Let's talk content. AMA

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_talk_content_ama/

by ssclafani • 11 years ago

117 224 11 years ago

reddit.com

cag_ii• 11 years ago

Seems completely reasonable, maybe just a bit vague...

The only surprising thing to me about this announcement is that they didn't already have such a policy in place.

comrh3• 11 years ago

Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people (these behaviors intimidate others into silence)
/r/coontown will be reclassified. The content there is offensive to many, but does not violate our current rules for banning.

Seriously? /r/coontown isn't harassing, bulling, or abusing a group of people? This AMA didn't clarify anything at all, these were always the vague, sometimes enforced, rules.

lazzlazzlazz• 11 years ago

Having hateful beliefs is not in itself harassing, bullying, or abusing individuals.

comrh3• 11 years ago

Doesn't it abuse "groups of people" then?

NeutronBoy2• 11 years ago

Well they banned a sub that was just fat-shaming, which was really what started this off. Shaming fat people is off limits, but hateful beliefs based on race is all a-ok?

slg7• 11 years ago

TL;DR - We will still allow almost all the same hateful stuff we have previously allowed, but we will do our best to hide it so people will stop complaining.

smegel2• 11 years ago

Not exactly the change people were anticipating.

In fact, I'm not sure there is a change.

waterlesscloud6• 11 years ago

The biggest change is making subs that violate "common decency" opt-in.

I predict they'll find a new phrase for that criteria as "common decency" pretty obviously would re-classify subs that are not what they're really after.

ForHackernews4• 11 years ago

"Unpalatable to advertisers"

oldmanjay4• 11 years ago

What were you anticipating?

smegel2• 11 years ago

Personally I was not expecting massive change, but the public mood seemed to be anticipating a crack down on race-hate speech at least.

I am firmly of the view that speech should be allowed, and allowed to be challenged openly, though.

rory0965• 11 years ago

I think the top post is intended to be Steve's assessment of the rules as they are (see footnote [1]) and to solicit feedback for potential changes. Really the only new thing mentioned is the non-porn NSFCivilization category, which he pretty clearly distinguishes from the rest of the post.

nl5• 11 years ago

Prohibited: Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people (these behaviors intimidate others into silence)

About time.

ttrashh• 11 years ago

I consider your comment harassment. I think it should be removed.

Slippery slope don't you think?

ForHackernews4• 11 years ago

No, I don't. I'll submit to the Reasonable Person Test here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person

zorpner• 11 years ago

One my favorite things about the anti-SJW movement is how they fundamentally don't understand what they're opposing. They see people using words like "harassment" and achieving results, so they go full cargo cult and start spewing those same words in the belief that they'll be able to achieve something as well. It reminds me of the sovereign citizen movement, a belief that there's some set of magic words that gets results, rather than actually interacting with society.

nl5• 11 years ago

There a thing called the "reasonable person test". It's well understood and applies widely. I suspect you know this and just don't like it.

I think you need new arguments. The slippery slope argument is abit used up for HN in 2015. Pretty sure that had it's moment in 1998 Slashdot.

mwfunk2• 11 years ago

It's not a slippery slope at all. What you said is more like going off a cliff. What you wrote parses as English and highlights an apparent logical contradiction, but it's no more valid than someone complaining about other people being "intolerant of intolerance", and presenting that exercise in reductivism as some sort of deep wisdom.

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

alayne3• 11 years ago

Harassment is usually defined as some repetitive unwanted targetted behavior, particularly where it has been made clear that the behavior is unwanted. I don't think a single comment is going to be considered harassment.

aaron695• 11 years ago

About time.

My objection to this comment is that it treats it like it's a simple thing.

For starters it bans harassing lets say The Nazi party or ISIS or a pro abortion doctor killing group.

I don't think this is wrong, but it's a fair enough complication.

But more importantly it sweeps under the carpet how to best get free speech on really important issues. Everything comes at a cost. This will hurt free speech at least a bit.

Once again it's not just 'About time' it's something that needs to be considered.

mc32• 11 years ago

It sounds reasonable. In practice its been difficult. I've been in communities where one mod is okay with certain interaction wheras another has no hesitation in yanking things.

There's personality, history, friendships, etc. Some mods were likely to tolerate irritants if they knew the person or the person had contributed to something they approved of... Like a movement, cause, etc.

That said, it looks like so far, its been used sparingly and not vigorously. But it's like speeding. You know the chances of having a ticket issued are low, but if highway patrol were to e force to the letter, one would have many more tickets issued.

brighteyes2• 11 years ago

If you didn't notice, that part had a link to the months-old policy change when it was enacted.

That isn't a new policy, they were just reiterating it. The actually new stuff is the NSFW scope enlargement, hiding from search, etc.

