Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

https://old.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/hddnml/the_warnings_have_changed_into_bannings/

by s9w • 6 years ago

420 357 6 years ago

old.reddit.com

manfredo4• 6 years ago

Reddit admin message:

Your account has been suspended from for breaking the rules. Your account has been suspended for 3 day(s).
> You recently upvoted a post or comment that was determined to be against our policies. Abusive content is not acceptable on Reddit nor is engaging with it. Please be thoughful about the content that you interact with.

Interestingly nothing in the Reddit policies seems to mention voting or engaging with content: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy

Simulacra• 6 years ago

As well, punishing someone for Engagement without malice, which you later determined to violate policy to, is a bit obtuse.

s9w4• 6 years ago

They officially announced this three months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/sprin...

Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities.

Until now that has mostly been warnings for posting in "bad" subs. Now after most of those are gone I guess it's time for the next phase.

manfredo4• 6 years ago

Full message:

I’d like to share an update about our thinking around quarantined communities.
When we expanded our quarantine policy, we created an appeals process for sanctioned communities. One of the goals was to “force subscribers to reconsider their behavior and incentivize moderators to make changes.” While the policy attempted to hold moderators more accountable for enforcing healthier rules and norms, it didn’t address the role that each member plays in the health of their community.
Today, we’re making an update to address this gap: Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities.

This seems strange to me. If this content is violating reddit's policies then why don't they ban them? It seems awkward to have this middle ground of "semi-banned" content where users get suspensions if they interact with it too much. Why create these invisible land-mines for users? I imagine it's because banning this content outright would make Reddit admins appear even more biased, or because the content doesn't actually violate any policies but puts off advertisers.

abtom• 6 years ago

This is super stupid. If they're so against the content why allow it to exist in the first place?

defertoreptar• 6 years ago

Whether they intended it this way or not, users will now be worried they're upvoting the "wrong" thing and will be less likely to vote unpopular opinions and political views, just in case.

jdashg• 6 years ago

I imagine this is reactive, since they can't proactively moderate their content. When they do get around to moderating (like checking reported comments), they can then penalize people who promoted the unacceptable content.

I think there should indeed be penalties for upvoting e.g. death threats.

goodluckchuck2• 6 years ago

Leaving the content up allows Reddit to track users' engagement and categorize/map their viewpoints.

humblebee• 6 years ago

They are trying to train their user base to moderate content correctly. If it's against the sites policy, users should down-vote the content and report it.

NietTim2• 6 years ago

That message is so stupid. What's there to learn from the punishment if you don't know what you did wrong?

marcusverus• 6 years ago

This actually strikes me as an intelligent (albeit Orwellian) approach to rules enforcement.

If Reddit's goal is to encourage broader self-censorship of wrong-think, the message makes perfect sense. If Reddit informed a user that they broke Rule A, a rational user would learn a specific lesson. They would learn that they can avoid punishment by not interacting with content that breaks (or might break) Rule A.

By punishing without an explicit explanation, a rational user must conclude that, to avoid punishment, they cannot risk interacting with content that breaks (or might break) any of the rules on the website.

folmar• 6 years ago

You learn that you are on the mercy of the platform owner. And that if you withhold enough details of the punishment you can play afool with courts.

SauciestGNU2• 6 years ago

I got one of these warnings, and I've narrowed down what I engaged with to a Hard Times article. Strange times when reddit finds satire too spicy for their site.

UhDev2• 6 years ago

You can make as many accounts as you want, no need to use an email address.

bitxbitxbitcoin• 6 years ago

This actually changed in the last few years.

newacct583• 6 years ago

This isn't a ban, it's a 3 day suspension. And we don't know what content was upvoted, or why it was a against Reddit policy. We do know, however, that Reddit indeed has policies about acceptable content, and most of us seem to agree they're fairly reasonable. So I don't understand the use of the scare quotes in the title.

Why exactly should an upvote, which is publicly visible approval, be different than a comment? I mean... they're both content posted to the site. It's not unreasonable that they be subject to the same rules.

Is the outrage here that votes are supposed to be "anonymous" and this feels like an unmasking of something people felt more comfortable doing "in private"? Is that something we want to protect per se?

This seems like more outrage than meat, honestly. I'd really like to know what the comment was before deciding.

s9w4• 6 years ago

The title wasn't meant to be a scare. The quote from Reddit is "against out policies" which was changed to "against their policies". I believe that's fair. And they already announced that these bans will be permanent in the announcement way back (see other comment for link)

ng12• 6 years ago

Well for one it makes every user individually responsible for identifying content that breaks the rules, and this is very hard given Reddit's history of arbitrarily enforcing the rules.

zeveb• 6 years ago

So, if people don't vote the way the Reddit admins want, the Reddit admins will replace the voters. That is definitely a way to get only the things the Reddit admins want upvoted, upvoted. But it seems to me to be the opposite of free discourse.

I can sympathise with the admins, because a) there are a lot of terrible, toxic people b) there are a lot of bot armies. The latter is probably easiest to combat, but it is still a tough nut to crack. The former is even worse: I imagine that the most engaged users are quite often the users one wishes were least engaged.

It's a tough problem, but Orwellian punishment of wrongthink seems the wrong direction.

btmiller• 6 years ago

Eh but there's a couple reasons in my mind why this might be reasonable.

First, Reddit isn't a 1st Amendment platform; they make the site, they make the rules. Like it or not, that's how it is today.

Second, you have to stop toxicity somewhere; there are a few universal goods we can generally agree upon, things like abuse of animals, underage content, etc. and as long as the slope isn't too slippery beyond that, I think this is an acceptable form of moderation.

tw04• 6 years ago

How so? Calling for someone to be murdered is understandably against their policy. As is doxxing someone. The user accounts that upvote the call for murder or upvote the doxxing details KNOW that the post is against their policy and decided to participate anyway.

I hate how these conversations always devolve to "well they're just trying to control what everyone says!" as if it's black and white and not shades of gray. No, they're trying to prevent assholes from spilling over into people's real lives, because the alternative is becoming 4chan. Where all that "upvoted" content results in ACTUAL PEOPLE BEING KILLED.

I hope most people on HN don't agree with the train of thought that websites have no duty to their fellow man to not normalize hate speech. "Where does it stop" - it stops at not doxxing people and not calling for people to be murdered, per their TOS.

chippy• 6 years ago

Yes, it's shades of gray.

For example, lets compare a similar service. Twitter is currently censoring some of the President of the US's tweets. They were not doing that a few months ago. So it's not black and white where twitter and acceptability is, and, like with society, it changes over time. Thus, people are concerned that merely interacting with something is enough to be labelled anathema, because of the shades of gray.

bcrosby95• 6 years ago

https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy

Calling for murder and doxxing isn't the only thing against the content policy. Lots of those policies will have a very subjective line in the sand.

deft• 6 years ago

Theres no upvoting on 4chan and bumping a thread (or on reddit upvoting) does not kill and cannot kill anyone. The people making the threads end up killing people (very rarely) not the randoms that reply (or upvote).

You don't even know what the account upvoted, and upvoting isn't hate speech (or calling for someone to be murdered). Do you have a bunch of unknown information on this or are you just defending reddit's continued slide to dystopian horror for no reason?

jlawson5• 6 years ago

You're forming a motte and bailey argument here... inside another motte and bailey argument.

Motte #1: doxxing, calls to murder specific individuals

Bailey #1: 'hate speech'.

And your bailey itself is a motte and bailey!

Motte #2: speech that incites violence or hate against a given group

Bailey #2: "All lives matter", "It's ok to be white" banned, "#killallmen", "all white people are racist" Ok.

It's always like this. I'd love a pro-censorship advocate to actually advocate what they want instead of endlessly cloaking it in these sorts of smokescreens and sneer labels. If 'hate speech' ever defended all people equally it wouldn't get so much pushback as a concept, but it was always a special protection for groups favored by those in power. Address that.

superflit• 6 years ago

Your discourse seems a bit like "hate speech" and you implying that:

"That is definitely a way to get only the things the Reddit admins want upvoted,"

Feels like a bigoted conspiracy theory. Reddit admins are not a cohesive group of people and this blanket statement hurts.

Your are suspended to comment here.

Please think of the children.

basch3• 6 years ago

"Reddit admins are not a cohesive group of people."

What does that mean? They are all paid employees of the same company, they have leadership, common goals, and accountability up the chain.

Is that part of the /s or commentary within the post?

cheschire2• 6 years ago

And people downvote you as a disagreement button on this site instead of qualifying their opinion in words.

But you’re not wrong in your opinion and allowing downvotes without requiring a response encourages groupthink as well.

But where’s the line? Do we as society mandate freedom of speech on all private platforms? Are downvotes on HN protected speech?

