Relevant context: recently, former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao called out Reddit for their policies after Reddit did a statement on Black Lives Matter:
> I am obligated to call you out: You should have shut down the_donald instead of amplifying it and its hate, racism, and violence. So much of what is happening now lies at your feet. You don't get to say BLM when reddit nurtures and monetizes white supremacy and hate all day long
Relevant, but I think the timeline is a bit subtler than that. (Mostly, the CEO referenced in that story is Wong himself, not Pao.)
- Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast in 2006.
- Founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman left in 2009.
- Yishan Wong became CEO in March 2012.
- Reddit raised its Series B in September 2014, led by Sam Altman. Wong was one of the investors.
- Wong resigns in November 2014. Ellen Pao becomes interim CEO and Ohanian becomes executive chairman.
- Reddit introduces an anti-harassment policy and bans fatpeoplehate and other subreddits in early summer 2015.
- Later in the summer, Victoria Taylor is fired. Users hold Pao responsible, she apologizes for how it was handled, and she resigns on July 10 under pressure from the board. Huffman becomes CEO.
- One day later, Wong writes the above post.
- One more day later, Wong reveals on Quora that Ohanian, not Pao, fired Taylor.
Celebrity AMAs just haven't been the same since. She was, in my opinion, one of the best parts of any of the default subs back then. It was very unexpected when she was suddenly gone with no reasonable explanation, and all the AMAs right around then were absolutely garbage. She did a lot for /r/IAmA.
It's interesting how sexual harassment has long-term implications for one's career. You're a VC partner who is sexually harassed by another partner, as a consequence you get pushed out, as a consequence you're forced to take a position at a failing company, as a consequence you're forced to take the role of the fall guy by the failing company's founders, and as a consequence your career in tech is over. It's remarkable how much shit Ellen Pao had to take just for speaking out about sexual harassment at Kleiner Perkins.
Keep in mind that it was found that all of her allegations of sexual harassment were completely unfounded and she was likely just trying to get a settlement to help her dire financial situation
> it was found that all of her allegations of sexual harassment were completely unfounded
Do you have a source for this?
The courts ruled in Pao v. Kleiner Perkins that Kleiner Perkins did not discriminate against her. I don't think they ruled on whether or not Ajit Nazre sexually harassed her (or others), and evidence for it was presented in the case. I'm pretty sure they did not rule that the allegations were "completely unfounded."
> she was likely just trying to get a settlement to help her dire financial situation
Given the publicity around how her case was the first like it, you'd have to be very, very foolhardy to go into it for financial reasons, especially if you didn't think you had a strong case. And if you were going for a settlement, you wouldn't want it to actually go to court if the other side didn't offer one, you'd just withdraw the lawsuit.
The Vanity Fair piece on her and her husband is a good read. It was written before she became CEO, or really got that much attention. I have no idea how true her allegations were, but she's the sort of person who would take advantage of situations.
The best commentary I read on her case with Kleiner Perkins was it was an imperfect case with imperfect parties. The press presented it as representative of gender discrimination in the valley, but it was really bad actors on both sides. While I didn't have any personal issues with Ellen, I know people who did, and I can absolutely see her taking advantage of the situation, so it was pretty appalling to see people who don't know her making her a champion of women in tech.
I hadn't read that article before, but I just read it now - I don't see anything in it to indicate that Pao took advantage of situations (at least in the sense of unfairly taking advantage of situations - certainly there's a lot of advantage in the situation of being a VC and this profile paints her as ambitious and driven, but I think it's not what you meant). There's a fair bit in the article to paint Buddy Fletcher as not a great person - money that apparently disappeared from his fund, for instance, and the independent auditor not being that independent. But the article also goes to some length to argue that he tried to convince his wife not to sue KPCB.
This is potentially veering off-topic, but I think it's entirely reasonable for imperfect people to be champions of women in tech or whatever other causes. I know very few perfect people. (In fact one of the common reactions I heard to Susan Fowler's "very strange year" post is how lucky she was that her own behavior was blameless through that year - certainly all the forces that conspired against her had been at Uber and other companies for years before that, but nobody was able to tell a story where they were so clearly faultless, because, well, everyone's human, and sometimes you misjudge things, get into fights where you're in the wrong, etc.)
And in particular I think it's entirely possible - and entirely consistent with the details in the Vanity Fair story - for an imperfect person to have been quite factually sexually harassed and to have suffered for it.
I remember reading this article when it came out in 2013.
When I re-read it today, I finally saw all the obstacles and discrimination that Ellen Pao and Buddy Fletcher had to overcome just to be in a position to be embroiled in scandals like this.
It's all power and positioning. That chain of events does a good job of explaining how the soft consequences of speaking out (a little less trust from others, not being perceived as the person you actually want to lead) can lead to real outcomes.
It's hard to know for sure how much she knew about when hired, but without what she'd experienced prior, would she have felt the need to take on this role? Was she viewing her career or reputation in need of rebuilding or strengthening, so that's why she entertained this (and if so, was the outcome expected, or did they throw her under the bus)?
Citation needed. Her sexual harassment claims were false, and she lost her court case. Perhaps what you are seeing is evidence that she is difficult to work with, and bad at her job.
Even on a throwaway, I can't share more, but Alexis royally fucked Victoria on that one. But don't think Ellen didn't have anything to do with it. The management structure at that time was pretty weird.
I used to work for reddit. I was talking with another former admin, and we both remember a post on reddit asking admins how they got their jobs at reddit. I was never able to find it, but Ellen Pao said something like "I invested in it and asked for a job."
This is just scape-goating and finding something recent to blame for a situation that has been going on for 150+ years.
Besides, it was effectively shut down, and all that did was lead to the creation of thedonald.win, which by all appearances seems to be thriving and growing rapidly, probably much faster than Reddit itself grew when it was founded. To blame the situation on a forum is to misunderstand that the country is filled with people with these viewpoints regardless (and it has been for far longer than anyone today has been alive).
