Reddit nuking accounts of anyone who mentions a new employee or their history

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1374347246070796289

by Tenoke • 5 years ago

184 55 5 years ago

Reddit is such an authoritarian shithole

The entire frontpage looks like it is curated by some propaganda department & megacorps acting like their posts with 1000k upvotes aren't advertisements

belltaco4• 5 years ago

Mine doesn't look anything like that. Everyone has their own frontpage based on their subreddit subscriptions so I have no idea what you're talking about. Maybe post a screenshot?

justaman• 5 years ago

There is the personal "front page"(stuff you subscribe to). Then there is the public "front page" which is just the most popular posts on reddit sans some controversial or NSFW subreddits.

tzs• 5 years ago

I agree with the other requests for examples. I just went to reddit.com from a browser that has never been there before. Here's what it is showing me. This doesn't seem very propaganda or megacorpish to me.

/r/GME post about a billboard telling people to keep holding GME.

/r/wallstreetbets GME Megathread.

/r/worldnews post about a Saudi official issuing a death threat to a UN investigator apparently over the investigator's investigation into the Khashoggi killing.

/r/Cricket match thread about "1st ODO - India vs England".

An ad.

/r/AskReddit asking what is something you loved as a kid but hate as an adult.

/r/technology thread on Microsoft's possible buying of Discord.

/r/awefuleverything thread making fun of Americans.

/r/worldnews post on a US intelligence agency saying the US should join South America in fight against illegal Chinese fishing.

/r/aww post about a puppy.

/r/Wellthatsucks post about a home baked pizza failure.

/r/IdiotsInCars post about an idiot in a car.

/r/politics post about Biden's infrastructure package.

...and it goes on like this...

seany• 5 years ago

There's a good automated reddit that tracks this actually. https://old.reddit.com/r/undelete/

doggodaddo78• 5 years ago

It has a lot of unnecessary conflict, trolling, SJW, crazy people, censorship, idiocy, and no defense allowed insta-ban fascism.

What's missing is a nicer general purpose platform that doesn't have so much thin-skinned, circular firing squads or anonymity for SFW topics. Let everyone participate so long as they're not advocating the basic limits of free speech: conspiracy theories, violence, obvious hate, or criminality. Politics is probably best contained to a separate section, as well as NSFW.

doloto• 5 years ago

Thats all due to their "karma" bullshit. It is a truly orwellian concept. People have fear of being silenced so nobody wants to argue with yes-men. Redditors always take one side of any hot issue and usually the top comment sets the tone. So it quickly receives 100000 likes and nobody would dare to disagree and instantly lose all of their precious karma points. So those who disagree will simply stay out of the discussion or would "agree" for the sake of driving their karma up. And every contrarian post will be reported and deleted. It is stupid and disgusting.

Tenoke7• 5 years ago

Some more information by the same author with a few more links: https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1374348774378762248

falcolas3• 5 years ago

… whoah. That’s not someone I’d trust to help run a website that promotes free-ish speech.

Tenoke7• 5 years ago

Seems like this post has likely been quietly downweighed and pushed off the front-page. I do wish there'd be a bit more transparency over those decisions though I understand they are common and do usually have reasons behind them.

curtisblaine2• 5 years ago

This thread has been captured in https://rejected.substack.com/, the newsletter of posts that reached the HN frontpage but were silently pushed off, and will be visible in the next release of the newsletter.

Tenoke7• 5 years ago

Oh, I never saw this but like it! I occasionally note submissions that have been weighed up/down based on the karma/time of the posts surrounding them for fun.

nelsonmandela4• 5 years ago

Do you have a theory for why they're being pushed off? Are these due to having keywords that are downweighted or sinister VC conflicts of interest?

Seems like you're pretty interested in this

phpnode5• 5 years ago

I'm still surprised that Reddit avoided a major scandal over the Ghislaine Maxwell situation. It's clear that they have serious ethical/integrity issues yet have avoided the kind of criticism that FB and Twitter get, despite arguably wielding more power. I wonder if this is partly because a lot of the community call themselves "redditors" and therefore interpret criticism of the platform as a criticism of the community. No one would call themselves a twitterer or a facebooker

Tenoke7• 5 years ago

I admit, I didn't believe /u/maxwellhill was Ghislaine but they still haven't posted since her arrest and it's been barely mentioned given how high-profile of a case it is.

lamontcg2• 5 years ago

So they haven't posted since they started getting massive amounts of online harassment? Go figure.

belltaco4• 5 years ago

I don't get why it'd be a major scandal for Reddit even if u/maxwellhill was Ghislaine. They were not a Reddit employee, just a community moderator. Would HN be responsible if famous person X was secretly posting on HN?

