for the sole purpose of harassing's other communities. But enabling this sort of market place of moderation, you are providing a mechanism for a group of people to organize a way to attack your own platform. So now you have to step back in and we're back to censorship.

I also think that this article completely mischaracterizes what the free speech side of the debate want.

>>Silver+hP
Reddit is awful. The whole system is designed to create a groupthink. Downvoting of alternate opinions, post throttling and over zealous moderators banning people for wrongthink. Actual discussion of unpopular opinions is impossible. This creates a userbase with a very similar mindset, and so the problem just compounds itself.

(This is for anything with a political slant to it, I still find it useful for niche subjects, say mycology)

>>collyw+IW
That can happen but the relative frequencies matter a lot. What I’ve seen at least an order of magnitude more frequently is that someone comes in with some tedious repeat of e.g. recent Fox News talking points, perhaps even literally copy-pasted, and then whines about downvoting because clearly the problem is that other people weren’t taking seriously their regurgitation of something which has debunked many times already. This is especially common in places like science or economics subreddits where a hefty fraction of these aren’t controversial takes but simply run afoul of measurable reality.

I’ve also seen a ton of cases where people expressed disagreement or contrarian positions but did so in a respectful and fact-aware manner and had positive interactions because they were respectful of the community.

>>acdha+t01
I've found that when posting a popular opinion, you can have absolute minimum effort fluff like "racism is bad" and get plenty of upvotes, but for controversial opinions you need to tread extremely lightly. You need disclaimers and careful wording and references etc. to avoid being downvoted. In many cases that's not even enough.

Positive interactions are certainly possible and do happen, but the site is heavily heavily tilted towards groupthink. Fighting it is an uphill battle.

>>Asrael+241
> In many cases that's not even enough.

Users rarely deviate from the established upvote/downvote patterns. In fact, I'd go as far as saying many users don't even read the comments before voting.

When two users are having a heated argument, it's common for a third person to respond to the 'right' person with an innocuous comment and be heavily downvoted for it.