> Besides, it was effectively shut down, and all that did was lead to the creation of thedonald.win
You don't end up on thedonald.win by chance, you go there purposefully. For a long time /r/t_d wasn't quarantined at all meaning anyone browsing /r/all would see their posts all day long (since they were pretty good at mass upvoting their own posts for that purpose).
I don't think anyone advocates for entirely banning this community from the internet, freedom of speech is still important, but just not have it in a place where it might get surfaced and advertised to people that weren't looking for it. So to me, thedonald.win and /r/t_d are very different.
> anyone browsing /r/all would see their posts all day long
I feel like that's only right and correct; in a sufficiently-large community (i.e. a society), anyone intentionally exposing themselves to "everything" should be prepared to view the worst of the worst (of the worst) of "everything." That's what "everything" means!
Honestly, I don't get why /r/all even exists, if it's not there for the people who want to voluntarily immerse themselves in a soul-destroying experience. It's a Total Perspective Vortex. (It thus perplexes me why Reddit—a corporation with PR concerns—would keep it around. It's not something a corporation would want to provide, even if it's something some strange people would like to consume.)
Imagine for a moment what the /r/all equivalent for Usenet would be like. Or the /r/all equivalent for "phpBB forums." Or /r/all for Wordpress blogs. Kind of ridiculous to even want that, no? It'd have no purpose other than instilling existential terror.
I'd venture to guess /r/all exists for the same reason the Facebook News Feed exists: to increase engagement with the site. It's a curation mechanism that amplifies the already popular items within the sub communities, and exposes them to the community at large in a virtuous (vicious?) cycle.
> anyone intentionally exposing themselves to "everything" should be prepared to view the worst of the worst (of the worst) of "everything." That's what "everything" means!
That would be ok if you saw that in propotion. The issue is when you have a group of people intentionally gaming the upvote system, making /r/all inundated with alt-right content (tbf, /r/t_d weren't the only one doing that), completly skewing what you see.
It's basically the same issue with all social platform, yes everyone should have the right to express their views, but mass amplification via the platform's algorithm shouldn't be a right.
“In proportion” to what, though? We get the same problem here that one gets with many voting systems: if voting is voluntary, then some groups are more politically active (i.e. vote more) than others, and so some voting blocs (here, subreddits) are over- or under-represented compared to their user-base size.
That’s not a problem with the way the algorithm counts votes. That’s just a mathematical voting-theory problem with comparing votes between disparate populations that are each motivated-to-vote for different reasons, and thus using “one vote” to mean something different within each community.
Or, to put that more simply: “karma” is non-fungible. It works fine to rank posts within a subreddit, but it’s entirely meaningless for ranking posts between different subreddits.
———
But that still ignores the greater issue. Things wouldn’t be “fine” even if some ideal inter-subreddit karma exchange-rate was reached. Keep in mind that some subreddits are “quarantined”, which essentially means that their weighting for appearing in /r/all is forced to 0.
In other words, /r/all isn’t just sorting badly; it also requires a bunch of manual overrides to its computed weights, in order to function.
IMHO, that’s not really a satisfactory algorithm. Maybe it’s practical for serving some purpose (e.g. making money), but that kludge-factor means that it isn’t actually doing what it claims to do: telling you about the activity happening across “all of Reddit.”
A “real” /r/all wouldn’t take quarantines into account. It’d just be the view that any third party would compute by scraping every subreddit, throwing all the posts into a table, and ordering by score descending. And that view is the one I mean when I say “soul-destroying.”
Let me restate my premise: a proper /r/all—one that truly delivers on the use-case it claims to deliver on—is just... not something anyone wants.
> but mass amplification via the platform's algorithm shouldn't be a right.
Right. No amplification is the solution. /r/all and the homepage need to be removed. Left wing subs and right wing subs should exist in peaceful isolation and subs like AHS which try to police what other subs are doing should be shut down.
I'm sure that would negatively impact Reddit's income, however.
It's not freedom of speech if reddit starts suppressing speech.
There are various other arguments to make, such as the rpevelance of posts encouraging violence that aren't covered under freedom of speech, or that reddit does not have to follow free speech rules in the first place.
I might be late to the threat but you have a very insidious assumption left unstated. You seem to think certain ideas are to dangerous to be shared. That they could infect people and corrupt them. If we silence all the wrong think people will act better.
This is dangerous for many reasons but particularly, what happens if something is deemed wrong think when it is objectively more true than the "right think"?
> just not have it in a place where it might get surfaced and advertised to people that weren't looking for it.
You're going to have to pick one of these two statements. If freedom of speech is important then let the audience determine what makes it to the front page. If freedom of speech isn't important than hide content you don't like and continue building your own bubble.
> You're going to have to pick one of these two statements.
Absolutly not. Repeating myself from a bit further down:
It's basically the same issue with all social platform, yes everyone should have the right to express their views, but mass amplification via the platform's algorithm shouldn't be a right.
Also,
> let the audience determine what makes it to the front page
/r/t_d was gaming the upvote system to have way more posts on /r/all that they would have had 'naturally', making this whole point moot. It wasn't determined by what the audience wanted to see, it was determined by a small brigade of motivated people.
The issue is indeed the same with all social platforms but also media and broadcast. The singular question is this: What entity can really artfully determine who ought to speak to the masses in the interest of society? Is there someone with superiority of wisdom that can determine who should speak to many, and if so, is the answer the same ones that hold that power today. In the not-so-long ago it was the priest who spoke to the many and the king with the divine wisdom. Today we know better and thus we have given that power to... the ones we elect? No. It is the one whose platform has the highest stickyness.
Mass amplification via a platform's algorithm is not a big step above the old ways, and the platform owner does not seem to have much better divine wisdom than past kings.
You can’t hide behind the terms of service. That is just something reddit made up. There is no fundamental difference between these two scenarios except whatever you’ve invented in your mind.
That sounds like you’re saying that it’s a waste of time to ever try to change anything because, well, “history.”
Feel free to disabuse me of my misconception if I misunderstand. But it sounds an awful lot like what some people say when you try to call out racist cops: “We’re just scapegoating someone for saying aloud what all the police are thinking. It’s a waste of time.”