Shivetya• 11 years ago

knowing the political bent of reddit I would not want to be a Conservative and posting there. This rule sounds like a SJW dream, straight out of our colleges of today where all speech is effectively silenced; even humor.

Any speech can be harass another and this the problem with such rules.

thisisdallas• 11 years ago

From the comments:

Q: In Ellen Pao's op-ed in the Washington Post today, she said "But to attract more mainstream audiences and bring in the big-budget advertisers, you must hide or remove the ugly."

How much of the push toward removing "ugly" elements of Reddit comes from the motivation to monetize Reddit?

A: Zero.

_____________________

His reply currently has -1022 points. The censorship of Reddit for advertisement purposes has been a topic of discussion in a select few subreddits for quite awhile. It looks like the rest of reddit is finally realizing what is going on.

I don't have anything against it, people have to make money and with free services like reddit, the users are the product that is sold to advertisers.

What I don't understand is, why not just admit it? From my ~20 years of internet usage, I have learned the one constant is you never lie to the internet.

Also, from the list of prohibited content:

Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people

This sounds like a rule that some teenager made up for guild forums. How in the world does Huffman think using something so vague as an actual punishable rule will turn out well?

Anyway, good luck to Huffman he is going to need it. I feel like voat.co is going to see a very huge increase in numbers during the next few months.

fweespeech5• 11 years ago

Its pretty clear that they tested out the "remove" option, pushed Ellen Pao out when it got ugly, and are switching to the "Hide" option.

Yishan [ "Not our problem" ] -> Pao [ "Remove" ] -> Spez [ "Hide"]

That seems to the be evolution at the moment, and honestly, I think "Hide" is the right answer. People have a right to avoid content that offends them.

Voat's problem [honestly] is as drama-filled as this transition has been...Voat really isn't offering anything other than "Reddit with more transparency". Assuming Spez doesn't screw this up, I'm not seeing how Voat.co will benefit.

As for vagueness, I'm not surprised...its like the legal definition of Obscenity or Pornography, its a community-tested definition based on social norms. You can't really quantify it the way you can numbers on a spreadsheet or "Marijuana is illegal".

As long as Spez is transparent, communicates effectively, and doesn't come across as arbitrary I think it'll work out fine.

scrollaway• 11 years ago

Just for some more context on that, Yishan's comment from yesterday is insightful and very entertaining to be honest:

https://pay.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3dautm/conte...

angersock2• 11 years ago

People have a right to avoid content that offends them.

Do they though?

EDIT:

Meant that seriously. Do we have a right to avoid all of the people complaining about discrimination in tech, for example?

oldmanjay4• 11 years ago

Reddit is in a difficult position, seemingly being mainly used by people that consider making money to be "selling out."

I'm sure they'd prefer a more mature community, but when you embrace youth culture as a way of life you get what you get, and need to lie accordingly.

guelo• 11 years ago

The distaste for advertising is as old as reddit itself. Reddit has always looked for creative ways to advertise and creative alternatives. You can't blame that only on the community.

mindslight6• 11 years ago

What I don't understand is, why not just admit it [users are the product that is sold to advertisers].

Because reddit's popularity is built on the illusion of being the complete opposite! One of the first large influxes of users came from Digg, who had their own revolt over censoring a 16 byte number.

Centralized sites have been given a pass for way too long. Let us hope the pendulum swings back the other way hard. Restricting communication, no matter how repulsive one finds the content, does not make the "world ... a better place".

tptacek4• 11 years ago

That's a worldview that does not accept any circumstance in which speech is also an action. But posting non-consensual pornography is more than speech; it's also a deliberate and disastrous violation of someone else's privacy.

waterlesscloud6• 11 years ago

Given that it's the central issue to their business, it's surprising they haven't crafted a much better response. It's going to keep coming up over and over until they do.

dreamfactory22• 11 years ago

Restricting communication, no matter how repulsive one finds the content, does not make the "world ... a better place".

It makes Reddit a better place and brings it closer to the original site before all the latecomers from the digg exodus. Why do you think curation exists?

Cub3• 11 years ago

See: Fuck Sears - https://www.reddit.com/r/TheBookofReddit/comments/h3pm9/i_hi...

anigbrowl3• 11 years ago

But is incivility communication? I mean, I don't think people should be forbidden from most forms of communication, but on the other hand I have no problem with individual actors like Reddit (or HN) setting standards. If you're at a party in my house and you start behaving obnoxiously towards one of the other guests, I'm going to throw you out, and I won't feel bad about it. Likewise, if someone comes to me with a complaint that the stripes on your shirt are triggering some bad memories and that I should do something about it, I'm going to suggest that they take themselves off to a less stimulating environment.