You’re right that it’s a tough problem. We are at an inflection point right now. The boundaries of speech freedoms for the next century are being defined right now.

ryankemper2• 6 years ago

Even more concerning than using downvote as a disagree button is flagging as a disagree button. It's happened to me many times where my good-faith comments have been flagged due to advocating a minority position (specifically, that the COVID-19 lockdown is harmful, just to give context) and I have/had to e-mail Dang to get a human to look at the flagged comments and determine if they were actually violating a guideline.

rplst8• 6 years ago

Freedom of speech is only about whether what you say can be used against you for government persecution (other than admitting to a crime to an officer of the law).

Therefore, I don't think we can say that posts and replies on the websites hosted by private companies can be considered protected speech.

That said, treating upvotes and downvotes in the same way as the text in a post or reply is a pretty bad idea IMHO.

kps3• 6 years ago

VC News is basically a Reddit clone to show off pg's then-up-and-coming toy language.

• Discourages long-running discussions by burying (and ultimately locking) older content

• Discourages coversation in favour of fire-and-forget comments by making it impractical to continue where you left off

• Gamification of content

• Numerically larger groups can bury content they would prefer others not see

— but slightly worse —

• No notification of replies, making actual discussion impractical

• Extra privileges for conformity (downvoting, vouching)

It doesn't match what pg wrote in http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html but actions speak louder than words.

walrus01• 6 years ago

Eventually reddit will go the way of digg and fade into irrelevance.

godzillabrennus2• 6 years ago

They’ve been working hard at that for a while.

The last I heard they still weren’t profitable.

justaman• 6 years ago

Can't happen soon enough. The days where forums were the defacto place for discussion were just better. The communities would self-police and alternative opinions weren't suppressed nearly as easily. Reddit is a meme slideshow, not a place for discussion.

Semaphor• 6 years ago

You just have to be in the proper small subreddits. Reddit is where I get the highest quality of discussion (especially since Covid-19 as small subreddits stayed small but HN went downwards)

gnulinux3• 6 years ago

I don't want to register zillions of forums and manage my passwords. I contribute to hundreds of subreddits. If reddit dies I'll find a replacement like reddit and move on.

ApolloFortyNine2• 6 years ago

The biggest hit against reddit is that every large sub has to resort to weekly discussion posts/tagging every post so people can filter, simply because of the way subreddits are forced to be laid out.

A normal forum will have different sections to discuss everything even mildly related to the overarching topic, and a number of areas to talk about things not related to the topic. But Reddit doesn't have those features, so subs have to resort to these half measures or allow multiple daily posts about the same 5 topics.

wvenable• 6 years ago

The long tail of reddit is the same as forums. I'm subscribed a bunch of niche subreddits for products I own, projects, etc and it's just like forums except with a measure of consistency and features that I appreciate. These communities are self-policed the same as any other forum.

The problem with reddit isn't technical, it's human. A large group of people will ruin literally anything.

muyuu7• 6 years ago

It's a matter of scale. As size grows, rules become harder to enforce and the amount of comments that would derail conversations sky-rocket. Living under the same rules globally, esp. across ideologies and world-views, is a disaster for everyone.

psychometry5• 6 years ago

Digg trying did not lose to reddit by trying to improve their platform by banning hateful content and low-quality users, nor did reddit win by being a haven for such content.

root_axis9• 6 years ago

True of every website eventually, but if data is any indication that won't be happening any time soon.

staycoolboy2• 6 years ago

I read digg multiple times a day.

It is far better than it was over a decade ago.

As an aggregator, it is nearly perfectly aligned with my interests (except for the year they spent heavily promoting Jimmy Fallon).

haunter4• 6 years ago

That doesn't really say anything.

I read CNN multiple times a day.

As a news site, it is nearly perfectly aligned with my interests.

Krasnol• 6 years ago

I see people writing this for years now. I guess at some point in history it will become true but I don't see a steep decline that would justify it atm.

beams_of_light• 6 years ago

Digg dug their own grave with the sweeping changes that drove everyone to reddit.

dmart• 6 years ago

I don't understand why you would even publicize this. Just stop counting those users' votes, if that's what you want to do?

There's enough fuzz in the vote counts that no one would notice, and you wouldn't have any controversy on your hands.

jaywalk• 6 years ago

I can think of a few reasons to publicize this, but none of them have anything to do with avoiding controversy.

tedajax• 6 years ago

I don't think avoiding controversy should be the goal.

psychometry5• 6 years ago

The point is that the users who are upvoting this kind of content will stay on the site if they think their votes matter. Reddit clearly would rather they leave entirely, and this is a good way to encourage racists/misogynists/incels/whoever to find another platform.

bradlys• 6 years ago

It happens for far left content as well. I don’t think it’s limited to hateful content. At least, that’s what I’ve read from the chapotraphouse subreddit. Example being upvoting some far left stuff in r/politics.

manigandham2• 6 years ago

It’s a good way to encourage any user at all to leave.

finnthehuman• 6 years ago

I don't understand why you would even publicize this. Just stop counting those users' votes, if that's what you want to do?

Those user's votes don't matter, scaring the userbase into narrowing their overton windows of acceptable reddit voting is what matters.

More broadly Reddit wants to be seen as taking action. The incentive structure facing that company rewards loudly making a slight improvement to the site over quietly making a huge improvement.

godzillabrennus2• 6 years ago

There is an alternative to the group think/hive mind called https://gab.com/ but it’s also a cesspool or horrible people sharing horrible ideas.

Not sure what makes sense.

psychometry5• 6 years ago

This is exactly what reddit would become if they weren't taking steps to deal with racism and other forms of hate speech.

s3r3nity• 6 years ago

it’s also a cesspool or horrible people sharing horrible ideas.

I tend to follow Voltaire's ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.' I agree with your assessment of the quality of ideas thrown around there, but I'd prefer a world where the internet allowed sites like that to exist, rather than one that's increasingly owned & distributed by giant corporate conglomerates with significant oversight into the discussion of its members, lest you get assigned to "re-education camps" or some BS like that.

And let's not pretend that Reddit doesn't want to be one of those giant conglomerates...

cthalupa7• 6 years ago

There's nothing wrong with Reddit not wanting to facilitate and provide a platform for that sort of content, though.

It's a massively popular site with mainstream appeal. They don't want to let that popularity and audience be taken advantage of to spread ideas that are hateful and likely to incite violence.

Quarantined subreddits are dumb, but it's a sign that their afraid of the backlash of outright banning them - they are already getting accused of heavy handed censorship.

If people want to talk about that stuff, then yeah, go to gab and voat and ruqqus or 8chan or other sites that allow for it. There's no shortage of places on the internet to talk about anything you want. Reddit doesn't have to be one of them.

yardie• 6 years ago

I'd prefer a world where the internet allowed sites like that to exist

So these alt sites spring up all the time (8chan, 4chan, ruqqus, voat). No one has taken those sites off the night. And the public is free to vote with their time, clicks, and money on whether they support these sites.

notkaiho• 6 years ago

So it's a hive mind and group think but with terrible people instead?

stronglikedan• 6 years ago

terrible people instead

Just different terrible people from the terrible people who dominate reddit is all.

typon• 6 years ago

Yes that's right. They won't ban you for having non-terrible opinions, but they'll downvote you into non-existence. I tried participating in voat for a couple of days before leaving forever.

haunter4• 6 years ago

So not so different from /r/politics then?

"Orange man bad" 320k upvotes, front page

cthalupa7• 6 years ago

but it’s also a cesspool or horrible people sharing horrible ideas

This is not coincidental. The same thing happened with Voat, the same thing is happening with Ruqqus.

I'm sure some not-awful stuff will end up as collateral damage here, but Reddit is attempting to target the communities of people that are promoting and engaging in some pretty heinous activities and lines of thought. When those are the people leaving to make a new platform where they won't be censored, that's the content that takes up the mindshare on those websites.

MaxBarraclough• 6 years ago

same thing is happening with Ruqqus

Can confirm. Checked out Ruqqus out of curiosity. Racist content right there on the homepage.

muyuu7• 6 years ago

The presence of content that is extremely inadmissible for Big Tech is a good sign in my book. It's very easy to select the type of content you actually want to see.

freeone3000• 6 years ago

This is what happens. Banned content by reddit policies is hate speech, far-right politics, and targeted hate. People who leave reddit for somewhere else do so because... they want to do those things, and can't. It's no wonder that any forum they then choose would become dominated by those ideas, that's the entire point.

SauciestGNU2• 6 years ago

Lots of left wing politics receive these inbox scolds too, it seems to affect hate speech, harassment, and also political ideologies outside of the advertiser comfort zone.

stevebmark• 6 years ago

It continuously baffles me that some people don't learn from unmoderated online communities. They become dens of bigotry, doxing, attack mobs, racism, misogyny. Saying your site is driven only by "free speech" is the cowardly reply that refuses to stand up to these things.

s9w4• 6 years ago

It's not mandatory to be against the things that you listed. Many people enjoy reading and talking about things they're legally allowed to.

kofejnik• 6 years ago

bigotry, doxing, attack mobs

Reddit is currently full of these, and it's apparently Ok when it comes from correct side of political spectrum

rabuse3• 6 years ago

I like the ability to see the discourse from all sides of the spectrum (reddit, voat, worldstar, etc.) I'd rather not have the platform dictate what they "think" is going to offend me.

root_axis9• 6 years ago

Seems a little extreme, but the overall logic seems sound from a moderation perspective. If you have users that consistently upvote content that violates the TOS inside of quarantined subreddits its probably a sign that they're a trouble-maker with respect to the site guidelines.

torben-friis2• 6 years ago

I don't really get reddit's efforts to clean their site.