It sounds to me like what he's saying it that its a waste of time (and often counterproductive) to try to silence voices that you disagree with. They aren't simply going to vanish because you've silenced them on your platform.
most people weren't advocating violence in there, most of these claims came from people that wanted to tear it down and provide justification for it. I've seen documented evidence that the same kind of content exists on other subreddits that have not been banned.
censorship does not help you win the debate.
why won't reddit police left-wing content and calls for violence? all I want is transparency.
Yeah, TD alone was huge in 2016-2017 and was a huge contributor to the dynamic we have in the world today. Ellen is 100% right here and Alex did absolutely nothing to address it.
I think if TD were banned in 2016, there's a decent chance the world would look even worse and more polarized today, due to the backlash and chain reactions that would have occurred.
Picture "TOP SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANY BANS SUPPORT OF THE PRESIDENT" headlines running for months.
Picture Trump bringing it up in hundreds of speeches and tweets, demanding regulation and saying how unfair it is that he and his supporters are being censored and silenced and attacked by Silicon Valley and the left. (He's already doing that, but this would give him way more ammo.)
Picture he and his supporters pointing to it as evidence that The Elites and the liberals and the tech industry are out to get him and out to get half of the country, and that only he can defend their liberties and bring our country and corrupt establishment back from the brink.
Also, all of those users would just flock to alternative off-site communities that make TD look like a bastion of reason and civility by comparison.
And? De-platforming works very effectively. Look at 8chan, Gab and Voat. All drowning in server costs trying to host "safe spaces" for certain opinions.
It does, and it is wonderful if those platforms are following along with the same narrative as you at a given point in time.
Google, Reddit et al. have shown themselves to pretty flexible when it comes to their morals though, particularly when it comes to the needs and wants of the Chinese government and their investors, so while you may be clapping your hands to your ideological opponents being "de-platformed" today, it could very well be you tomorrow.
I want to believe you. If you know this to be true, please share.
I remain skeptical. Evidence still seems mixed.
Yes, it seems social medias are effective incubators and accelerators for social pathogens, dominating the attention economy.
But there's also evidence that attention doesn't change minds. If I read this correctly, StarSlateCodex is making the case that media attention about Creationism didn't move the needle about beliefs.
8chan, Gab, and goat are all for very out of the mainstream opinions.
The POTUS has a strong support base, including multiple major media outlets that share information about him. It’s a totally different story. I think he could easily stand up a huge social media network if he needed to, perhaps in collaboration with Fox News.
I'm not so sure that he could to be honest. From an advertising PoV I don't think they'd have much luck - I listened to Ben Shapiro's podcast for a few weeks out of curiosity a while back and his advertisers are really bottom of the barrel stuff. If you've ever checked out Breitbart then.. yea. I doubt you could sustain the server costs. TBH I doubt the Daily Wire would be profitable from its advertising alone, and they don't have nearly the server or personnel costs a huge social media network would. I don't think a Trump affiliated social network would do any better with advertisers.
My thought would be that it might be funded by his campaign, similar to his other campaign apps and website. Completely hypothetical of course but they could either just make it owned by the campaign, or stand it up at arms-length and have it funded by dark money donations from trump supporting billionaires, kind of like a super PAC? Or just have the campaign buy millions of ads itself on the site to fund server costs.
The campaign or Trump's personal wealth could definitely pay for a social media network for some time, I'd agree. I just think the real money coming into right wing media is based on them being able to get loads of views on Facebook/YouTube and spread things widely, and a pro-Trump social media network is really a dead end for that. Without that I don't think you could make it profitable.
Deplatforming internet racists is categorically different from deplatforming the president himself. TD, 8chan? Most people who support the president don't even know what these are, and maybe have a vague idea about Reddit. I would be surprised if Reddit overall had more influence on the election than talk radio, and it doesn't come close to the bully pulpit now that he's president.
I disagree. I think de-platforming is rarely ever effective, and is very often counter-productive and achieves the opposite of the intended effect. 8chan, Gab, Voat, other imageboards, and distributed semi-private things like Discord servers continue to grow in popularity and continue to further radicalize people far beyond where they were before they first came to those places.
Key excerpt: "There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong commitment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches."
If you have relatively moderate people looking to discuss non-mainstream things without being censored, and they can't do that, then you're forcing them into the witches' dens, where they'll probably become increasingly less moderate and increasingly more paranoid and polarized. They feel like the other side hates them and is out to get them... and in this case, their point is being proven. This is exactly why Trump won in 2016 and why he'll probably win again.
Sure, it certainly isn't profitable or fun to run 8chan, Gab, or Voat if you're the owners, but this is just about the users who don't particularly care what site they're using. They'll just use whatever site won't get rid of them. (Also, it isn't even profitable or fun to run reddit, either.)
And this isn't even getting into the possible ethics of de-platforming and censorship and what should and shouldn't be permitted; just the practical effects. Practically speaking, I don't think it's an effective tactic, if the effect you want is to disempower your opponents. It empowers them and energizes them.
>>Reddit puts a NSFW spoiler on violence, porn, etc. Is that considered censorship?
yes and no. It is lesser because it empowers the user to self select if they want to see NSFW items. That is the key.
I put the quarantine on the same level as this, so I have less of an issue with that than if they just banned it outright.
>Is it really censorship if r/t_d had violated numerous Reddit ToS rules?
yes, let me be clear Reddit is perfectly in its legal rights to censor anything they want. They can censor directly all Republicans if they want.
They however can not magically make it not censorship simply because they add a line in their ToS.. that is not how free expression works.
a Website that only allows car related topics censors all speech not related to cars
The problem for Reddit is for years they advertised themselves as a Open Access forum for all topics and discussions, the point 6 font terms of service not with standing.
If reddit has a BIG BOLD header on the HomePage that reads "Conservatives not welcome here" then it would be a different discussion for me
>> outwardly hateful,
Ahh the old "hate speech" non-sense. I reject this premise as "hate speech" is such a subjected term that if you ask 10 people what qualifies as "hate speech" you will get 30 different answers based on context and other things
Further Reddit ignores their own policy on hate speech and promotion of violence provided the speaker is the "correct" political affiliation and that target is the "wrong" political affiliation
The Reddit ToS has always had restrictions on communities that brigade and abuse other communities. They didn't need to add an exception for r/t_D. Instead, they made an exception to keep the subreddit around, because it was driving lots of traffic to the site.