Now I do prefer a distributed system like Usenet, where individuals maintained their own killfiles of whose bullshit they'd like to screen out and NNTP administrative overhead was relatively flat (ie it wasn't too difficult to set up a new newsgroup, or if I remember correctly anyone could set one up under the alt.* hierarchy).

But Usenet/NNTP ran into a huge tragedy of the commons problem, most famously from Canter & Siegel's 'Make.money.fast' posting which they crossposted to every newsgroup, resorting to a capitalism/free speech defense when everyone else took them to task for it. You could also point to the abuses of anonymous remailer systems like penet.fi by bad actors (who were obviously able to easily outrun killfile entries) and trolls - I was still active in a couple of Usenet grousp until a year or two back and I could point out people who have been persistently targeting individuals and communities for over a decade. I'm sure many people with roots in Usenet could point to similar individuals.

I don't feel like going on a research dive right now, but I'm thinking of a social science paper I read a few years back about tipping points in social networks, which mainly exxamined persuasive campaigns, but you could see by the same logic how trolls could easily wreck an otherwise productive forum by lowering the signal-to-noise ratio below a certain threshold. I think it was from RAND corporation but the title escapes me right now.

ars5• 11 years ago

Restricting communication, no matter how repulsive one finds the content, does not make the "world ... a better place".

But it certainly makes the site a better place. No one wants to read that repulsive content. Allow it and people do not want to visit the site.

The only people I want to enforce free speech against is the government. In private I prefer restricted speech, specifically stupid and immature comments that just waste time and derail conversations into idiocity.

amyjess• 11 years ago

How in the world does Huffman think using something so vague as an actual punishable rule will turn out well?

He's made it clear in the thread that he's still working on the wording and the rules aren't going live until he has much more precise wording than this.

https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_t...

potatolicious• 11 years ago

"How in the world does Huffman think using something so vague as an actual punishable rule will turn out well?"

Because it is the only tenable position. As much as we want it to exist, there is not a set of hard, bright-line rules possible for governing literally all possible topics of discussion in all contexts in all communities. The expectation that we can make simple, universal rules and have it succeed is part of the problem.

Governance is unavoidably complex and resistant to simplistic applications of ideology, in many places its rules must necessarily be vague because its reach is vast and the rule's interactions with the community is hard to predict. Room must be preserved for in-context judgment.

"I feel like voat.co is going to see a very huge increase in numbers during the next few months."

Excellent. I can't wait, so long as voat's traffic increase is coupled with a commensurate decrease in reddit traffic from the same people ;)

zxcvcxz• 11 years ago

I can't wait, so long as voat's traffic increase is coupled with a commensurate decrease in reddit traffic from the same people

Really? Reddit seems to have even more racists and sexists since they all supposedly "left" for voat. But hey.. if that's what you like.

Pyxl1012• 11 years ago

> "How in the world does Huffman think using something so vague as an actual punishable rule will turn out well?"
Because it is the only tenable position.

Is it not tenable to avoid taking a specific position as a website individually, and to simply comply with the laws of the broader society? NearlyFreeSpeech.net seems to have been taking this stance successfully for years, for example. It would not allow them to dodge criticism, since plenty of people wish to manipulate Reddit and other Internet sites into implementing or achieving whatever social objective they have in mind, but it seems as though it ought to be tenable while simplifying the issue and putting it to rest.

dreamfactory22• 11 years ago

How in the world does Huffman think using something so vague as an actual punishable rule will turn out well?

This is precisely why every major publisher uses human curation rather than purely algorithmic.

byg80• 11 years ago

Go to Voat if you want the free speech (also some of the bad hate that comes with it) in a nice little familiar package (it's almost identical to reddit.)

Go to Snapzu if you want more than a clone that has some rules (no hate) and a solid community, but most importantly tries to innovate and not just copy reddit.

Go to Hubski if you want a civil place to discuss things without all the flashy pictures and what not.

8ig8• 11 years ago

As usual, The Onion has this covered (2012):

https://youtube.com/watch?v=w8c_m6U1f9o

"The Power Of Selling Out: Your Customers As Political Capital - Onion Talks"

mbesto2• 11 years ago

From my ~20 years of internet usage, I have learned the one constant is you never lie to the internet.

I believe Gabe Newell said it best "You can't lie on reddit".

ars5• 11 years ago

That is such a silly thing to say. Of course you can. It's very easy.

People get so excited when they catch a liar and think "See you can't lie", not realizing just how many lies pass right by without being caught.

woah• 11 years ago

Is it really that hard to define harassment? The law seems to do alright.

saint_fiasco2• 11 years ago

Not really. The law just pretends it's easy.

