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
It's funny you call out the exception as tedious as opposed to the groupthink that's mindlessly enforced and repeated ad nauseam on most Subreddits.

>>gorwel+tG1
A subreddit is a community - if you don’t like the norms, go to a different one. It’s like going to someone’s party and loudly asking why they all like such lousy music – nothing positive is going to come from it. In many cases, it’s not even entertainingly weird - more like “you should try something good. You probably haven’t heard of my favorite band before but look them up. Nickleback.”

Note also how I mentioned people repeating low-effort arguments. The tedium comes from the stream of people who come, repeat someone else’s idea, aren’t prepared or willing to engage intellectually, and whine about censorship when nobody finds that compelling. Anyone who spends much time in a particular forum can recognize that and see that there’ll be very little value from engaging. We see that a lot here where people complain that HN is biased against cryptocurrency because the response to “have you accepted our lord and savior bitcoin into your heart?” was not well received by people who remember the exact same claims being made a decade ago.

>>acdha+rO1
> The tedium comes from the stream of people who come, repeat someone else’s idea, aren’t prepared or willing to engage intellectually

This is 99% of Reddit though.