I implore you to go to ceddit.com/r/the_donald and look at the mod log. See how many slurs and calls to violence you see being manually approved by their mods.
>>The Reddit ToS has always had restrictions on communities that brigade and abuse other communities.
Reddits content policy, by their own admission today, is subjective and poorly defined.
Further it is beyond denial that admin moderation and crack downs on subreddits is often politically biased. for example it has been shown many times Admins will crack down on "calls to violence" in conservative or "right" subreddits but are hands off in progressive or "left" subreddits.
You ask me to go to ceddit or mod logs to see violence and racism, but what about the left subreddits that have it on display with out having to visit an external site or mod logs?
in away you are correct, and honestly my biggest problem I have with reddit (and other tech companies) is the double speak they employ.
If they come out with a clearly defined OBJECTIVE set of rules that is UNIVERSALLY enforced then my objections would disappear
Instead they have a vague subjective list of rules that they selectively enforce largely based on a political bias they continue to publicly deny exists
They claim their site is open to all political leanings and views, if they want to have a liberal version of thedonald.win then more power to them, put up a banner that says "Democrat Supporters Only, This is Reddit. Our community is a high-energy Democrat rally. There are no exceptions." then my objections, and the objections of many would disappear, of course reddit would lose most of its value and traffic, which is why they want to speak out of both sides of their mouth. Reddit is only of high value if it has a large cross section of the public participating.
I don’t think this alarmist view makes much sense because all of that has happened, and more. The Right (the group of angry young white men inhabiting r/the_donald not conservative voters) spend every moment outraged about censorship and supposed sleights against them — real or not. Everything you describe is happening every single day and has been since before Donald Trump and will continue after him. If the_donald had been shut down it would have been a positive, without question.
It's a bit sad how there aren't many places on the internet left that strive for the balance between no moderation (for example - various anonymous imageboards) and an extremely biased one (especially towards political opinions, eg. on Reddit and Twitter). In addition to that there are problems with bots made to influence public discussion. In my opinion, that's the main reason why you shouldn't base your opinions on the general public on content you see on the internet - it's relatively easy to manipulate any opinion in a way that it seems supported by a large (and loud) majority.
It's been normalized everywhere, it comes off to me as some sort of badge of honor for people to blame all the ills of the world on one race. Amazing how this doesn't fly for other groups.
> Everything you describe is happening every single day and has been since before Donald Trump and will continue after him.
Yes, it has been and it is and it will, but everything is relative. No matter how bad a bad situation is, it can always get worse. You may not like the US now, but for all we know you could be begging to return to June 2020 when June 2021 comes around.
Every little thing like this increases his odds of re-election and the odds that people will think he's right or at least has a point. If reddit bans the subreddit for him and his supporters and doesn't ban any others, that could actually turn some non-Trump voters into Trump voters, and definitely increases the odds that his people will get out and vote.
>spend every moment outraged about censorship and supposed sleights against them — real or not
Sure, but then here they would have a real sleight, a real example of censorship, and a concrete and empirical thing to be outraged about, as well as a coherent and persuasive argument about the larger implications of the censorship and potential future risks they may face. It's the perfect way to empower them and bolster their intensity and their numbers.
He is very good at taking inflammatory stories, running with them, and getting other people fired up about them, too. He is extremely persuasive not only to his base, but also can be to some people who are closer to the middle. Reddit banning the subreddit and not allowing another one be created for him would be an escalation and a turning point. It's a major line in the sand, and would be a major talking point for him.
It may sound alarmist, but I'm saying this because I am genuinely alarmed at what could have happened and what might happen in the future. His supporters exist in the tens of millions, and they're going to talk with each other one way or another. If they're unable to talk with each other or about him without being banned on popular websites, they're left with no choice but to instead do it on insane cult-like conspiracy theory websites (trust me, if you think TD is bad, just try looking at some of those sites), where they'll be increasingly polarized and will increasingly believe even more dangerous and extravagantly false things.
The more large organizations try to restrict a particular group, the angrier they get and the more they feel like powerful forces are out to get them and that there's an organized conspiracy behind it. It's like trying to push an air bubble out of some material - you just end up displacing it, and if you apply too much pressure, the thing's going to pop.
Also, as other commenters have pointed out, there are lots of very polarized and even extremist people on the opposite side, and if reddit removes one side and does nothing to the other, then all of the above gets amplified even more.
I honestly agree with how Zuckerberg and Huffman are handling this. They both clearly personally dislike Trump, but they understand the big picture. It's kind of like geopolitics.
>> that could actually turn some non-Trump voters into Trump voters
That ship has already sailed most likely. I voted Libertarian in 2016 as I have for every presidential election that I have voted in.
2020 there is a high probability that I will vote Republican for president for the first time in my life, not for sure yet but it is EXACTLY because of the extreme support for censorship, de-platforming and cancel culture that is coming from the Authoritarian left that has my vote is wavering
The crazy thing to me is how so few people on the left realize and understand this. Many people in this thread just don't seem to get it at all.
I'm a left-leaning person and always will be, but sometimes I get really frustrated at how people I otherwise agree with just never fail to consistently shoot themselves and each other in the foot. They'll read your and my posts and just think it's a bunch of nonsense and once again be flabbergasted when Trump wins again. (I'm not 100% certain he'll win, but I definitely am over 60% confident.)
Yes, /r/politics is an echo chamber. But there is an enormous difference between that and T_D. I don't ever recall seeing posts on /r/politics being stickied that called for violence, whereas that happened routinely on T_D.
Your comment is not sarcastic, it is misleading, misiniformed and ultimately destructive.
BS. The only difference between the two discussion groups is that TD dropped all the pretense. I have seen the same kinds of things that are loosely defined as 'calls to violence' in both places.