Enforcing harassment laws has always been problematic both online and offline.

the_watcher• 11 years ago

I guess I still just disagree with Pao's position. The internet itself is a lesson in this. The internet has innumerable "ugly" sites (which are akin to subs for reddit). Do advertisers not buy web ads? No, they just buy ads on the sites they want to buy them on. Maybe Reddit was struggling to monetize at the rate they wanted. I'm sure investor pressure is high. But Reddit had a shot at being something like the internet on top of the internet, and choosing this path kills that. Doesn't mean it's the wrong decision, but the response I'd have liked would have been something like "we're working hard to ensure these less savory parts of reddit are only encountered by those looking for them and are very much aware of the content."

NOTE: The illegal stuff obviously falls outside this, as the internet (and a corporation) clearly have to operate within the relevant laws.

jsmeaton3• 11 years ago

"we're working hard to ensure these less savory parts of reddit are only encountered by those looking for them and are very much aware of the content."

That's exactly what they're doing, is it not? They're providing opt in controls for the less savoury content:

Similar to NSFW, another type of content that is difficult to define, but you know it when you see it, is the content that violates a common sense of decency. This classification will require a login, must be opted into, will not appear in search results or public listings, and will generate no revenue for Reddit.

And the few subreddits that incite abuse are getting shuttered. I feel that's more than reasonable.

pbreit2• 11 years ago

I think Reddit has clearly earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to advertising vs content. It has been operating for 10 years now with pretty much no sign of bowing to advertisers.

pbreit2• 11 years ago

What I don't understand is, why not just admit it?

Did you ever think that maybe it's true? I could easily see a motive of pushing offensive content behind opt-ins, vs banning, without thinking so much about advertisers.

If he had said 5% or 20% would you have jumped all over him about being beholden to advertisers?

briholt• 11 years ago

This doesn't solve the problem. Banning "[a]nything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people" is so open-ended that it could include minor criticism or it could exclude flagrant bigotry, depending on the interpreter. They've replaced the de facto policy of arbitrarily banning things they don't like with an official policy of arbitrarily banning things they don't like.

gooeyblob• 11 years ago

When was reddit arbitrarily banning things they don't like?

fweespeech5• 11 years ago

Can we agree a large percentage of the Reddit population felt that Reddit Inc acted arbitrarily [in general, not nesc the bans] regardless of your feelings on the matter?

leereeves10• 11 years ago

Reddit still lacks an objective definition for "harassment". (So does the world, I think.)

When was reddit arbitrarily banning things they don't like?

When they banned five subreddits (actually quite a few more than that, but five were announced), without a clear policy that could be fairly enforced on all subs.

Udo• 11 years ago

They've replaced the de facto policy of arbitrarily banning things they don't like with an official policy of arbitrarily banning things they don't like.

Reading that thread, the barrier to ban subreddits seems to be fairly high still. A subreddit apparently has to be pretty much centered on promoting violence in order to meet the criteria.

That said, had they chosen to go for a low barrier, flat-out "we'll ban everything we don't like" policy, the outcome might have been better in the long run. Short-term there would have been a huge outcry, but after these kinds of people left, the site would probably be more friendly overall. Smaller, but nicer.

Instead, they chose to go for a very modest policy change and what looks like reluctant enforcement.

JeremyNT• 11 years ago

There is elaboration on what this means if you read the linked blog post [0]:

We define harassment as: Systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person (1) conclude that reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation, or (2) fear for their safety or the safety of those around them.

This clearly has a lot of wiggle room for interpretation, but this pretty clearly seems to exclude e.g. "minor criticism."

[0] http://www.redditblog.com/2015/05/promote-ideas-protect-peop...

lurchpop• 11 years ago

not a safe platform

in today's world that means a platform where too many people disagree with me.

tptacek4• 11 years ago

They're going to require a login to see the "indecent" subreddits. I wonder, are they going to take any other measures to make them difficult to reach from, e.g., search engines?

Will they run advertisements on "indecent" subreddits?

shock-value2• 11 years ago

He answers that directly.

This classification will require a login, must be opted into, will not appear in search results or public listings, and will generate no revenue for Reddit.

tptacek4• 11 years ago

Thanks! I didn't notice that.

waterlesscloud6• 11 years ago

"Not appear in search results" likely just means the internal search engine. Such as it is.

I'm not sure that implies anything about whether or not they'll show up in Google and Bing.

waterlesscloud6• 11 years ago

What would be the reasoning for making them difficult to reach using search engines? That seems to me to be more a decision for the search engine to make.

As far as ads go, once they have a tiered classification system, allowing advertisers to choose which tier they're comfortable with is trivial.

EDIT- re ads: He got more direct about it with this, "I also want to claim we don't profit from them." Which indicates they won't have ads on them at all. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_...

vectorpush• 11 years ago

That seems to me to be more a decision for the search engine to make.