They sometimes come up with measures like this, while routinely ignoring the development of horrible communities that they're aware of (since some users take any possible opportunity to mention them to the admins and are met with silence or half measures).

They even came up with the concept of quarantined subreddits. I honestly can't think of a single honest reason for them existing. Once you've deemed a community so harmful that you don't want people accidentally stumbling into it, why go out of your way to allow it to exist behind a curtain, instead of just outright banning it (unless you want to support it discreetly).

To be clear, I'm not accusing reddit admins of shadily supporting horrible communities. I'm just saying that, from the perspective of a user that sees them fight the battle, they're doing it so badly that it almost seems they don't want to win, and I wonder what's happening behind the scenes for that to happen.

unethical_ban• 6 years ago

If you let a bad community be bad in their dark corner, they won't spread as easily to the rest of the site. You can easily see that the accounts are toxic by seeing that they participate in garbage communities. And it's a great honeypot for authorities, be it for political astroturfing and nationstate stuff, or for borderline-illegal content.

0-_-0• 6 years ago

If you let a bad community be bad in their dark corner, they won't spread as easily to the rest of the site.

I suspect this is the reason. I observed the opposite, a certain type of content disappearing after a separate comunity was created for it.

buboard3• 6 years ago

Because competitors exist

hombre_fatal• 6 years ago

Not really. And forcing all of your unwanted/toxic subreddits to Reddit clones only damns them from ever gaining traction.

Take a look: https://voat.co/

gsich• 6 years ago

You mean 4chan/8ch?

ed25519FUUU• 6 years ago

The missing component of your thought process is who, exactly, deems subreddits not worthy of existence. Many people view pornography as an extremely damaging problem and addiction, would you want all 18+ subreddits removes because somebody “can’t think of a single honest reason for them existing”?

rtsil• 6 years ago

who, exactly, deems subreddits not worthy of existence.

That would be the company which owns reddit, through the admins. Is it fair? No, it isn't, but reddit has no requirement to be fair (although it would be nice if it was).

torben-friis2• 6 years ago

The missing component of your thought process is who, exactly, deems subreddits not worthy of existence.

The same people that deems them worth quarantining, presumably.

We could have a debate of the benefits and drawbacks of moderation, but by the time you have quarantines in place, the ship of not considering yourself a moderator has long sailed, which is why it doesn't make sense for me as a measure.

JohnBooty3• 6 years ago

Ten years ago I would have said, "No censorship. Turn on the firehose of information, and let me choose what's 'acceptable' and what's not."

No more.

That presumes some sort of equal playing field and a meritocracy of ideas.

That's clearly not the case. The reality is that good-faith content takes more effort than bad-faith content.

The 2016 US Election in particular showed us what happens when a platform takes a "hands off" approach - platforms become absolutely saturated with false, hateful information... much of it produced by large and even state-level organizations.

It's not just evident when it comes to political content.

Craigslist. Amazon. Etc. None of these platforms work with a completely laissez-faire approach on behalf of the platform owners. To think otherwise is utterly naive.

Platforms need to curate. There's no other way. Yes, this means we will need to place trust in those platforms and monitor their curation. Platforms will, in turn, have an obligation to be transparent w.r.t. how they curate.

henriquez• 6 years ago

I think it was set up (or at least supported for this long) mainly due to thedonald subreddit. The admins were too weak-willed to outright ban that subreddit and deal with the PR and political fallout, but they wanted to prevent those posts from filtering up to the main site. Now that all the Trump people have left reddit I would guess that the concept of “quarantine” is no longer needed and goes away soon, in favor of simply banning subreddits. But we can all rest easy knowing that we can still watch people die or all sorts of weird porn - reddit has really cleaned up their act.

MisterTea• 6 years ago

Once you've deemed a community so harmful that you don't want people accidentally stumbling into it, why go out of your way to allow it to exist behind a curtain, instead of just outright banning it (unless you want to support it discreetly).

Perhaps this is a way to sidestep claims of censorship. Deleting subs can embolden some community themes and messages by allowing them to play victim of censorship and bolster claims of conspiracy via attacks from left/right/government/lizard people. So let them carry on while alerting people of what lies ahead.

TheAdamAndChe• 6 years ago

It also keeps people from flooding into the rest of Reddit. When /r/fatpeoplehate was banned, their users flooded and spammed most other subreddits.

stingraycharles• 6 years ago

This is most definitely the case. The outrage inside Reddit is massive when there are signs of censorship, even if it’s just a very vocal minority: they set the tone.

Keeping this group of people happy, while at the same time trying to maintain a somewhat “clean” site, is a delicate balancing act. I am certain that quarantined subreddits is a result of this.

MattGaiser3• 6 years ago

Reddit is an anonymous website, in a unique way that Facebook, Twitter, and even Hacker News (simply because of the small community) are not.

A lot of its success is built on content which is not as acceptable as one might desire. See what happened to Tumblr when they cracked down.

salawat• 6 years ago

Reddit isn't even remotely anonymous. Pseudonymous at best. Anonymous forums are completely incompatible with user identity centric moderation mechanisms (Karma, Gold, rep etc...)

Once you assign usernames and attach any type of value counter to an account, you've effectively dumped true anonymity out the window due to essentially creating a pseudonymic marketplace.

People may think "How pseudonymous do you need to be?" In today's world? Very. Especially given the propensity for deplatforming and reputation based social warfare.

cperciva• 6 years ago

I think quarantined subreddits play the same role as "NSFW" tagging on posts: They're not banned, but it improves the user experience to not see them by accident.

Spivak5• 6 years ago

Yeah, but it's always the hate subreddits that make the headlines when they're quarantined.

Scoundreller5• 6 years ago

There is a marijuana related subreddit that is geo-banned from Canadian IPs.

Reddit just says “This content has been restricted in your country in response to a legal request.

Geoblocked in Canada due to General legal request”

Is there any way to push Reddit to disclose who sent the request?

I’d love to followup with that agency, but we have a lot of police services in Canada, if it was one.

MattGaiser3• 6 years ago

From Canadian IPs? It is legal here now, so that is odd.

kps3• 6 years ago

You seem to have forgotten to name the subreddit.

Reddit stopped copying Lumen (Chilling Effects) around 5 years ago.

gotoeleven• 6 years ago

I think they just want to have their cake and eat it too, so to speak, like everyone else.

For some people free speech is like riding the train: when you reach your stop, you get off.

numpad02• 6 years ago

Probably they profit from horrible communities and lose on some, and there are no clear distinction between the two, so they started to quarantine less profitable ones to stigmatize before banning them.

They’re profiting off anger so “old” ones being angry has no downsides.

haunter4• 6 years ago

Probably they profit from horrible communities

There are no ads in quarantined subs and you can't buy any reddit awards to gift to others

klodolph2• 6 years ago

My take on quarantined subreddits is that it’s just a tool to remove certain communities from the mobile app so they don’t get in trouble with Apple / Google (mostly Apple, I’m sure).

Spivak5• 6 years ago

And also how to deal with communities that should absolutely not be spilling over into the rest of Reddit. Reddit, I think rightfully, quarantines a lot of ED related subreddits.

tenebrisalietum• 6 years ago

I think there's something to this, because on at least the iOS app, a quarantined subreddit basically looks like it doesn't exist at all, on the phone app.

koheripbal• 6 years ago

...and also how to avoid the media talking about it.

downerending3• 6 years ago

My impression is the reason is that there really isn't widespread agreement on the harmfulness of such communities, so they're sort of trying to split the middle. And perhaps also to advocate for seeing them as awful, per corporate sentiment.

The principal example that comes to mind is TD, which seems more obnoxious and tasteless than some sort of evil.

Subs that truly are beyond the pale by wide consensus seem to get dropped immediately and without objection.

As to not wanting to win, well, yes, dropping everything controversial means losing a lot of page-hits, and as a business, they're likely wary.

throwaway_USD• 6 years ago

I don't really get reddit's efforts to clean their site.

You don't get why a online forum might have an interest in ensuring every other post isn't a dick pic?

If you can understand that, maybe you don't, then you DO understand their interest in moderating their own website whether or not you agree with their moderation standards in practice. A dick pic may be obvious to you...but so long as the picture depicts someone >18yo then it is legal and free speech.

They sometimes come up with measures like this, while routinely ignoring the development of horrible communities that they're aware of...

Again isn't it their right to determine what forums/threads dick pics may in fact be appropriate and which threads forums they aren't and should be moderated/removed?

lovegoblin• 6 years ago

You don't get why a online forum might have an interest in ensuring every other post isn't a dick pic?