People on the donald openly celebrated violence in top upvoted posts. Tons of open racism. Politics has turned into a bit of an echo chamber compared to 10 years ago, but it is in no way the same as T_D.
That "dropping pretense" you describe carries a LOT more weight than you are giving it, in who it attracts, and the behaviors it promotes.
It's just a thinly veiled allusion to "dog whistling" which all of these supposed free speech zealots like to throw around whenever they feel that their safe space is being questioned.
I'm no fan of r/politics, but to actually believe that they're basically the same as TD is just wild.
I would very much like to see a study on that. Because of the reddit quarantine I can't use a subreddit analysis tool to compare the subs. The only conclusion I can see is that both politics and the donald is likely to share the same word as the most commonly used: Trump.
I would in particular be interesting to know if there is a significant difference in offensive words used in either sub.
I don't agree with you, but even if I did, the "pretense" being referred to is "we don't actually want violence inflicted on the other party". I'd say that's a pretty important pretense to keep
"Dropped the pretense" is an inference you're making into the motivations of the posters.
Indeed, the difference between making a direct call to violence and an inferred one are very different things.
The problems with TD stemmed far beyond inciting or glorifying violence. As mentioned, the biggest problem with /r/politics is it's an absolute echo chamber. Not even in the same realm.
Free speech isn't hard to understand as a concept. If someone says something you disagree with, you debate them. Echo chambers radicalize us all. No one is immune to the effects of groupthink.
You're allowed to shout that there's a fire in a crowded theater if there's actually a fire. No one has ever argued that there is an unlimited right to say whatever you want whenever you want (libel and slander laws exist and don't seem to be controversial). If you falsely shout that there's a fire and cause a stampede and people are injured and it can be proven that you did it with malicious intent, you will be prosecuted or sued, but this isn't fundamentally different than libel or slander laws. Finally, you should know that the "fire in a crowded theater" phrase came from a unanimous Supreme Court decision that endorsed censorship and suppression of speech that criticized conscription during World War 1.
Fire in a crowded theater is not an exception according to the Supreme Court and hasn't been for a while.
Clear and present danger is the standard.
According to the Supreme Court saying that all members of a certain minority group in must be killed, is covered under free speech, but saying that a specific member of that minority group must be killed at 9 p.m. tomorrow night, it's not free speech but clear and present danger.
The “only difference” between a group of fascist white supremacists who fantasize about violently exterminating their perceived enemies and a bunch of ordinary people in a community organized around discussing newspaper/news magazine articles who are scared about the growing threat of fascist white supremacists and want them voted out of office and removed from positions of power is that the former have “dropped the pretense”?
green user, only posts are in support of T_D, pretends it wasn't a hate filled shithole... Alright, I'll bite.
t_d was a vile, hatred spewing, white nationalist, violence prone subreddit and its death made the world better. Let's link a few examples, not for you, but for the few people that might still doubt it.
(NSFW links coming up, by the way.)
Their mods regularly left up posts that advocated for violence against leftists [1], calling for civil war in response to impeachement [2], calling for the murder of those who disagree with them [3], general gay and islamic hatred [4], kept a discord with doxxes of leftist in their sidebar [5], calling for political opponent's murder [6], rounding up muslims into concentration camps [7], extermination of migrants [8], and many, many, many others [9][10][11]
I've never read or posted to The_Donald before although I was aware of its existence, so I read your post with a neutral mindset and followed the links to verify your claims. Because if true then I'd agree with you on its closure.
Many of the posts are quite nasty, for sure. But I feel rather deceived. Many of the cited links don't support your claims about them. I checked them all, here are the summaries here for others.
advocated for violence against leftists [1]
This post advocates deportation of low-IQ immigrants. Many countries impose proxies for IQ on immigrants, e.g. degree requirements. I've had to pass such requirements myself. For this claim to be correct any border enforcement must be considered "advocacy of violence", which given the widespread existence of borders would be in my view a misleading claim. None of the replies advocate for violence either.
calling for civil war in response to impeachement [2]
This post doesn't "call" for civil war but predicts that it would be a likely outcome of Trump being replaced by Nancy Pelosi i.e. someone of entirely opposite views, in case of impeachment. If this post is considered unacceptable speech then it's hard to see how anyone could say "action X would lead to civil war" without it being equally unacceptable, which would effectively ban all discussion of civil war including by academics.
calling for the murder of those who disagree with them [3]
This post says "Whats the penalty for treason? Death?" and the replies give a variety of other possible outcomes like CNN jobs, book deals etc.
The US does have a history of executing people for treason. Lawful executions aren't legally considered murder. This post is thus a rhetorical question about constitutional fact. Obviously whether the act being discussed really is treason or not is a different matter, I didn't bother checking that, but it's not the same as saying "let's go murder this person" because the call is for the state to take action, not individuals.
general gay and islamic hatred [4]
This one is an image macro titled, "I present to you, the anti christ". The image is a cartoon of what appears to be a gay man wearing a turban and smoking a cigarette. It does indeed seek to denigrate gays and muslims, I guess, if you accept that depicting a gay muslim is inherently "hatred". But isn't that a contradiction in terms? Isn't that only considered controversial because Islam is famously intolerant of gays? The combination of these two things really shouldn't be considered a problem, according to western values, and presumably that was the point.
kept a discord with doxxes of leftist in their sidebar [5]
The leftists in question signed a public petition, and petitions aren't signed by anonymous people. Still, I agree this breaks Reddit's rules on doxxing as addresses are more than names, and this is by far the strongest claim to bad behaviour so far.
calling for political opponent's murder [6]
This one calls for Hillary Clinton to be imprisoned, not murdered. A small minority of comments talk about treason, but again when the state executes someone this isn't called murder, which is a legal term with its own meaning.
rounding up muslims into concentration camps [7]
This one indeed is bad, it describes China rounding up muslims in concentration camps and then says that whilst they "aren't applauding China" maybe the EU and Canada can learn something from it. For me that'd cross the line.