I'd argue that it's absolutely the site owner's prerogative to determine which sections of the site can be indexed by a search engine.

malnourish2• 11 years ago

In the self post spez makes it seem like they will not run advertisements on such subreddits.

[they] will generate no revenue for Reddit.

I'm still curious about a few things. Will subreddits be able to opt-in to be classified as "indecent"? And if so, will there be oversight on that? What if r/games decides to be "indecent" so that reddit doesn't earn money from that subreddit and to keep exposure limited?

Also, who classifies it? Is something like r/atheism, freethough, or christianity indecent because it can and does offend people? Could r/askhistorians or askscience be indecent? Some people are offended by historical and scientific truths.

waterlesscloud6• 11 years ago

"What if r/games decides to be "indecent" so that reddit doesn't earn money from that subreddit and to keep exposure limited?"

Something like this seems very likely to happen. It will be interesting to see how Reddit handles it. The only good option I see for Reddit there is to try to win the mods over.

kevinmchugh• 11 years ago

Turning racist subreddits into cost centers feels like a good alignment of incentives, but it's weird to give toxic users an ad-free experience because they're toxic.

icebraining• 11 years ago

It's not like the Reddit ads are particularly taxing, though.

jchendy• 11 years ago

There are other options. Like filling the ad space with PSAs.

mavhc• 11 years ago

If you really want to keep the assholes, and I've no idea why you would, just charge them for using your server, they either pay or clean up their users. People will be begging to be let back into the free hosting section

munchbunny• 11 years ago

That's an interesting point, but my read on Huffman's original comment is that it's more for market reasons.

I work in the ad tech industry, and my read is that this is Huffman trying to assure brands that Reddit is a reputable venue for advertising. For example, most major brands are VERY skittish about going anywhere near family unfriendly content because they don't want to be associated with a questionable site.

From this perspective, accidentally giving toxic users an ad-free experience (a small thing) is a worthwhile tradeoff if it means you can attract the big advertisers (a huge thing).

brighteyes2• 11 years ago

They could still show ads, and donate the profits to charity. If the charity is opposite to the subreddit, it could even motivate people to leave (say, coontown ads could be donated to a charity related to #blacklivesmatter).

MichaelGG• 11 years ago

Eh it might help increase active user counts. Instead of getting a simple over-18 prompt, users will see a page line "sign up for a FREE account to see this stuff we can't show you otherwise".

nickpsecurity• 11 years ago

Damn that is an interesting perspective on it. Maybe show them adds selected to piss them off rather than please them. Popup, modal, moving all over the screen type of ads. If they leave, no money is made and they're gone temporarily. If they fight ads in protest, money is made which can be invested into more frustrating technology.

Let's play!

oldmanjay4• 11 years ago

It strikes me that nearly every problem Reddit faces is a result of centralization and scale. The right answer is for users to go back to a self-hosted model, which will never happen because people follow crowds instinctively.

kelseydh8• 11 years ago

Almost reminds me of the Silk Road, and the move towards decentralized markets. Someone needs to make a decentralized reddit where anyone can go wherever they wish easily, and no one is tasked with serious governance issues -- let each subreddit govern themselves.

spc476• 11 years ago

A network where the users are in control of what they see and hear. A ... user net of some sort. You could probably call it usenet. Yeah, that has a nice ring to it.

andrewstuart2• 11 years ago

The reason we’re careful to restrict speech is because people have more open and authentic discussions when they aren't worried about the speech police knocking down their door.

Am I reading this right? As in, we restrict speech because people speak more freely when they're not free to speak?

ikeboy• 11 years ago

That was meant to be a reason not to restrict speech.

mwfunk2• 11 years ago

You may be reading it wrong. It sounds like they don't want an environment in which people aren't sure what is allowed or not allowed. "Careful to restrict speech" in the sense that you don't want to go overboard with rules and moderation because you end up trading one problem (bad behavior from bad citizens) for another (an overly sanitized and controlled environment).

OTOH, even your interpretation makes some degree of sense to me. When a community turns toxic, the bad behavior from the bad citizens drives away all of the good citizens who are positive contributors. It's just like mailing lists or discussion sites like HN. Personal attacks beget more personal attacks, and eventually so much of the comments are malicious or stupid that people who actually have something to contribute go elsewhere.

An extreme example would be YouTube comments. If you see a bunch of terrible comments that barely parse as human language, you are that much more unlikely to leave a well-written comment because why bother? It'd be pearls before swine (if all the comments are terrible, then the people who bother reading the comments are likely also terrible).

It sounds like Reddit is just trying to avoid the downward spiral that almost every electronic community goes through eventually, but are aware that taking this too far could have a chilling effect on the larger, more constructive community that they want to retain.

tikhonj2• 11 years ago

That's the reason they're careful about it.