The confusing part is not that they're attempting to clean the site - it's their ineffective, half-assed ways of doing it.

Meekro• 6 years ago

Once you've deemed a community so harmful that you don't want people accidentally stumbling into it, why go out of your way to allow it to exist behind a curtain

Since we all know we're talking about The_Donald, I'll just mention them specifically. Alexa traffic data considers Reddit the #6 website in the US -- they are huge, and their major actions will be noticed. If they ban their top pro-Trump community, Fox News will be talking about it later that day. Reddit execs will be answering questions in front of the US Senate a week later. Phrases like "election interference" will be thrown around. Nobody wants that.

So instead they do it subtly: quarantine The_Donald, which means they don't show up in site-wide lists, can't be accessed through the mobile app, and can't be indexed by search engines. This stems their growth. Later, start replacing their moderators. Eventually you've taken it over and shut it down, and they leave. Now if Tucker Carlson wants to tell his audience about it, he has to explain to a bunch of 60-somethings what a "forum moderator" is. Not happening.

Honestly, I think what they did worked out best for everyone. Reddit is happy to be rid of them, and they're happy with their new website, TheDonald.win. Everybody wins.

haunter4• 6 years ago

But the sub doesn't "exist" for months, no new posts

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/new/

There is a pinned mod message which leads you to the new site but that's entirely out of reddit

naravara• 6 years ago

They sometimes come up with measures like this, while routinely ignoring the development of horrible communities that they're aware of (since some users take any possible opportunity to mention them to the admins and are met with silence or half measures).

I think their main challenge is they have a cultural/temperamental resistance to making decisions on a case-by-case basis. Any time there is a problem it seems like they try to overgeneralize and come up with a sort of rule or heuristic that can apply in every case and situation. But since the "toxicity" of a community is usually more subtle than that they end up always being way too reactive.

falcolas• 6 years ago

I don't really get reddit's efforts to clean their site.

That's easy - advertising.

The same reason YouTube cleaned up it's act. And Gifycat. And a dozen other sites who found themselves at the wrong end of their advertiser's ire.

Shivetya• 6 years ago

What is going on at Reddit is that the cancel culture has found how to take down content they do not find acceptable and worse persecute those whose content they have taken down or disagree with.

So, using a combination of email blasts, instant messaging, and more, these groups focus down a site or individual. This can involve simple brigade type tactics against posted comments and stories, complete with abusing the site reporting process, to flag users and content they disagree with. Sometimes it requires pressuring those higher up with public shaming for permitting something they may not be aware of by use of the common innuendo of if they don't take action they agree with all the hateful, if any, aspects of the target.

When any social site becomes large enough to receive mentions on other sites and media it immediately becomes a target of groups seeking to control the message and attack those who do not wholly support that message. Even minor disagreements can be sufficient to attract ire.

the moral majority is an authoritarian regime and it will have a further damning effect than any feared religious right that people constantly brought up as an internet or social bogeyman.

the very fact they now state ideas they don't agree with as making them physically uncomfortable to the point they declare if violence should scare anyone. this is code for saying no limits are required to remove the threat.

1984 isn't government oppressing people, it is people oppressing people

* btw - only reddit you can be banned from reddits you never visited for activity on another sub (including just voting apparently)

dredmorbius6• 6 years ago

The bans, as announced in Reddit's annual Transparency Report this past February, apply specifically to actions in quarantined subreddits:

Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities.

https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/sprin...

Quarantines offer greater flexibility in monitoring and management, with fair warning to members.

d1zzy• 6 years ago

They even came up with the concept of quarantined subreddits. I honestly can't think of a single honest reason for them existing. Once you've deemed a community so harmful that you don't want people accidentally stumbling into it, why go out of your way to allow it to exist behind a curtain, instead of just outright banning it (unless you want to support it discreetly).

In what world, refusing to ban something from your online platform is equivalent to "supporting it" (discreetly)? Reddit is a business, the business of getting ad money for providing an open discussion forum. They are free to decide what they host and what they not but simply hosting something (which in their case means, doing business with people that post that content) doesn't mean they support it. Supporting something is not the opposite of not supporting it.

It's like saying that Amazon _supports_ pornography because AWS allows to host pornographic content.

kache_2• 6 years ago

Reddit has been compromised with actors who do not have free speech in their best interest. The other day there was an illuminating ask reddit post about transexuals who decided to transition back and their experiences. That post got promptly removed by moderators; even though there was no hateful content within it at all. They effectively silenced the transexual population due to an ever so slight conflict of ideology.

To think that the reddit administrators would go so far as to ban people for even interacting with content that THEY deem problematic.

Reddit is dead and no one I know uses it anymore.

EDIT: - In case anyone is interested; here is the censored post that I was referring to https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/h9ctho/serious_a...

psychometry5• 6 years ago

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

dageshi3• 6 years ago

I imagine the mods have a fairly finely tuned sense of which threads will turn into a shitstorm and don't give a fuck about pre-emptively killing them.

And honestly I WISH nobody used reddit anymore, maybe it could roll back 10 years when it was frankly more fun, but it sure seems like more people than ever are using it.

dvtrn2• 6 years ago

I imagine the mods have a fairly finely tuned sense of which threads will turn into a shitstorm and don't give a fuck about pre-emptively killing them.

How do we feel about pre-emptive moderation? Is it warranted? Is it warranted every time? Only certain topics?

Spivak5• 6 years ago

I 100% support Reddit killing any thread in a popular subreddit about anyone trans or the trans community preemptively because every single thread turns into an absolute dumpster fire. Reddit on the whole shows a very different side whenever those kinds of threads show up.

yiyus• 6 years ago

Many of the oldest users (me included) have just moved from the more general subreddits, where those shitstorms happen, into more and more specialized subreddits. But I miss the old reddit too.

sukilot• 6 years ago

How is it censored? There is a comment on that post with 5000 upvotes.

kache_2• 6 years ago

It was removed from the front page; therefore culling any more engagement with the post.

See the following comment https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/h9ctho/serious_a...

kaybe• 6 years ago

There is a whole subreddit about this topic however.

https://www.reddit.com/r/detrans/

centimeter• 6 years ago

I don't think "reddit is dead", but I do think the relatively intelligent and interesting userbase that was there ~10 years ago has been almost entirely displaced by clickbait and propaganda targeted at the now mostly middlingly-intelligent read-only userbase.

This almost inevitably happens when a site gets popular enough. There are only so many intelligent people actively posting on the internet, and it's impossible to have a site with 100,000 users (let alone the >400,000,000 of Reddit) with a high fraction of them providing good content.

Certainly the heavy-handed censorship of the Reddit administration is a disincentive for people who are interested in topics at the edges of the overton window (i.e. most of the interesting people online).

elicash3• 6 years ago

Reddits values aren't the same as yours.

This isn't a bad thing. It's not like Reddit has monopoly powers. Some people want to belong to communities that have agreed-upon values.

luckylion5• 6 years ago

But the community would be a subreddit, not the site reddit.com, which is far too heterogeneous to be considered some kind of community.

Fogest5• 6 years ago

The post you are referring to was deleted by the user who made the post not the mods....

And that doesn't even relate to this topic as what you're referring to is on a subreddit basis and is determined by a set of volunteer mods not reddit admins.

goodluckchuck2• 6 years ago

The post you are referring to was deleted by the user...

How do we know that? The body just says [removed] and the user is marked as [deleted].

If the admins can alter the content of your posts, then surely they can delete / remove content and have it show whatever they choose.

elpocko3• 6 years ago

The post you are referring to was deleted by the user who made the post not the mods....

Not true. The post body says [removed]. If the user deleted it, it would say [deleted].

darepublic• 6 years ago

The fact that r/teenagers is often more open minded and mature than "important" subreddits like news and politics speaks volumes

conradfr• 6 years ago

Not exactly the same thing but the other day I got banned from r/ADHD for a (moderate from my POV) comment about pronouns.

The mod then gloated about banning dozens of people other this and that "LGBTQIA+ people run the subreddit", and that "the lack of discrimination (...) for being cis or being white or being straight or being a man overshadows any discrimination they would receive for their adhd"

I don't think that's great moderation given the subject of the subreddit but what can you even do about it that would not be time consuming and pointless?

globular-toast• 6 years ago

The moderation is the worst thing about reddit. Reddit mods are some of the most corrupt people I've encountered but there's no way of telling how much the accepted groupthink is being carefully shaped by the mods.

My model for moderation would be opt-in. I want to be able to see everything by default but be able to see what moderators have flagged as inappropriate. I could then grow to trust some or all of those moderators and just hide everything they flag by default. But I'd always be able to go and quickly evaluate whether I still trust those moderators to be doing the right thing and not just hiding things they disagree with.

surround3• 6 years ago

Do you think there was a way for you avoid this path? Like more understanding parents, other friends, another therapist? Or was it unavoidable?
> It was a combination of things, so I can't say for sure what could have prevented this. More understanding parents definitely would have helped. Other perspectives online, as well. Detransitioners frequently get shut down on the internet, as their experiences are often labeled "transphobia." Which is utter bullshit, in my opinion. Perhaps if I had read a similar story as my own those years back, I would have had second thoughts.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/h9ctho/serious_a...

