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.
instead i first thought of HN’s “showdead”
(This is for anything with a political slant to it, I still find it useful for niche subjects, say mycology)
They tried getting rid of that in Voat, and it was such a cesspool that nobody sane used it, and the owner couldn't keep it up and shut it down. /r/TheDonald at one point tried to migrate after whining about Reddit's moderation and came crawling back because they couldn't stomach it.
Yeah, Reddit's moderation system is far from ideal, but we've seen experimentally that it's definitely better than not having it.
Precisely, It's like the author never understood the original definitions, but think their interpretation of the world creates them anew. It's a dictionary, not the bible.
Moderation as "we modulate other people's behaviors for you and your feelings" is justifying the act of censorship using other terms. These rationalists aren't half as smart as they think they are, or they wouldn't need so many words and novel interpretations.
Fresh ideas are always welcome, but the people who are trying to maintain working forums have been at the process for a long time now and can draw on experience all the way back to the BBS days.
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.
It's a great concept, though it's worth pointing out that there's considerable overlap of moderators between subreddits (a.k.a. powermods).
In effect, you end up with a single system applied across hundreds of subreddits which may-or-may-not be appropriate, and if you happen to earn the ire of a powermod you find yourself banned from all the subreddits they moderate.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/c5urdn/what_i...
Apparently /r/TheDonald was very used to being in a safe space. Voat didn't cater to that, and TheDonald couldn't take that so eventually they returned to Reddit.
This was before their separate website.
Positive interactions are certainly possible and do happen, but the site is heavily heavily tilted towards groupthink. Fighting it is an uphill battle.
Historically the r/RedditRequest process only considered whether the moderator was completely inactive from Reddit. There could be a dead subreddit that hadn't been touched in years or a flourishing subreddit whose top mod was completely MIA, there was nothing you could do if the top mod was still active on Reddit — even if you could prove they were just squatting.
Not unlike domain squatting.
This experience as well as a rather low discussion level on Reddit made me resign from using it. Hard to find a replacement, however; I like to use Stack Exchange, as a very dry form of communication that focuses on merit.
No, it really isn't.
Differences:
1) Reddit is super ban happy, and there is no way to view banned content. Ban reasons include slurs, political opinions, as well as no reasons at all.
2) Subreddits are not filters over the same content, they have (mostly) different content.
3) There is a fractal abundance of user-moderated subreddit; yes, there is some bad culture in some of them. This is not what ACX is proposing. He is proposing 2-20 filters, ran by the company, not by volunteers, with a specific purpose and clearly defined.
I really don't see how ACX's proposal can cause illegal behavior or harassment that is not already there.
You're making a false equivalence with reddit, then pointing out reddit has negative emergent properties.
I don't disagree with your point, there's quite a bit of knowledge around building communities and moderation that's been around and honed for at least a generation. And we should take that knowledge and build on and around it.
That said, folks have been going on about "Eternal September" for decades. Granted, people are born all the time, but they've grown up in the age of the Internet.
As such, it seems to me that at some point (if not now, when?) we need to get away from that particular excuse.
Anyone born before the Internet (myself included) has had a long time to figure things out, and anyone born in the Internet's wake is immersed in it from a fairly young age.
So why do we continue to use "Eternal September" as a foil?
It's entirely possible I'm missing something important, and if I am, please do enlighten me. Thanks!
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.
Twitter is already a whack-a-mole, but for a range of content that's much broader than just illegal content. A change like this would reduce their moderation burden.
> 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.
You can ban harassing behaviour without banning open discussions.
Finally, I don't think the ACX proposal is exactly like reddit. Reddit still has moderation imposed by a third party, this moderation configuration is in your control.
I think if you look at real-world examples with an actual history like reddit... you find that reality is complicated. All those problematic reddit dynamics that you describe exist. But, there were also some advantages/successes to their "moderation" approach.
