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
> 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.

This is like saying "no moderation is _essentially_ the same as moderation because you can just choose not to read posts." I suppose it's simplistically true if you squint hard enough and actively ignore the issues people care about, but in that case you're not left with a particularly useful statement.

Let's look at the proposal vs. how Reddit currently works. Let's say you have a sub called /r/soda, there's a rule where you can't "promote sodas," and they'll ban you for rule violations if you say "Coke is my favorite" but not if you say "Pepsi is my favorite" (selective enforcement of rules, even by site administrators is common on Reddit). 45% of the users love Coke, 30% love Pepsi, but 100% of the posts about what soda people live are about Pepsi.

So with the proposal you make a post about how much you love Coke, notice that the post is deleted, then choose to ignore moderation and see all the other posts by other Coke users of the sub that have had a similar journey. You continue to discuss things with many of the people on the sub like you did before.

With the current way Reddit works, you get banned and then start your own sub. But no one knows about your sub, the vast majority of new subs die, and even the ones that are moderately successful take years of work to gain a community. No one in /r/soda might even realize that "Coke is my favorite" posts are banned if they hadn't made such posts themselves, since there's no way to see what's banned and what isn't. The users there are kept completely ignorant of the need to create another sub.

So now you spend hours trying to promote your sub in various places and creating enough content for it that people who visit will actually use it and not just see a dead sub and move on. If you're lucky, and with a lot of work, in a year you might be able to reach a small fraction of the audience that was in /r/soda, and tell that small group of people "Coke is my favorite."

And even then, Reddit admins can look at you askance and decide to shut down your sub. I've seen multiple subs say "We can't even have a friendly discussion about [particular_topic] because Reddit admins have said they'll shut us down if we do." Even things that other subs are allowed to talk about (again, the rules are applied rather arbitrarily).

I can't see how the proposal is like Reddit in any meaningful way.