Ironically, the AskReddit mods contributed to this problem by removing the post.

zozbot234• 6 years ago

Strictly speaking, that's not ironic at all; it's quite in line with what's routinely experienced by people trying to provide accurate and nuanced information about gender dysphoria, gender-dysphoric identity etc., and how to best help folks who may be affected by it.

cmdshiftf4• 6 years ago

Reddit is dead and no one I know uses it anymore.

It's not dead, and I say thankfully because it not being dead retains its state as a containment mechanism of what is easily the worst group of internet users in internet history.

I fear for the day Reddit falls and its userbase spills out looking for another avenue to be comforted with groupthink, newspeak and feel goods for the Brands We Love.

umvi• 6 years ago

Reddit is a collection of communities. I like several of them, and think they are generally good and uplifting, /r/pixelart for instance. Some communities have some pretty bad people in them, but it is impossible to create a social media site at scale without like-minded bad users creating and/or flocking to bad communities.

People are in different stages of life and seek solace in other people having similar experiences. Thus, the sexually frustrated congregate, the depressed congregate, drug enthusiasts (and abusers) congregate, disgruntled ex-<insert organization> congregate, you name it, and angry/sad/anxious people with a shared condition will congregate in search of validation/confidence.

But the opposite is also true - people with a shared hobby/passion/vision congregate as well and create some really fun and uplifting communities.

tekknik2• 6 years ago

Unfortunately this style of moderation has already has spilled out. Even on HN people are insulted for not agreeing with the groupthink, usually as an attempt to bully their point of view off of the internet. Now these people are becoming mods and have real power to suppress counter narratives. This is a systematic problem of people trying to oppress views outside of theirs.

muyuu7• 6 years ago

Yep reddit is increasing its conformity and intolerance to dissent at a very quick pace, maybe because it's election year? But in the past such forays have been one way only.

As the subs where you can speak with some degree of openness are ever smaller, it's not worth the time anymore.

michaelcampbell• 6 years ago

Reddit is dead

This is just absurd.

* https://foundationinc.co/lab/reddit-statistics/

* https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com

and no one I know uses it anymore.

You say this as if it is relevant to your point.

nebulosa• 6 years ago

I think the core of a lot of these issues is the distinction between universal findings which almost always are in favour of "progressive" worldviews and anecdotes which aren't necessarily. The example of trans people detransitioning is a good one here - the general truth that transgender people are very happy with their decision to do so (regardless of what that may mean for them) conflicts with individuals and their anecdotes regarding their (or people they know's) transition.

Whilst there isn't inherently incorrect or morally wrong about detransitioning in itself, often when brought up it can lead a person to an idea which is incorrect - essentially applying the anecdotal evidence of a Reddit thread to all situations.

Thus, moderators of subreddits (and administrators, although I think that whilst it is bad when they do so, it isn't as common as many would believe) feel conflicted on the matter. Should they allow the discussion to continue, almost guaranteeing that somebody is going to form misconceptions from the thread? Or should they shut it down, stifling free speech but at the same time reducing the level of overall animosity towards minorities in the community, and preventing people from forming misconceptions?

Ultimately, I think that it should always really come down on the side of free speech, as long as they aren't being blatantly hostile. However, in my opinion, if we really want to have a positive "marketplace of ideas", as some describe it, we really need to educate people from a young age on logical reasoning, cognitive biases and argumentative fallacies the same way we would teach history, geography or the arts. Whilst I think that's unlikely to happen in our current political climate, given that keeping people uneducated is a very effective way to make them vote for those who make the most compelling surface-level arguments, it seems to be the only good solution for the conflict laid out above.

dcsilver• 6 years ago

Agree. There's just nothing even remotely interesting or real being said on Reddit anymore. I'd honestly rather do anything else. I'd rather stare at a wall with my own thoughts than spend time on Reddit.

Here's an exercise - check out /r/unpopularopinion today. Full of perfectly boring normal opinions like "MTV should go back to showing music videos". All of the content just seems completely fake. There's not an unpopular opinion in sight.

Now go the Wayback Machine and take a look at that same sub from say, three to five years ago (which feels like a short time to me these days). Plenty of deeply unpopular, controversial, thought-provoking opinions. You don't have to like them, but they were real.

crazypython• 6 years ago

This seems like a good way to suppress bots that upvote posts that incite violence or severe verbal abuse or gingoist. However, I am afraid if they start doing this for discussion on COVID-19.

mey• 6 years ago

Is this any different than making Shadow Banning visible to the user who has been Shadow Banned?

gruez• 6 years ago

My long time reddit account (same name as my hn account) was shadowbanned 2 weeks ago. I sent them an appeal and they responded really quick (it was sunday night I believe) saying that my account "got caught by Reddit's spam filter" and unbanned the account. A few days later my account was banned again. I sent an appeal and this time they haven't responded in over a week. Is this possibly related?

dannyw• 6 years ago

Probably not, but my reddit account of 10+ years have been shadowbanned too with no explanation. As a Digg immigrant, I can't wait to migrate away to the next reddit.

marricks2• 6 years ago

An obvious concern of this would be just silencing content which isn't violent or morally wrong but just not wanted in a large commercially viable website. This is obviously polarizing but something I'll be watching is what happens to /r/chapotraphouse.

CTH has some posts that violated a rule but most don't, the admins claim their quarantining was never well communicated and intentionally vague, posting screenshots of lack of communication from mods.

If people get suspended for just participating there without any clear violations of calling for violence/brigading/etc then that's not really a great sign for transparency.

cthalupa7• 6 years ago

CTH has some posts that violated a rule but most don't

I'm not familiar with the CTH situation, or super familiar with CTH in general besides knowing them to be pretty far left on the political spectrum.

But based solely on this line, if their admins are not making enough of an effort in Reddit's eyes to clean up and discourage people from making these rule breaking posts, then the quarantine makes sense. Even if only 1% of .1% of the posts are violating the rules, if the subreddit isn't policing that small minority of posts, what is Reddit supposed to do? Ignore it because most posts aren't breaking rules?

marricks2• 6 years ago

I don't follow them enough to personally have an opinion on if they warranted that treatment or not, but did follow enough to know it really couldn't have been most posts. So really can't argue with you on the validity of the banning.

but... that if the fraction of bad posts lead to mass suspensions on CTH then I'd say it is a creepy/not-good direction for Reddit.

yew• 6 years ago

What seems to be happening with CTH looks like a positive sign. They're not really less toxic than the others getting the boot, and the admins kicking abusive buddies while they're cleaning up everyone else says they have a (somewhat) functional internal process. Less room for toxicity in the world!

motohagiography• 6 years ago

There seems to be a divide between people who think discourse is a progressive art of the exchange of ideas, and those who use language as a pretext for political struggle where the role of ideas is to act as provocations that yield a persons "true," alignment and identity. The latter view means engaging ideas compromises your ethical purity, where the former one means people can express abhorrent ideas without physical consequences.

There isn't a short answer to what's probably an eternal conflict, but I do know a lot of people in tech who might benefit from reflecting on the question of, "are we the baddies?"

mtgp10002• 6 years ago

The dichotomy is seems to be reflected in the growing divide between rational, scientific inquiry, and modern progressive liberal arts which are rooted in critical theory.

akho• 6 years ago

On the one hand, I can understand them not wanting to be a platform for content they do not like (find offensive, believe legally dangerous, &c). On the other hand, presence of porn and nazis is an indicator of a healthy community — banning these things leads to decline in other areas (see Tumblr). You can’t have partial freedom of speech.

At least the porn is still there.

The problem with ‘social’ sites is that they allow cross-contamination between the seedy bits, and r/woodworking and the like.

The open web — with separately hosted forums — is a lot better, but less convenient. I hope to see a solution sometime, but the odds are not good.

mullingitover2• 6 years ago

Abusive content is not acceptable on Reddit nor is engaging with it.

This is such a fail for Reddit. If the content isn't allowed on the site, it's on Reddit to remove it. The existence of the content on the site implies Reddit's approval of the content, so engaging with that content is a wholly innocent act.

fwip3• 6 years ago

Do you think that every post and comment on Reddit is pre-approved by an employee before it becomes visible?

MauranKilom• 6 years ago

Please explain by what mechanism you would expect abusive content to be unengagable before being recognized (and treated) as such. Preferably one that does not involve Reddit having to travel back in time.

mullingitover2• 6 years ago

I don't have a way to programmatically detect abusive content, and for users the content's presence on the site implies it's legitimate. Just remove it when it's found, and shadowban the people who posted it. It isn't rocket surgery.

Jonnax• 6 years ago

I used Reddit a lot back in 2013ish but went off of it.

Looking at it now, it feels like that in general the site is really mean spirited.