The top voted comment and thread is describing muslims as feral animals, barbarians etc. The others are suggesting that China has legitimate reasons for it due to Islamic terrorism.
extermination of migrants [8]
This one says, "ICE isn't enough. The Federal government will need to implement martial law to eradicate the aliens and corrupt politicians"
This one seems ambiguous. Grammatically it can be read as either ICE isn't enough to fulfil its mission of "eradicating aliens" (deporting them would be getting rid of them), which doesn't involve "exterminating" people let alone all migrants as they only care about illegal immigrants. Or it can be read as the difference between ICE and martial law is the level of killing involved. Given the Hacker News rule of the most generous reading possible this one would go the first way - not a call for "extermination of migrants" or indeed politicians but rather tougher enforcement of the existing rules.
The replies are all discussing electoral demographics and don't make any statements about killing one way or another.
The final three you didn't summarise. Oddly they seem like the strongest to build your case. They are anti-semitic comments about how "jews control our media" etc, a comment about "humvees with mounted machine guns" in response to a video of quite mild clashes between migrants and police, and a comment revelling and glorifying the impaling of someone who attempted to clime a border fence and was killed by the fence's protection mechanisms.
Clearly there's some nasty content there the moderators failed to crack down on. But I've seen some very nasty posts on all kinds of subreddits over the years. To prove T_D was worse than others would require some sort of statistical analysis, which would itself be likely to be biased (obviously a lot of posters on Reddit think nothing of calling people they disagree with Nazis... and we know what happened to them)
No, that reddit community is not representative of all people who nominally support Donald Trump (say, those who voted for him in 2016). However, that reddit community in particular has a substantial number of fascists and white supremacists among its members, and they are welcomed to bring their disturbing violent messages there.
(They are also encouraged by the numerous statements by Trump himself – their “god emperor” – and other allied officials in support of overtly fascist and white supremacist viewpoints.)
What would you consider to be fair definitions of “fascism” or “white supremacism” or “racism”? Does your definition include e.g. neo-Nazis marching chanting “Jews will not replace us”?
> Yeah, TD alone was huge in 2016-2017 and was a huge contributor to the dynamic we have in the world today
Can you elaborate as to why? I'm not really sure how a subreddit is responsible for hate + violence + racism. How does freedom of speech/thought only work one way?
I've browsed TD since it's inception and haven't seen any violent, hateful, or racist posts.
That's not to say that they haven't ever existed, but certainly not anything remotely close to how it's perceived. And definitely not any worse than you would see right now on r/politics.
I don't know what to tell you. I followed it during the election but it got too disgusting. Immigrants, and Muslims were large targets from what I remember. Lots of misogyny towards Hillary Clinton as well but I guess that doesn't count. It was certainly much worse than r/politics which is very biased but not racist.
Plenty of really gross Pepe memes. I mean, I don't know what to tell you.
They always did a good job of some token news story as a "see we're good guys!" type post but if you scratched the surface and read the comments its was obvious.
Oh give me a break. You're being willfully ignorant if you actually believe this to be the case. For months there were front page posts on reddit, manipulated by bots, from TD that were some of the worst content I've ever seen outside of 4chan.
I mean, reddit scrambled to implement a subreddit filtering feature just to provide a means for users to filter TD out due to the near constant complaints about the content of that sub.
Meanwhile, they banned other subreddits for much, much less. They actively fought to provide them their safe space and wrote actual features to support that subreddit.
It was by far the largest online conservative community, and it funneled people into even more extreme communities.
I don't really get bringing up the freedom of speech angle here - r/the_donald has always aggressively deleted posts and banned users for expressing anything but complete loyalty to Donald Trump.
This opinion bothers me. TD was always an explicitly pro-Trump subreddit. You expect anti-Trump content to be modded or removed. The modus operandi of /r/politics is much more nefarious. It is branded as a general politics-related subreddit but content that doesn't fit the left-leaning narrative is removed for ambiguous reasons.
You'd expect mods of t_d to not partake in smear campaigns against survivors of a school shooting, actually remove calls for death of various politicans, not telling people to harass journalist and maybe remove blatant fake news.
Nobody cares about the survivors of a school shooting, other than having sympathy for them.
The survivors of the school shooting politicized the issue which makes it everyone's problem. They want a political action, they are constantly on the television promoting a certain viewpoint which I believe is asking to give up on my civil rights. They're saying that I need to give up my civil rights because of what happened to them.
Virginia Beach Shooting resulted in sweeping anti-gun legislation passed and the flipping of Virginia legislature, almost none of it was targeted at the survivors of the shooting. There was world's biggest Mass demonstration of armed protesters, and almost nobody brought the survivors of Virginia Beach shooting up.
> It was by far the largest online conservative community,
and it funneled people into even more extreme communities.
a) This is such a stretch and you have no evidence to support your claim.
b) I'm pretty conservative and know a large number of conservatives and exactly none of the people I know even like Reddit, or consider it a viable "conservative community" at all.
There is a surprisingly large literature of academic literature on Reddit an TD specifically, at least some of which mentions radicalisation, though I've yet to find specific bits.
Work elsewhere certainly expresses and substantiates that narrative: Kate Starbird, Renee DiResta, Samuel Wooley, Kara Swisher, Zynep Tufekci, among others.
Alexis was on the board and still had an active role at the company despite not being CEO, for example, firing a popular moderator and and letting the blame fall on Ellen Pao:
You're saying Reddit has that big of an influence on how people see and interact with the world as opposed to say Identity Politics which by its very nature puts different groups into direct conflict with each other and where "cancel culture" came from??
You're giving a message forum way too much credit for Trumpism in the United States. Do you actually think that social media is representative of a majority?
Steve Bannon has spoken about specifically targeting Gamergate for political recruitment, I think the role of Reddit in radicalizing young men is quite important, actually. I don't think you could write a reasonable history of the last 10 years of US politics without reference to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and 4Chan.
Right. Dig into campaign actions and - as an example - it looks a lot like the trump campaign won wisconsin with robocalls more than with social media.
Hard to tell for sure, of course, but the recent blanketing of facebook with political advertising doesn't seem to have achieved that much except for buying Brad Parscale a ferrari.
Social media does presumably have some effect but I'm not sure how you'd tell how much/how little compared to other approaches for reaching people.