Presumably, they want to it in ways that are limited, reasonable and predictable so that people can have open discussions without worry. This is obviously a good goal, but it's the sort of thing that can easily get swamped in implementation details.

ars5• 11 years ago

As in, we restrict speech because people speak more freely when they're not free to speak?

I don't know about reddit, but that is in face true in the real world.

In a place with no restrictions on speech, timid people, or those with controversial opinions, do not speak.

In a place with restricted speech they feel more open to speak.

boards2x• 11 years ago

Hilarious. Spam is strictly prohibited, while hate-speech is tolerated, unless inciting. spam must be lethal. Anywho, I've never liked Reddit and like it even less seeing what's going in there.

> These types of content are prohibited [1]: > Spam

mrkurt• 11 years ago

Spam is easy to recognize. Hate-speech isn't, there's a tremendous range of speech that may-or-may not be hate speech.

bluecalm2• 11 years ago

Yeah but... racism is well established as a harmful thing by now. If you host subs dedicated to it you are making the world a worse place. It might be a tough call with other things but this one is as clear-cut as it gets.

tikhonj2• 11 years ago

That's because spam is an attack on the service. More like DDoS traffic than commentary. It's a matter of operating the site, not policing the ideas therein.

"Hate speech", on the other hand, is about voicing particular modern taboos. It's inherently politicized and controversial. Banning it site-wide would be little more than moralistic.

jewbacca2• 11 years ago

For very many habitual users of Reddit, the way in which it is probably most valuable is as the canonical general discussion forum of the web. An important part of the infrastructure of their perception and interpretation of the world around them, for pretty much any domain beyond the most incommunicably personal.

To read Reddit can be, in a surprisingly real way, like participating in a collective consciousness -- with all the addictive dependence [I say that in a non-judgemental way, not being able to come up with a less negative way to characterize it at the moment] that the type of speculative fiction which imagines such living arrangements usually predicts.

The practical side of this is that, for any given news event, cultural phenomenon, popularly-circulating idea, whatever: for these users it is instinctive to consult the reddit threads on the topic, as a deeply-ingrained part of their process for digesting and interpreting it. That those reddit threads will exist and have an active discussion on any given topic is a given. Even if the local source of a news piece has a forum/thread of its own, it is fundamentally not the same thing.

It's been, in a hazy golden age that may have never actually existed, something close a total function for processing the events of the world, big and small.

One day, there was an event, a dumb internet drama event, but one for which the primary Reddit discussion thread was displaying a count of 20 thousand comments -- but on inspection, every single last one of those was showing up as [deleted]. That was the start of it for most users. Many have fixated on the specific topic of that initial drama as the source of the problem with Reddit, and many others have fixated on this fixation as the source of the problem with Reddit.

But there is a general sense that this is growing, spreading, and mutating, and seems to be cropping up in places that are not strictly predictable.

For example, there are persistent rumours that several of the more popular subreddits for which the news would be directly and explicitly on-topic, are systematically removing discussions about various global trade agreements currently being negotiated. Is it true? Maybe, maybe not, but the trust is broken.

----

The main thing is (the perception that):

Now there is a partial function where before there was a total function. That is disastrous damage in an information processing system.

----

To these users, this is a very profound and frightening piece of damage, having extended a part of their cognition into this machinery that now seems to be failing. Panic sets in, which obviously means wild flailing at anything that pops its head up and can be in any way seen as responsible for the damage.

Hence, the reaction to Ellen Pao (and what would have been the reaction to Steve Huffman here, had he unilaterally taken a more extreme stance than he has here). Especially after she made public statements of purpose that were easily interpretable by these users to the effect of "whatever else might be the source of the damage to your extended cognition, we intend to start deliberately doing some more damage to areas we don't consider important".

----

Also important to understanding this:

To the users I'm talking about, the "cognitive value" of Reddit is not entirely about directly being fed opinions to take up as one's own.

Many of these users find great value to being exposed to, they deliberately seek out for their own enrichment: idiocy, malice, counterfactuals, cognitive dissonance, debate (honest and otherwise), the whole range of perceptions and opinions. To them, being exposed to these things is just as much of the value of Reddit as the "good stuff". And that seems to be the aspect of Reddit most strongly and immediately under threat.

Anyone who does not value this kind of experience (which seems to be a very large proportion of the people participating in this conversation at the most visible levels) is going to see any attempt to frame this type of content as valuable in any way as totally incomprehensible, evil, and malicious itself. So this part of things is pretty close to an impossible conversation to have in public.