Also upvoting means that you're just seeing whatever the majority of voters want you to see. It works on a smaller community like HN because comments get 10s of upvotes at most. It's not a site for good discourse.

However there's communities where there is interesting discussion still and often if you want an opinion of a product or an issue you might find a thread on it from a real user.

But generally they've done nothing to stop the nurturing of racist/sexist/bullying content over the years.

Now you can argue about free speech being important for an internet platform.

But Reddit trying to change the community attitudes of their site now seems a little late.

Also there is a real sense that some users believe that Reddit is the Sheppard of society and they're fighting on the forefront of society. Which I think stems from the millions of apparent subscribers to subreddits.

But it's just a fancy internet forum.

Like this linked post is on a subreddit called Watch Reddit Die. Apparently something about free speech being stifled in Reddit.

People need to realise they shouldn't waste their life on a website they don't like.

The internet hasn't been fully consolidated by Facebook and Google just yet, they can find or make a different community.

Scoundreller5• 6 years ago

It works on a smaller community like HN because comments get 10s of upvotes at most.

I think you underestimate the size of this place. It’s basically a busy Subreddit.

AlwaysRock3• 6 years ago

Reddit's issue is the issue of so many ad supported websites. Clicks sell ads and controversy draws more clicks than anything else.

It's been clear over the last few years that the popular subreddits are the ones that have the most dramatic content.

Smaller subreddit do tend to have better discourse though until eventually, they get large enough to become popular and start to become the same echo chambers.

shostack3• 6 years ago

First, big brands don't want controversy displayed next to their ads. This is likely behind some moves Reddit has made in the past to clean things up.

Second, I'm curious what % of revenue comes from user-purchased post and comment awards from gold. I've noticed those in use quite a bit in some more inflammatory subs like /r/politics. I wonder how they vet payments from users to avoid providing a way for hostile actors to buy visibility while flying under the radar. Ie. Avoiding conflicts of interest from accidentally monetizing trolls.

pteraspidomorph• 6 years ago

I have been a redditor for a decade and have a few remarks based on my experience.

I feel like reddit has always had recurring and overlapping cycles of mean spiritedness. For instance, during the summer holiday period it becomes notoriously harder to have a reasonable exchange of ideas there (don't ask me why; I'm not quite sure). This year, since the beginning of the COVID19 isolation period in March, we've been in a period of very high mean spiritedness. It could be a consequence of users' high stress levels.

Reddit does still have several excellent communities. I find that there's one thing in common between them: They have real, dedicated, human moderators enforcing strict, rational policies. Also: There are some weird cliques of power moderators on reddit who control dozens if not hundreds of subreddits. A good subreddit is usually not run by those cliques. Not to discount the hard work that some grunt moderators put into trying to run the large, clique-controlled communities, but the commonalities are hard to ignore.

On upvotes: Reddit should have clear policies enforced equitatively and transparently at the company level, by a human staff, and downvotes shouldn't be presented as the opposite of an upvote. I don't see a complete alternative system that can replace the upvote, though. They do provide different sorting options; what else could they do, there?

On alternatives: People attempt to leave on a regular basis. The problem is that there's a much higher incentive for the people who are ostracized not only by reddit as a platform but by the associated community to leave than for people who are, for the most part, comfortable, even if the administration acts a little weird on occasion. All alternatives are quickly colonized by people that the majority of the reddit community (if there is such a thing) would rather not be immersed in: White supremacists, conspiracy theorists, fanatic nationalists, etc. For the more moderate people to be willing to move, they want to feel surrounded by a majority of people like them, not a minority.

thejynxed2• 6 years ago

The phenomenon you are describing is called "Summer Reddit", and that term comes about yearly because schoolchildren are home for the summer, with the average age of Redditors participating during this time lowering from 24 to 16. It also heavily correlates with an increase in edgy commenting and shitposting.

nend• 6 years ago

Is there any evidence this is real? The image specifies /r/reddit.com, which was discontinued about a decade ago.

Obviously this practice is/would be awful. But it's really surprising and the image seems a little fishy.

edoceo• 6 years ago

It's real. Reddit is doing a ban based on what you up-doot

euroclear• 6 years ago

/r/reddit.com is still used for admin communications; if you want to contact the site admins, you are encouraged to use the contact the moderators link on /r/reddit.com.

dredmorbius6• 6 years ago

From 24 February 2020:

"Reddit Will Start to Punish Users for Upvotes as It Eyes Ad Cash"

https://gizmodo.com/reddit-will-start-to-punish-users-for-up...

"Spring forward… into Reddit’s 2019 transparency report"

https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/sprin...

cwhiz• 6 years ago

I don't think Reddit should be able to censor lawful content and also claim protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. If they want to police lawful content that is fine but then they are no longer an open platform and they should forfeit their Section 230 protections. I dislike the ability for online platforms to have their cake of protection against lawsuits and also eat their cake of policing lawful content they don't like.

anarazel• 6 years ago

The aim of 230 was explicitly to allow doing so. And how would you even imagine this working? Have a bunch of conlaw students judge posts against complex tests?

root_axis9• 6 years ago

Without section 230 protection it would be impossible for the site to stay open, so in effect you're saying sites that moderate user content should be shut down. Does that seem like an accurate interpretation of your position?

alacombe• 6 years ago

I'm fine with that. They decide to take a political stance, they shall deal with the legal consequence of their actions.

cft• 6 years ago

Sure it will be possible to stay open: just double down removing offending content and defend from the lawsuits. Large companies routinely have multiple ongoing lawsuits.

an_opabinia• 6 years ago

Section 230 is another classic legalist versus legal realist versus "whatever absolves me" trap that people fall into on this forum.

The legal realism prevails with this stupid law, it will always prevail. You can both moderate / review / editorialize content, including political content, while simultaneously enjoying Section 230 protections.

kick• 6 years ago

What you "think" is literally entirely against the reason Section 230 exists.

manfredo4• 6 years ago

The problem is that "lawful content" includes things like explicit support for Nazism and the KKK (not 2020 "Trump is a Nazi" kind of allegations of Nazism, but actual Nazis). Even things like abstract calls for violence are protected under the First Amendment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio

I don't think people espousing this view understand the scope of what sites need to tolerate to comply. Would reddit be a better place if they let people say, "ni\\\\s belong in shackles" and, "death to Jews"? Because that's legal speech.

rufus_3• 6 years ago

How might a democracy suffer if those who control the common venues for voter's political dialogue are given a monopoly over setting the bounds of acceptable speech?

yusyusyus3• 6 years ago

What model makes sense and why should it be treated differently than other forums with moderation?

I'm a big fan of the idea that internet providers, DNS registrars, etc. need to be neutral to content in the way common carriers are, but I'm not convinced yet that platforms should have similar obligations. It seems that the appropriate response to schismatic disagreement with the "SysOps of the BBS" is to build another BBS as the "telephone network" is open to all.

luckylion5• 6 years ago

At some point, that gets moved up a few levels though, if the BBS allows for groups that get moderated by other people, is the BBS still "the moderator" or is it those people that set up the group? And if you don't agree with their decisions, should you be able to launch a rival group on the BBS (it being a platform and all)?

majormajor7• 6 years ago

So no site should be allowed to have moderation policies that include things like "no trolling," "no flaming," "no swearing," or anything like else like that for things that don't cross into "illegal" abusive speech? Without becoming a target for filling up with illegal shit to overwhelm the moderators and cause legal trouble for the owners?

So HN is gone, too, then.

NOGDP8• 6 years ago

So no site should be allowed to have moderation policies that include things like "no trolling," "no flaming," "no swearing," or anything like else like that for things that don't cross into "illegal" abusive speech?

Any site can have any rules they want. But they shouldn't expect to be able manipulate and control discussion and face no backlash from users.

Without becoming a target for filling up with illegal shit to overwhelm the moderators and cause legal trouble for the owners?

'Trolling', 'flaming' and 'swearing' are not illegal, and honestly, most complaints about 'trolling' I see are just people who disagree with what they're reading.

guscost• 6 years ago

There should be a users/penetration threshold above which enforcing a cultural code of conduct waives immunity. GDPR uses a similar threshold, and unless you're seriously arguing that "trolling", "flaming", and "swearing" are being moderated successfully on e.g. Twitter, it seems practical.

anticonformist• 6 years ago

It's actually very insidious the way HN (and Reddit) control what we see though. There is almost no transparency, accountability, or oversight. Moderators make mistakes and we never even know it. We don't know what we don't know. The culture of silicon valley and hacker culture are being manipulated by a small number of employees at a proprietary investment firm. This is very far from ideal even if you do trust the intentions of the current employees.