Social media is wildly influential. At this point, it is likely more influential than any other form of media. Reddit is the #2 social media platform by traffic in the US, after Facebook.
My feeling is that the world at large underestimates the impact of social media and Hacker news overestimates it. Not sure how to rate the infulential-ness of different media, but Fox News was HUGELY influential to the voters that decided the last presidential election: https://www.vox.com/2019/3/4/18249847/fox-news-effect-swing-...
I think "worldview media" is a more appropriate term for the phenomenon.
What form it takes isn't as important as the fact that it supplies enough content / entertainment / methods of consumption that one can subscribe to it and have 100% of their bandwidth filled, to the exclusion of competing narratives.
Talk radio was an imperfect expression of this, because radio isn't portable in the same way that app-based social media + mobile devices / Fox News are.
But it's entirely possible to prevent someone from ever being exposed to a contrary narrative, simply by filling all their available time.
They didn’t say it was? Ideas don’t reach a single person — someone that follows these forums — and then stop. They continue spreading and they might moderate when they do but they still have some center.
Reddit's advertising tool once said that /r/The_Donald had six million daily unique visitors. Sixty-two million people voted for Trump and sixty-five million for Clinton. Six million isn't a majority, but it's absolutely influential.
Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign digital director, and Dan Scavino, Trump's social media manager, regularly visited the site.
/r/conservative isn't taking on the role of T_D, but it is taking on the role of unironic right wing boomerposting. I don't even go there anymore because the titles always seem to be variations of "EPIC ownage of LIBTARDS" and circlejerks in the comments, and very little discussion about actual conservative principles.
> Yeah, TD alone was huge in 2016-2017 and was a huge contributor to the dynamic we have in the world today.
Surely you mean "the dynamic we have in the world of reddit today", right? Otherwise, that sounds Bill-Gates-Is-Transmitting-Corona-Over-5G-Towers level insane.
It's not the smoldering powder keg in the middle east, the long looming conflict between the US as the sole imperial super power and the up and coming China contesting their role in SE Asia etc, no. It's really TD, a subreddit where Trump fanatics post memes.
I'm confused, too. Shortly after Pao left is when all the quarantining, admin interventions, bannings, and 18+ warnings popped up on reddit. It was clear that reddit felt going mainstream was the only way for profitability.
When Pao said:
"Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining Reddit’s core principles."
Some, and I agree with them, interpreted this as Pao being the one that actually tried to keep reddit more of a discussion/free-speech site (the "core principles" she referred to), and the mob was wrong all along. Therefore, on the surface, either we were completely wrong, or Pao is changing the narrative today.
Either way, and it goes without saying, there's far more going on here than anyone outside of the board room knows.
Suspect she's more just looking for something to complain about. In any case, T_D is indeed gone, and no doubt the world is a better place. Or something. I haven't noticed a reduction in vicious posts on Reddit, though.
There are plenty of similarly moderated subreddits on Reddit that no one complains about. It’s easier when you can just ban all political content that gets out of hand because the forum is not focused on politics.
I agree that HN is heavily moderated, but from what I've seen the comment moderation is more focused on maintaining civility and tone. I think dang and friends will let you say controversial things as long as they're framed in a productive way and you aren't a jerk about it (and as long as you don't commit the sin of editorializing a post title!)
I think that's a stark contrast with reddit, where being a dick is often excused if one has the right ideology. Not to mention that many subreddits (especially, but not exclusively, the political ones) have become carefully maintained echo chambers thanks rules against disagreeing with even a single facet of the "correct" beliefs. r/The_Donald even had an explicit "no dissent" rule.
This is a great way of putting it. HN is heavily moderated for tone and respectfulness but not for ideology (within reason). Reddit is heavily moderated for ideology but not for tone or respectfulness.
I believe this policy is actually responsible for political subreddits there being so consistently toxic. The site’s moderation encourages extreme ideological echo chambers to form in which members can be almost arbitrarily uncivil as long as they exist within that community’s ideology.
This site one is one of the best. If political dialog could be moved to a peer site it would be even better.
I'm guilty of engaging in discussing politics here (and tried to do so in a factual and respectful manner) but it's pointless. It just becomes people talking past each other and generates arguments rather than dialog.
HN allows a very wide swath of opinions without over-moderation. I've seen arguments commonly from every ideological & political segment, even though HN leans left (because its userbase foundation derives from the Bay Area, which is 95% left leaning). You see Capitalists here, you see Communists, you see conservatives, you see liberals, you see libertarians, you see every flavor of Socialist, you see everything inbetween.
You can argue for most points of view here, so long as you remain within their decency guidelines. Obviously HN won't tolerate certain extreme ideas that involve genocidal camps, killing people, violence or racism, that you might see bubble up out of eg the pro fascist or pro communist camps.
If there are 20 slices in a gradient of political ideology in the US (as an example), HN will allow you to very freely argue 18 of them, only dropping the extreme left and right (both of which commonly involve arguing for murder, racism, genocide, oppression, gulags, forced re-education camps, violence and countless other horrible things).
If you go into the largest political sections of Reddit arguing strongly (but decently) for Trump, you'll get moderated because the mods won't like you. That doesn't happen on HN, Dang will mostly leave your opinions alone (you will get downvoted though), so long as you are arguing in a way that isn't belligerent.
> So much of what is happening now lies at your feet.
I just don't know how much of a responsibility reddit has in strong-arming sub-reddits that are communities, whether we like them or not. So I struggle with Ellen's indictment.
It makes it seem like Reddit is a root level cause for where we are at today -- It's not, and is only a symptom. I believe it is unfair to say reddit, and their (somewhat) hands off approach to moderation inside a "community" is somehow the cornerstone to these ills, or that it did something to 'amplify' them
What hasn't been used as an avenue? The point being, how much is "reddit" proper actually responsible? How much of that burden do they actually carry in policing isolated (by nature) and self-managed communities? I just don't know where that line is, and whether it's fair of Ellen to characterize it this way. And to do it as a response to what he's saying -- that comes off as somewhat tactless to me.