----

(reposting a comment that I've made before, in a thread that was apparently soft-killed on HN)

jewbacca2• 11 years ago

Here is a similarly-aligned sentiment from the OP thread here, beautifully-stated by somebody with potentially more credibility on the subject (let's be honest here) than me (though do note that she rightly does not claim to be speaking for anybody but herself):

----

I have been a redditor for a very long time, and I've been part of a range of kinds of communities that vary fairly significantly.
I am also a female who was raped, and this is something I have been opened about talking fairly frequently on reddit.
I disagree with the ban of the aforementioned sub, because I feel that it sets a precedent depending on what the society deems appropriate to think about, and what it does not.
Please note, that I can not and do not pretend to speak for any woman who was raped besides myself.
What I am concerned with is this distinct drawing of a line between the people who own the site, and the people who create the content on the site. Reddit appealed to me because it was the closest thing to a speaking democracy I could find in my entire existence, utilizing technology in a way that is almost impossible to recreate across large populations of people otherwise.
This sequence of events marks this as a departure from that construct. From today onwards, I know that I am not seeing clusters of people with every aspect of their humanity shown, as ugly as it may be sometimes. I feel that it is not the subreddit that causes subs like /r/rapingwomen to exist, but this stems from a larger cultural problem. Hiding it or sweeping it under a rug from the masses is not what solves the problem; I have already lived under those rules and I have seen them to be ineffective at best and traumatizing / mentally warping at worst.
People's minds should not be ruled over by the minds of other people, and that is what I feel this has become. Internet content is thought content, idea content. It is not the act of violence - these are two very separate things. You can construct a society that appears to value and cherish women's rights in the highest regard, and yet the truth can be the furthest thing from it.
I really would hope that you would reconsider your position. To take away the right of being able to know with certainty that one can speak freely without fear, I don't have many words to offer that fully express my sadness at that.
The problem is not the banning of specifics. The problem is how it affects how people reason afterwards about their expectations of the site and their interactions with others. It sets up new social constructs and new social rules, and will alter things significantly, even fractions of things you would not expect. It is like a butterfly effect across the mind, to believe you can speak freely, and to have that taken away.

-- /u/abcabcdeabc, responding directly to Steve Huffman

https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_t...

kelseydh8• 11 years ago

Reddit is in dire need of a UI/UX improvement. The site is unuseable without the Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) browser extension.

Honestly it feels like developers have not made a significant change to Reddit in years. Screw advertising revenue, Reddit needs to begin making improvements gradually to its user interface or else it risks becoming a dinosaur.

vezzy-fnord• 11 years ago

The site is unuseable without the Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) browser extension.

Not much of a Redditor, but could you elaborate as to why the vanilla Reddit UI is "unuseable"?

theseatoms• 11 years ago

Yeah, I hear this often, but I've never used RES and the site seems fine. Maybe I have some form of Stockholm Syndrome..

renata• 11 years ago

Blocking subreddits from /r/all is basically essential for a decent reddit experience and is only available with RES or reddit gold.

SwellJoe• 11 years ago

Yeah, they're down to what, 7 billion pageviews a month? How will they survive?

kelseydh8• 11 years ago

If Facebook kept its original design it could be argued they wouldn't be where they are now. Most people don't notice how much Facebook changed its UI over the years because the changes have been gradual. If Facebook as a site had not evolved, there is chance that they wouldn't have survived. Reddit has hardly seen any update in its appearances and I believe within 5 years it will be at risk of losing its user base if it does not evolve its front-end to make the slight improvements that are so obviously overdue (looking at you, Reddit Enhancement Suite).

mahouse• 11 years ago

That's an interesting argument taking into account the site spends half the day down. ;P

techwizrd• 11 years ago

On the contrary, many redditors would disagree with you. Reddit's format works very well for consuming and focusing on content and comments. Redditors are considering whether to abandon Reddit based on the community aspects and the actions of the admins. Those require far more work than just a UI/UX improvement. Many redditors also browse from mobile apps such as a Reddit Sync or Alien Blue. Those redditors will gain little from UI/UX improvements to the desktop, but they stand a lot to gain or lose from changes to Reddit's content rules and community policies.

kelseydh8• 11 years ago

Fair enough, but you know you are !@#$ing up your software development when you have absolutely no mobile presence you can control or make ad revenue off of.

Reddit has been stuck in a development black hole for years. If they are pumping out new features, they certainly aren't features that user's can notice or appreciate. You can get away with this neglect for awhile, but too much of it and your platform will stagnant.

Features like better content blocking at the user level are definitely more difficult than UI/UX, but they are also necessary for Reddit to reach the next level.

Honestly, rather than pursue advertising, if they got their !@#$ together to find new content streams, they could easily bring in lots of cash. They are stuck in a mindset that only their existing feature sets should be the ones that exist. Contrast that with Facebook who made many bold additions to their platforms over the years (news feed, chat). There are ways of doing this without becoming Digg. (The answer is by not removing existing functionality, but by adding to it.)

jedberg• 11 years ago

People have been literally saying this since the first month of the site. It doesn't seem to be holding back growth.