Above all, these approaches aren't just good/bad or successful/failed. There's a ton of texture. The moderation approach dictates a lot about the platform's character, and that isn't captured by binaries or spectrums.
It's exhausting to wade through all of those.
There has been a general coarsening of the culture which has gotten worse since the 2010s, Donald Trump was certainly a part of it.
I was talking about it with my wife this morning and she thinks that people have been getting more concerned about the homeless colony in a nearby city because the people who live there have been getting angrier and nastier. Other people down our road have put up signs that say "SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!"
There are the nihilistic forms of protest such as the people who are attacking paintings in museums to protest climate change. (Why don't they blow up a gas station?)
And of course there are the people on the right and left who believe they can "create their own reality" whether it is about the 2020 election or vaccines or about gender.
What do you mean? It's not in any way illegal to discuss such topics.
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.
Yes, there is some knowledge for some internet savvy types who grew up with the internet, but a lot of people are casual users. Many people still feel anonymity gives them carte blanche to be a jerk, or worse.
The amount of effort to be online is zero, but the amount of effort of people to behave is sometimes also zero (or low), of course depending on context. HN is a lot more civilized, but if it stopped being moderated it would in time be a nasty place as well.
Mostly quit Reddit when I realized about 5% of my posts were shadow deleted for holding the wrong opinion.
So as somebody who noticed this bit of drama, and looked into it, I can explain. It's actually all very simple. Here goes:
It's a stunt!
Yup, they say that much. They tried protesting, they tried blocking roads, but were making page 10 of the newspaper. So they came out with some dramatic, outrageous plan that they knew wouldn't do harm (they planned this well in advance, and glued themselves to glass, not to the actual painting) but would be weird enough for people to talk about it. Plus there's a degree of symbolism in it.
> (Why don't they blow up a gas station?)
Because you can't protest oil infrastructure in any effective way. Blow up something? That's terrorism. Glue yourself to a gas pump? You'll get insulted and probably dragged off, plus gas stations are kind of meaningless and replaceable and often not anywhere very interesting. Protest at oil infrastructure? It's typically remotely located, and secured. You won't be noticed before you're removed. Block Shell's HQ? Good luck blocking a huge building with multiple entrances and security.
Point being there's nothing oil related I can think of where you could cause some sort of disturbance, quickly get attention, have the press get to you before you got forcefully removed from there, and have the story be interesting enough to have a prominent place in the news.
The people who think the Jan 6 attack was a good idea will add it to the list of other things leftists do that they think justify the Jan 6 attack.
For that matter I'd say that a lot of what "Black Lives Matter" does is also nihilistic. That is, there is not a lot of expectation that things will change because their ideology doesn't believe that things can change and because it won't look at the variables that could be changed to make a difference. What I do know is that some investigator will come around in 20 years and ask "why is this neighborhood a food desert?" but the odds are worse than 50% that they'll conclude that "it used to have a supermarket but it got burned down in a riot" is part of the answer. In the meantime conservatives will deny that the concept of a "food desert" is meaningful at all and also say that Jan 6 was OK because leftists are always burning down their neighborhoods and getting away with it -- except you (almost) never get away with burning down your neighborhood in terms of the lasting damage it does to your community unless your community is in the gentrification fast track, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Heights_riot
(It might be the sample I see, but I know a few right-wingers who admit that there is a lot of craziness on their side but it is justified by what the other side does whereas I never hear from leftists that it's justifiable to say that "A trans woman is indistinguishable from a natural woman" because of something stupid a conservative did.)
It didn't used to be. It used to be pretty good, but a handful of censorious mods insisted that they needed tools to fight exactly the same sorts of things that OP is insisting that moderation is for - illegal content, real harassment - and then immediately started using those tools to purge political enemies.