I'd be in favor of a law that required uncensored free speech on all forums but that also allowed users to opt-in to moderation. Even if 99% of users opted in to moderation it would still leave an escape valve for totally uncensored free thought.

wildmusings• 6 years ago

Free speech is not so daft a concept. Where some restrictions are necessary, the principle of “viewpoint neutrality” still works to prevent censorship. This is the approach that First Amendment jurisprudence takes. So, where the government allows pro-abortion expression, it must also allow anti-abortion expression. But it can still set volume limits and control crowd movements and so forth, as long as it does not discriminate on the basis of viewpoint. And this applies even where its more general obligation to allow all expression does not hold.

muyuu7• 6 years ago

I think you are, sadly, completely correct. And that is why Section 230 in IMO unworkable as it was conceived, as it provides exceptions on a justification that is completely false.

Honestly I don't see what's the best alternative. Probably the segregation of comment platforms and sites. If Section 230 were to be substituted with something effective in regards of speech protection, or conversely the right of platforms to curate comments, then still this would only apply to the US and it would be a significant factor to move the comments elsewhere.

basch3• 6 years ago

In essence section 230 says "as a platform, youre not held liable for censorship of content you find objectionable, AND you dont take ownership of the speech you leave up."

Section 230 did not create a distinction between a platform and a publisher that required censorship rules to be applied fairly or evenly.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

cthalupa7• 6 years ago

That was literally the purpose of Section 230. If you want them to not be able to do that, you want Section 230 to be repealed. You don't have to take my word for it, either, since one of the authors has been explicit about it. (The discussion in his tweets is largely framed around politics, but there is nothing that would make the argument only apply to them vs speech in general)

https://twitter.com/RonWyden/status/1266052221072019456

stereolambda• 6 years ago

I mean, I see merit in the position that monopolistic corporate entities, which you are forced to interact with if you want to participate in modern society, have government-like power over people and should be held to similar standards in terms of civil liberties.

But Reddit is effectively just a big message board. Such interpretation would force every small internet forum to either become a [0-9]chan or a closed space for invited members only. There is lots of middle ground where the owners/the community polices some speech and you can reasonably, realistically just go somewhere else.

qq11ww22ee333• 6 years ago

I don't think Hacker News should be able to censor lawful content and also claim protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. If they want to police lawful content that is fine but then they are no longer an open platform and they should forfeit their Section 230 protections. I dislike the ability for online platforms to have their cake of protection against lawsuits and also eat their cake of policing lawful content they don't like.

hn_check2• 6 years ago

This is an absurd argument that the far right is plying as if they have some constitutional right to push their hateful noise on every site.

The internet is open. If you disagree with Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc, there are alternatives. Of course when the hateful all congregate, the farce of their positions becomes too clear. They need the legitimacy of Twitter or Facebook to ply their nonsense.

As an aside, it's interesting that those far right sites are some of the most fervently moderated, "snowflake" sites. Even The_Donald on reddit was hysterical in its suppression of even a simple question on the truthfulness of some fake claim. Instant comment deletion and account ban. Gab's extreme assertions of their moderation policy are uproarious when compared to its creation (you know - "Twitter silenced right wing voices!")

tzs• 6 years ago

I don't think Reddit should be able to censor lawful content and also claim protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The whole point of Section 230 was so sites could do that. Before 230, there has been court rulings that said if you moderate the content you are liable for the content. 230 was enacted specifically to reverse that.

cma• 6 years ago

I hope you realize the entire site, and every site, would be full of 99.99% commercial spam if this went into place.

trcollinson3• 6 years ago

Unfortunately, I don't think you understand the extent to which you, as an individual user, would be under obligation if Section 230 wasn't in force. Section 230 protects you, the "user" as much as it protects the platform or "provider of interactive computer services". It is very likely that without the protections of Section 230 you, the "user", would have to decide whether my comments on your Reddit post, Youtube video, Facebook post, or even this post, do not bring you under undo liability, and thus would have to police those comments. If you are prepared to do so, then go ahead and remove Section 230 protections. I have a legal background and I am certainly not prepared to decide if all content related to my content is lawful content.

danShumway• 6 years ago

I don't think Reddit should be able to censor lawful content and also claim protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

The entire point of 230 was to allow companies like Reddit to censor lawful content while still claiming protections. It was never designed at any point to create neutral platforms.

Lack of moderation was already a defense before 230 was created:

CompuServe stated they would not attempt to regulate what users posted on their services, while Prodigy had employed a team of moderators to validate content. Both faced legal challenges related to content posted by their users. In Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc., CompuServe was found not be at fault as, by its stance as allowing all content to go unmoderated, it was a distributor and thus not liable for libelous content posted by users. However, Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co. found that as Prodigy had taken an editorial role with regard to customer content, it was a publisher and legally responsible for libel committed by customers. [0]

Section 230 was not designed to foster neutral platforms, it was designed to allow platforms/communities to moderate as they saw fit without opening themselves up to legal liability. To re-phrase that in modern terms, section 230 is one of the strongest protections we have today for community's Right to Filter[1].

When people say that they like Section 230 but it's gone off the rails, what they really mean is that they think Section 230 was always a bad idea. Or perhaps more charitably that they haven't really researched how Section 230 works or what its history was.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

[1] https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-filter

duxup• 6 years ago

They've got so many moderation related issues.

Amidst all this accounts that randomly spam the site with collections of articles and etc run free. They don't participate in discussion (maybe a handful of actual comments... with more links), they just push a particular point of view and inundate every sub they can find with article after article....

A simple query "hey is this user just spamming submissions" could deal with some of them.

If you search new you're presented with repost after repost of these spammers, sometimes reposing their own content, just from another news source.

If you're part of a location based sub that is in the news, it's just an AVALANCHE of distantly cause related submitters spamming it up.

unholythree• 6 years ago

That’s the most obviously problem I see with section 230 freedom of speech maximalists arguments. Who’s right is it to curtail the freedom of someone to announce their love of a some sexual performance enhancing supplement in every thread and comment section on the internet?

wnevets• 6 years ago

For years reddit stood by and did nothing while certain groups exploited and spammed the front page with their hate speech, im glad to see they're finally doing something about it.

antishatter• 6 years ago

The main issue is asymmetric rule enforcement more so than the rules themselves. This is probably true for most if not all social media platforms.

zarkov99• 6 years ago

I feel safer already. Thank you Reddit for protecting me from my bad opinions.

ru5522• 6 years ago

I'm a daily redditor. On Saturday I logged into reddit and found "Your account has been permanently suspended from Reddit." across the top banner. The mod message says I was permanently suspended for repeated violations of the content policy.

The last time I posted ANYTHING on reddit was 21 days ago when I commented on a Schwarzenegger post and said I'd love for him to be president. I appealed it and haven't heard anything.

NietTim2• 6 years ago

Do you share your internet? I read today that someone got banned because his roommate got banned

ru5522• 6 years ago

I don't. I'm not sure what the reason is. I generally only post nerd stuff in r/sysadmin or r/networking. Oh well.

spacephysics• 6 years ago

Reddit once being a haven away from large corporate interests, has continually succumbed to the mainstream narrative of what’s appropriate.

Sure, there are communities that are horrid, but then there are those that are on the line. And inch by inch that line moves from moral goodness, to corporate interest.

Reddit is no different than Twitter/YouTube/Facebook, only they haven’t covered the same amount of ground.

Given another few years, if that, we’ll see the same censorship practices on Reddit, with the same magnitude, as youtube, facebook, and twitter.

This is essentially account entrapment. Show content they know is in bad faith, then punish them. Or, once a post is deemed in bad faith, retroactively punish them for not having the correct opinion.

1984

qq11ww22ee333• 6 years ago

1984

1984 and its consequences has been a disaster for the human race. Read another book

minkzilla• 6 years ago

I’ve read many books in my time and I liked 1984 both for its entertainment value and as a warning about government power and limiting free speech. What is wrong with 1984? Is there a similar but better book I should read?

snapetom• 6 years ago

It's interesting. I was just looking at a user account that had a gazillion post karma, but -10 comment karma. It also created a few subreddits. It's so obvious a content farmer.

People moved away from Digg because they implemented an algorithm to suggest news, and de-emphasised user submitted stories. Now, essentially the same thing is happening with reddit via these farmers. It's not as obvious and might not be sanctioned, but at the end of the day, a few select bots are also pushing content to the front.

cde-v• 6 years ago

This was announced back in February....

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8044337/Redd...

dredmorbius6• 6 years ago

Gizmodo is cited, and gives better info:

https://gizmodo.com/reddit-will-start-to-punish-users-for-up...

scythe• 6 years ago

Reddit has two conflicting aims.

First, it tries to be a "community hub", like Forumer in the old days, where anyone can set up an "autonomous" messageboard (subreddit) to support discussion among a particular subculture. Consider e.g. /r/smashbros.

Second, it tries to be a "community-in-itself", complete with its own demonym "redditor", and a shared set of values, etiquette, and jokes/memes.

These goals are fundamentally at odds. A community of competing factions -- some of which openly hate each other -- is hardly a community. A board for Super Smash Brothers players which must hew to the diktat of reddit at large is not really a community of Smashers. When a norm on Reddit at large is violated by a subreddit, the general population is incensed. When a rule is handed down from the admins to the moderators of a subcommunity, the members of that community feel they are being manipulated by outsiders -- even if they might have decided to enforce that rule on their own, if they had been left to their own devices.