That being said, what reddit does need is a separate interface for people that don't like the current one. That already exists in the form of the various mobile apps.

With a few tweaks to the api, they could easily build a whole new desktop UI for folks like yourself who want something different, to run alongside the existing one.

ars5• 11 years ago

“We need people whose stupidity clashes against our values.”

No. We don't. Those people are a detriment with no redeeming qualities.

You can clash against values without being stupid.

But in any case clashing against the hivemind on reddit is quite hard, and boy oh boy the hivemind can be stupid.

If reddit actually want to make things better they can get rid of the downvote option.

Retra3• 11 years ago

Removing down-votes doesn't help unless you've got a fairly sparse sub to begin with. Facebook doesn't have down-votes, and I consider that one of its poorer features.

pervycreeper3• 11 years ago

Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people

This is incredibly ambiguous. I think it is important to specify what exactly harassment isn't, and explicitly permit that.

Most people claiming 'harassment' are simply using it as a tool to silence and persecute people who dare to hold opinions that differ from their own. For example, the Twitter harassment trial that just finished yesterday in Toronto. [1] Merely saying that one 'feels harassed' should not count for anything.

Furthermore there is a problem with labelling certain communities as being problematic, or whatever word they are searching for. This makes uncommon or novel viewpoints vulnerable to further marginalization if their opponents succeed in giving them that label.

[1] http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchfor...

alayne3• 11 years ago

That Toronto guy bothered that woman and her acquaintances for months and months and made ongoing personal comments. If that's not a form of harassment, I don't know what is. Christie Blatchford isn't exactly an impartial news source.

pervycreeper3• 11 years ago

Off-topic, but on that point, the full body of communications referenced in that case is publicly available online, and I invite readers to decide for themselves.

If that's not a form of harassment, I don't know what is.

You may be right about that. By the way, Twitter has a 'block' function for dealing with 'mentions', as far as I am aware.

braythwayt2• 11 years ago

Spez quoted the existing harassment policy. It is not as simple as “feeling harassed:”

Systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person (1) conclude that reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation, or (2) fear for their safety or the safety of those around them.

The key phrases to me are “systemic and/or continued” and “a reasonable person."

pervycreeper3• 11 years ago

I'm sure what they have in mind is pretty well-considered, however, the pitfalls I outlined above still remain. For instance, different people have different ideas of what a `reasonable person' is. Generally, one which is pretty close to themselves! Also, ``systemic and/or continued'' also means different things to different people. For instance, the opponents of Gamer-Gate claimed (and perhaps genuinely believed) themselves to be targets of a `harassment campaign', when in fact, they were receiving disagreement and mockery from many different sources, each only communicating once or a handful of times. [1]

So, that wording of the policy still leaves plenty of leeway for the sort of abuse I described above.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity

danielweber2• 11 years ago

conclude that reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation

This is the worrisome part.

Say that Joe posts, in conversations where it's on topic, that one group of people are racially inferior. Now a bunch of people get on his case about it, flagging him all the time, downvoting his shit, and tracking where he posts his bullshit to counter everything he says with their own version of events, it sure seems like reddit isn't a "safe platform" to express his ideas.

INSTANT EDIT Y'know, I convinced myself I'm wrong, but I'm going to post this comment anyway since it helped my change my own mind so maybe it will inform someone else.

I think "safe platform" doesn't mean "welcoming platform." If Joe's specific ideas get downvoted and called out, okay.

However, if people are tracking down and downvoting Joe when he posts about other things or tracking him to different places or to his Facebook or to his employer, that's where the line is crossed. Then it's not just "unwelcome," it's "unsafe."

And the best part is that this works no matter what Joe was posting that got people's undies in a twist.

comrh3• 11 years ago

Most people claiming 'harassment' are simply using it as a tool to silence and persecute people who dare to hold opinions that differ from their own.

That seriously needs a citation or something to back it up. It doesn't make any sense to me how you could claim that.

Fuzzwah2• 11 years ago

Anything illegal

Illegal where?

y-satellite• 11 years ago

The US, since that is where reddit is based.

Fuzzwah2• 11 years ago

CA laws specifically then?

xacaxulu2• 11 years ago

Pao has whatever the opposite of the Midas touch is.

interesting_att2• 11 years ago

Am I the only one who didn't see anything of value in this AMA from /u/spez?

Pyxl1012• 11 years ago

This Reddit comment (from the thread being linked to but not easy to see, at the time I write this) catalogs the various public statements that staff have made over time about Reddit being a place for free speech on the web:

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_...

It's interesting to see what was said in the past and how it compares to the narrative today.

em3rgent0rdr• 11 years ago

"Anything illegal"

That's a pretty broad catch-all.

Let's talk content. AMA

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