It's a fun example because of how wrong Hollywood (and intuition) gets this one. You're on an elevator and an evil terrorist cuts the cables! Oh no! What happens next!? Not much, besides you being annoyed at probably being stuck somewhere in between floors. People had to be persuaded that the technology was safe and so Elisha Otis' [1] regular demonstrations of his safety stopping invention is a big part of the reason of why elevators were able to take off. It's practically impossible to make an elevator fall down a shaft.
Now us growing up with them simply take everything for granted to the point we have absolutely no clue at all about what we're using, but always have used it, so just assume it must be okay as is.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Otis#Lasting_success
It’s not technically illegal to have those conversations, but it’s in some kind of a grey area, because if you’re having conversations like those; the immediate question is of course why…it’s tough to find reasons to bring up that topic other than the obvious.
What do you mean? They got what they wanted, more or less. They're a group of people organized around an idea, figured they weren't getting attention, so they went to look for a way to get some. That's all there is to it.
I think you're expecting some sort of special significance here. No, it's not complicated or even special.
It's the threat of law enforcement that leads people who run websites to remove illegal content.
Generically (to, say, please advertisers) that is an expectation that sites are going to be proactive about removing offensive (or illegal) material. Simply responding on a "whack-a-mole" basis is not good enough. I ran a site that had something like 1-in-10,000 offensive (not illegal... but images of dead nazis, people with terrible tumors on their genitals, etc.) images and that was not clean enough for Adsense. From the viewpoint of quality control, particularly the Deming viewpoint of statistical quality control, it is an absolute bear of a problem to find offensive images at that level -- and look at how many people write a paper about some A.I. program that gets 70% accuracy is state of the art.
I don't think it's even anonymity, for some, indirect communication is enough: I once had a roommate who would leave unpleasant messages on the answering machine, but would be perfectly nice in person (on the same topic, even).
That’s a nice outcome, but also leave you vulnerable to outsiders deciding to ruin your sub by flooding it with discussions of table tennis or racism or arguing about moderation.
But you make a good point if the differences between the OP and Reddit.
On its own it doesn't. If you need to recruit people to your cause though you need people to know you exist and there's somewhere they can join.
> Giving up saving the planet for the goal of getting attention is fundamentally nihilistic.
Er, how are they giving up?
What they're doing is regularly shouting "Save the planet!" at people. Only this time they picked a weirder way to do it, because nobody was paying attention to the more normal ways they had to say it.
And also, whether they're justified or not, it doesn't really matter to he point. ACX's proposal =/= subreddits.
"Reddit has a paid team called Anti-Evil Operations (part of the "Trust" & "Safety" team) which goes around permanently banning accounts for saying bad words. We made automod block them so you don't lose your account for saying a word and getting reported. It's not our rule, it's the entire website now, we're just trying to look out for our people. Sorry."
It's got to me more like this.
You have to tell the ESG people that what matters about Exxon Mobil is (1) they have to stop fact investing in producing oil that other people burn, (2) it wouldn't matter if they became a "net zero" company by pumping CO₂ from their oil refineries in the ground and using synthetic fuels in their trucks, (3) it doesn't matter how many women they get on the board.
People who are concerned about climate change in the US should be concerned about institutional reform in the Democratic party. Namely, we shouldn't be in situations like
https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/senate-debate-pen...
where a lunatic that could be beaten by a ham sandwich could win because the Democrats don't think that Pennsylvania deserves a senator who can verbally communicate effectively. (e.g. out of everybody in the state Philadelphia could get somebody in the top 1% of verbal communication skills as a Senator, why do they have to get somebody who is disabled?)
Again, I think you're under the impression that this particular event was supposed to be in some way Meaningful. Part of some grand strategy or a big movement or something. I'm telling you it's not.
As far as I can tell, https://juststopoil.org came into existence around February this year. They're just a small, new group formed around opposition to Big Oil that's trying to make some noise. This paintings thing is attempt #25, and it just happens to be weird enough to make the news, but not fundamentally different to the 24 that came before it.
In fact they tried previously gluing themselves to microphone at a news agency:
https://juststopoil.org/2022/04/03/just-stop-oil-supporter-g...