Reddit splits the baby and nobody's happy.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 6 years ago

Interesting approach. Assuming no bots, doesn't that change actual sentiment among the population. How can you measure what people are thinking if dissenting voices are banned?

braythwayt4• 6 years ago

Every time we have a conversation about why Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit shouldn't be allowed to"censor" content, I ask what would become of Hacker News if it was not permitted to moderate spam or threads that do not follow the HN guidelines.

I think it would quickly devolve into 4Chan. Almost all of the current community would decamp, and the trolls that infest other sites would take over.

qq11ww22ee333• 6 years ago

"Devolve into"? This website is just the "sounds educated" arm of imageboard users.

HN is entirely filled with right-wing to far-right sheltered techbros. Half the accounts here that are constantly complaining about "free speech" and "consequences to their actions" are really one bad day away from calling everyone they disagree with various slurs, and the other half are so insulated from any sort of actual injustice in the world that they sit atop of their smug towers of indifference, cawing at the peasants below who have things such as "opinions" (that disagree with theirs, of course) or "motivations".

braythwayt4• 6 years ago

You are not wrong, but don't forget Sturgeon's Revelation: "90% of everything is CRUD."

What makes something valuable is the 10% of the thing that is not CRUD, and whatever measures put into place to make sure that the 90% CRUD doesn't poison the 10% that's worthwhile.

To me, that's having clear guidelines that are consistently applied through moderation.

compuguy• 6 years ago

You're not wrong about this. There is a very vocal right-wing population of commenters here on HN that show their true colors in more polarizing submissions.

jlawson5• 6 years ago

For structural reasons this comparison makes no sense.

HN has one homepage; one sub-community. Reddit has an infinite number of subreddits. Similar for facebook.

Even with no moderation, in no case would anyone be exposed to content that wasn't posted and allowed in a community that they deliberately subscribed to.

Reddit polices what kinds of communities are allowed. HN is one kind of community.

braythwayt4• 6 years ago

It makes no sense to you, but for years, users on certain subreddits were exposed to users and their views from other subreddits thanks to brigading.

Likewise, Reddit and Facebook both have to deal with being judged by all the forums they "host." You may not think it makes sense to criticize Reddit as a whole for hosting white supremacist forums and violent misogyny forums, but the rest of society seems to think that one bad apple forum spoils the entire Reddit and Facebook barrel.

If you're looking for a comparison, I don't have to read any thread I don't want to on HN, just as I don't have to join any subreddit I don't want to on Reddit.

But I know they're there, and that affects my perception of what HN or Reddit or Facebook is.

If it was just about hiding content, we could argue that HN shouldn't censor anything, but if we let people tag threads and comments with labels like "white supremacy" or "SJW raving," then everyone can filter what they don't want to see, so what's the problem?

xboxnolifes• 6 years ago

I feel like this is completely different. Reddit has subreddits and subreddit moderators who can moderate based on their own community guidelines. There is no need for global moderation.

dogma1138• 6 years ago

Nice I wonder how many comments that go against Reddit’s policies I’ve upvoted over the years unintentionally on the mobile app.

I up/downvote posts/comments at least couple of times a day when trying to scroll on my phone or just hitting the screen to wake it up after being distracted.

This is ridiculous policy.

UweSchmidt• 6 years ago

The idea that the "vote" is not just counted but judged is new, it seems. It is the next step in the trend of hyper precise tracking of peoples thoughts and actions, and their judgement in a transparent and opinionated global social sphere with extreme consequences.

Overall, a worrying trend.

hogFeast• 6 years ago

You can vote any way you want. As long as you vote the right way.

mtgp10002• 6 years ago

At this point reddit is arguably a social danger, in that it is made to look like organic content, while in truth everything is heavily censored and opinions are implicitly and explicitly approved in an absolute top down manner.

Opaque vote display and ranking algorithms, keyword based shadowbanning, ideological mods and admin - combined with an organic facade you have a platform to manufacture consensus and push propaganda onto millions of unsuspecting users, young and old alike.

Frankly it's scummy and I hope they fail.

Natsu• 6 years ago

What would it take to bring back pre-Eternal September Usenet?

mherdeg• 6 years ago

Considering how much of Internet culture is currently being formed on reddit it's amazing how opaque the site is to history. The archival is low-quality and missing a lot.

I sometimes browse by /r/all/gilded, which gives you a weird, weird, WEIRD cross section of the Internet. One time I found a heavily gilded post memorializing a recently deceased contributor to /r/cripplingalcoholism -- which appears to be an important but saddening community for people with a serious medical problem -- then followed a few links on the profile of the deceased and their associated until, a few minutes later, I ended up at /r/opiaterollcall.

Wow oh wow, what a subreddit that was: https://web.archive.org/web/20130904195509/www.reddit.com/r/...

That forum died pretty soon after I found it (and got national press coverage at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/us/opioid-reddit.html ) but wow, oh wow, there was a lot going on there which is now essentially lost to readers of history, because existing archives don't go deep into posts and comments.

isatty• 6 years ago

No jedberg comments on this post?

hn_check2• 6 years ago

Of course "voting" should be something you are accountable for. If you are pushing nonsense and banned content up, you become a part of the problem.

Even on HN there have been many anti-science nonsense stories on the front-page where the site would benefit from letting people indicate that they want anyone who enabled it to have no weighting in the curation of their own personal view. This may be a sort of filter bubble, but it's an anti-idiot filter bubble. I don't need to have my world clouded by the noise of conspiracy fanatics and idiots.

iron0013• 6 years ago

For those of you who aren’t familiar, the “watchredditdie” subreddit is a “safe space” for alt-right users to whine about not being able to brigade, astroturf, and otherwise manipulate reddit to their own political ends the way they did in the run-up to the 2016 election.

surround3• 6 years ago

If this submission gets flagged/killed (it’s already gone from the front page) will I be penalized for upvoting it?

colordrops• 6 years ago

If you told a reddit user from 5 years ago that you would be banned for upvoting content, they'd call you a nut job.

dredmorbius6• 6 years ago

Gizmodo addressed this in February, though just as Covid-19 news coverage began overwhelming everything:

Yesterday, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (or “Spez,” as Redditors affectionately know him) published the platform’s annual transparency report, highlighting how the platform took down more than 200,000 pieces of offending content over 2019, along with nearly 56,000 accounts and nearly 22,000 subreddits—the site’s communities, most of which are moderated by volunteer users. He also flagged a “company update” regarding the way Reddit thinks about “quarantined” communities...

https://gizmodo.com/reddit-will-start-to-punish-users-for-up...

That policy, in a Reddit post by Huffman:

When we expanded our quarantine policy, we created an appeals process for sanctioned communities. One of the goals was to “force subscribers to reconsider their behavior and incentivize moderators to make changes.” While the policy attempted to hold moderators more accountable for enforcing healthier rules and norms, it didn’t address the role that each member plays in the health of their community.

Today, we’re making an update to address this gap: Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities.

https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/sprin...

According to that statement, bans (apparently temporary) are for voting only in already quarantined subreddits.

WatchRedditDie's discussion is not especially nuanced, considered, or balanced.

kilo_bravo_3• 6 years ago

Why do SO MANY pretend-libertarian tech bros pretending to be libertarians and liberty-loving freedom fans think that free speech applies to private property?

And why have they let themselves be tricked into spewing the Section-230 nonsense that conservative hate-mongers are using to threaten online service providers?

Section 230 protection is irrelevant to service providers policing their site. It is very relevant to service providers who are being told by conservative hate-mongering politicians “hey we’ll strip your protections unless you allow our hateful content even though the protections are unrelated to our content and comments”.

You’re carrying water for malicious actors who don’t care about you.

By your own logic, not mine (I think it’s bullshit) YOURS if you downvote this comment to the point that it is hidden or automodded then you are infringing on my “FREEZE PEECH RAIGHTS” because you are “removing” constitutionally-protected freeze peach from the public sphere.

fulldecent2• 6 years ago

Here is what people mean when we say we don't like Section 230. And we mean it whether or not Section 230 is actually responsible.

- Advertiser uses our trademark on Google Ads? Google makes money and has editorial control. But we can't sue them.

- Somebody posts something libelous about us on Twitter? Twitter makes serious money and has editorial control. But we can't sue them.

- Fakes on eBay? Can't stop them. eBay not liable.

If Twitter is going to have a "fact checking" department, then they also need a "retractions" department. And if retraction aren't forthcoming when reasonable, then we need a cause of action against them.

lenkite• 6 years ago

No one complained when folks voting on an unpopular forum were kicked out late last year. Everyone laughed and said "good riddance" then. Now the chickens have come home to roost.

The adage of the "fascists will next come for you" continues to remain true.

zaro• 6 years ago

The thought police strikes again.

It's not anymore about simply censoring unwanted content, punishing the users for engaging with will be way more effective in the long run.

Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

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