Do people expect Reddit to dox everyone posting or moderating on their platform and then publicize the results?

phpnode5• 5 years ago

I'm not sure I want to list the reasons it is bad here because the subject has been painted as a conspiracy theory and YC is obviously interested in Reddit. But the gist is that they knew who she was,she used her substantial mod power to bury news related to herself and JE, and then when her identity was exposed Reddit used Reddit to bury that story to prevent a scandal.

r721• 5 years ago

Reddit discussions:

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/mb1vpb/rukp...

https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/mb11kw/the_o...

tw042• 5 years ago

I'll be honest, I feel whoever decided to reject this made a pretty poor decision. This is a discussion that absolutely needs to be had, and frankly it looks like collusion between Reddit and HN (while I doubt that's why).

Regardless, this community and reddit share a ton of users, if Reddit is going to ban discussion of what is at best a questionable hire, this should be a place to freely discuss it. It's both relevant and topical to the community here. As best I can tell it doesn't violate any rules, and if it does an exception should be made IMO.

threatofrain2• 5 years ago

This is a discussion that absolutely needs to be had, and frankly it looks like collusion between Reddit and HN (while I doubt that's why).

Where is HN colluding on this?

falcolas3• 5 years ago

It's been (as of my post) knocked off the front page. It's more likely people flagging "non-technology/startup" drama.

http://hnrankings.info/26554697/

silicon24013• 5 years ago

Somewhat related, does anyone know of a good tool to archive one's entire reddit history? I'd like to be able to dump all my comments, saved posts, etc to a folder. Even better if I can download whole treads, linked media, etc. Not worried about getting nuked for OP's linked example but I've gotten very interested in building personal archives of any of my online history.

As a personal anecdote, earlier this year I went through and (tediously) saved my bungie.net account which contained all my Halo 2, 3, etc online activity history. Funny enough, just a couple of months later Bungie announced that they were shutting down the site, and longtime fans scrambled to save what records they could. Unfortunately the forums were gone by that point, so I lost a lot of my memories there, but today I don't remember how much time I actually spent archiving that data, I remember the memories that come flooding back whenever I look through that data again.

Tenoke7• 5 years ago

Somewhat related, does anyone know of a good tool to archive one's entire reddit history?

I've tried this for nlp training and all the old tools I tried no longer work, and you can't do it via the API either. Your best bet is to scrape it the old fashion way e.g. with Selenium but I am also interested if there's a working tool.

silicon24013• 5 years ago

Bummer; so there is a reddit API, but you really can't use it to just get your saves/comments/etc? I had assumed you could. I guess this'll take more effort than I thought. thanks!

Zren• 5 years ago

Python has a module called PRAW. https://praw.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting_started/quick_...

I wrote a quick script a while back to dump my comments by subreddit to a text file to grep through. There's probably better praw scripts running around. https://gist.github.com/Zren/82befb7bf63e3d9156de1bbd48b0ffe...

tablespoon• 5 years ago

Somewhat related, does anyone know of a good tool to archive one's entire reddit history? I'd like to be able to dump all my comments, saved posts, etc to a folder. Even better if I can download whole treads, linked media, etc. Not worried about getting nuked for OP's linked example but I've gotten very interested in building personal archives of any of my online history.

I believe https://pushshift.io/ is purported to be archiving all of it, but after poking around I can't find anything past April 2020 in https://files.pushshift.io/.

As a personal anecdote, earlier this year I went through and (tediously) saved my bungie.net account which contained all my Halo 2, 3, etc online activity history. Funny enough, just a couple of months later Bungie announced that they were shutting down the site, and longtime fans scrambled to save what records they could. Unfortunately the forums were gone by that point, so I lost a lot of my memories there, but today I don't remember how much time I actually spent archiving that data, I remember the memories that come flooding back whenever I look through that data again.

IMHO the problem with user account activity archives is that social media is social. I've got archives of my old Facebook activity, and it feels even more incomplete than only hearing one side of a telephone call. What I'd really want is an archive of every thread I've posted in, or even every forum for the dates I was active.

fastball• 5 years ago

I asked Reddit support for my entire history and they sent to me.

Admittedly I lived in Europe at the time so I used GDPR as a club.

Then I had them nuke the account.

Reddit nuking accounts of anyone who mentions a new employee or their history

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