I see no indication that this is part of some grand strategy from the Democrats or something. No, it's just a small group doing a weird thing and getting news coverage because weird thing is weird.
Edit: And in fact, Just Stop Oil is UK based, so they have nothing to do with the US Democrats or Pennsylvania.
This is an important point, I think. There's a generational aspect to this. Those of us who came of age prior to the internet (and especially social media) being ubiquitous don't really have an expectation that we're owed a forum where we can just say anything that's on our mind. As one of those olds, whenever I hear people complaining about "censorship" on whatever social media platform it kind of sounds entitled to my ears. We didn't expect to have a platform prior to about 2005 or so. We didn't have 'followers'. We discussed politics with a few friends in a bar over drinks. But now so many people seem to expect these private companies to provide them with a platform where they should be able to say whatever they want. Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee you a platform for that speech.
If it's helpful, this organization has in fact actively sabotaged oil infrastructure in the past to protest and no one gave a single shit. They had a whole week where they decommissioned several pumps back in August. I think its helpful instead of asking "why don't they <obvious>" to assume someone has already tried it.
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.
It wasn't supposed to be that way. Even the Reddiquette page told people not to downvote simply because they disagree. But nobody reads Reddiquette, and these days most redditors think disagreement is the purpose of downvotes.
That being said, you'd have to be naive to think downvoting for disagreement doesn't happen on HN.
> post throttling
This is only a thing for new accounts as an anti-spam measure.
> over zealous moderators banning people for wrongthink
I think it's wrong to blame reddit for this. This will be a problem on ANY site that allows users to create their own communities within it.
The key point the author of the article makes is the difference between moderation and censorship: you can opt-in to see moderated content, but you're unilaterally prevented from seeing censored content.
What Reddit does (removing posts, comments, banning accounts) falls under the definition of censorship here -- within the platform itself, obviously.
So is trying to destroy cultural heritage. I see no qualitative difference between trying to deface a Vermeer and blowing up the Afghan Stone Buddhas.
You can. But you'll still have people screaming about how they were actually silenced for their political views. Which is exactly the situation we have today.
Now, like electricity and water, it's become so fundamentally entwined with modern living that folks see it (maybe rightfully) as a common right.
edit: I'm not sure it's generational as much - the folks complaining about it the loudest seem to be older, non-technical folks.
Mass taggers have historically been abused to ban or shadow-ban users who've posted in "bad" subreddits.
If you argued with someone in r/the Donald, you'd magically be unable to participate in a large swath of unrelated communities. Trying to appeal the bans would often result in you being permanently muted or receiving a snarky response from the mods saying it's your fault for engaging in said 'bad' communities.
It's because there are assholes everywhere. They are small in number, but they are pretty evenly spread throughout the population. Regardless of ethnicity, socio-economic status, age or any other demographic detail, they are everywhere.
And they always have been, and likely always will be.
I suppose that social media dynamic allows them to disproportionately visit their douchebaggery on the rest of us, but that's not "Eternal September." That's just humanity.
It doesn't feel like it's fundamentally entwined like electricity or water - It would be tough to live without electricity or water. But I live just fine without social media - in fact, I think my quality of life has gone up after deleting my twitter account back in May. And to a large degree, I think we're worse off as a society than we were prior to the emergence of social media.
More transparent systems with less suppression or banning are clearly possible, but commercial entities don't want to hold themselves to strict rules which is why they keep the rules and processes opaque. This same trend is seen in both social media and app stores.
Probably were, since as far as I can tell it's a stunt with no real intent to destroy anything.
> and at least in one case glued themselves to a 16th century picture frame, itself a priceless cultural artefact.
That's definitely not good.
There were some grassroots efforts around 2015 to make the mod log public and transparent (so it'd say what was removed, by who, and optionally why), but it was unfortunately opt-in and never gained large adoption.
This is 99% of Reddit though.