I don't believe that anyone is absolved of responsibility for their platform simply because the platform is "performing as designed", which is to say, with minimal moderation and policing of "self-managed" communities. It's hypocritical to hide behind the algorithm, the product, or the source code that allows extremist groups recruit when you're the one that built the product, and you're the one actively choosing to pursue market power at the expense of social good.
The radical right capitalized on the whole gamergate scandal to push their agendas, and their fathers and grandfathers wouldn't have generally identified as gamers.
Well, yes, in that way nothing that happens today can be in any way, shape or form similar to something that happened 50 years ago. After all, they didn't have cell phones and Twitch back then.
Was I making a comparison? Was I shutting the door to one? Did I make a statement that in any way, shape, or form suggests that nothing today is similar to something that happened 50 years ago?
I was stating what I still believe is a factual observation. I didn't claim or imply that other generations could not or were not radicalized throughout history. I wasn't suggesting that only young males can be radicalized, that reddit is the only place it can happen, that only right-wing entities have ever radicalized people, or that their opinions are somehow novel.
Would you would like to argue that the groups associated with "gamergate" weren't on reddit, weren't radicalized, weren't radicalized by right-wing entities, weren't young, and/or weren't generally male?
> Would you would like to argue that the groups associated with "gamergate" weren't on reddit, weren't radicalized, weren't radicalized by right-wing entities, weren't young, and/or weren't generally male?
Lots of people that cared about gamergate weren't "radicalized", they were pissed off. But mostly I'd argue that they are no different than their fathers or grandfathers. Those generations wouldn't have identified as gamers because that wasn't a thing back then, much like they wouldn't shout obscenities in Twitch chat, because that too didn't exist. They'd shout pretty much the same obscenities elsewhere though.
Gamergate in no way was totally responsible for the election of Trump. If anything invoking that Bannon capitalized on a small fraction of people in the movement is used as a cudgel by those wishing to shove their own political agenda down "gamer culture's" throat. Feeling excluded? Why not just destroy it instead. Pathetic.
I’m a young white man and I grew up in the Deep South (Alabama/Mississippi).
I had just started eighth grade when I moved to a very small town in Mississippi. On my first day a group of white kids invited me to sit with them. They decided the best way to break the ice would be to tell me heinous racist jokes. For example, somebody would tell a “joke” about how they’d like to hang Obama from their Christmas tree and everybody would burst into laughter.
All that is to say that I don’t think their opinions are different than those who raised them. They were children and had to have learned it from somebody.
But they would never express their racism outside of small white groups because they knew at some level it was wrong.
At some point in my teenage years I noticed a shift among these “friends”. They had joined online groups that echoed their sentiments and argued that it wasn’t wrong to be racist but rather it just makes you “woke” to go against the crowd. They think they’re just seeing the world differently.
One guy in particular would say heinous racist things and immediately follow it up with something like “I’d rather die than live under communism”. He had become radicalized. He was no longer a closeted racist boy. Now he’s a fully grown racist man filled with vitriol.
As a (former) young male on reddit (and I started out on reddit when it had about 4 subs), I am not seeing much over radicalization done to people. Reddit is big enough that there are many radicals on there.
I am definitely seeing opinions that aren't mainstream, and I have seen some subs self-radicalize. Self-radicalization seems mostly a consequence of more egregious things being upvoted more (e.g I don't even dare think what r/badcopnodonut looks like now) and a refusal to discuss things people see as issues. There is no reason on earth that gamegate went right wing, but the mainstream media sent hate their way and so they shifted away from those.
I'm not sure if I agree with the policies of censorship being endorsed right now. It's like the new "fighting child exploitation."
To play devil's advocate, here are some potential negative consequences of censorship:
1) Censored communities may still find other uncensored platforms to move their speech to, and it may be a platform even worse for fostering "bad" speech that is hidden from the public and festers in the dark. For example, Islamic terrorists do pretty well without connecting their members on Reddit or Twitter, and as such, we don't really have an insight into the state of their thoughts.
2) Best case scenario is that banned speech and thought becomes repressed in society due to the difficulty in these people connecting/sharing ideas. This creates a latent risk as at some point all these repressed people may realize they are not alone in thought. It also delays the cure to the problem by treating the symptom.
This brings me to my point that racism, bigotry, and prejudice largely stem from a lack of understanding, experience, and fear. Silencing hate speech or thought is just treating the symptom of the problem. Hiding symptoms and ignoring the underlying causes will result in the disease breeding—in the worst case in the dark—until it becomes explosive. If you address them and fight them by educating, and showing, and assuaging their fears, this will do much more than a temporary censorship will fix for the long term.
Racists are people too, and often just misguided. Censorship, eradication, and vilification are only really viable strategies if you truly believe these people are intrinsically evil and irredeemable. Such tactics will just push them deeper into their entrenched thoughts and solidify their understanding that others don't care about why they think a certain way, but that it's just an Us vs Them fight (which of course they are already inclined towards). See China's handling of Falun Gong. There's no doubt that Chinese elimination strategies towards Falun Gong just entrenched its supporters and gave the Scientology-esque movement more strength than it could have otherwise derived.
I don't know if it's specifically because of Ellen Pao's note, but I'm sure he is feeling the exact same thing. And I'm sure his wife is in his ear about it too. I am slightly surprised that he's washing his hands of it instead of leveraging his position to do something about it. Maybe he tried and failed behind the scenes.
He doesn’t strike me as the type of person to sit back and watch if he disagrees with something. If he’s washing his hands of Reddit I would venture to guess he’s explored many other avenues first.
censoring conservative subreddits only makes the people in them more detached and more upset. It’s why Donald Trump is president right now. When will we learn?
> African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers. [0]
The reality of course is that the relationship between law enforcement and the black community is dogshit. There are terrible people on both sides that escalate nonsense into homicide, and this puts both groups on high alert in tense encounters.
Unfortunately I feel that one side has to move first to fix the situation and to me that's obviously law enforcement. But even if they started, in earnest, today it's going to take decades to equalize and sins of the past will eternally haunt us all.
It's hard to reconcile that theory with the facts of most of the cases that make the news. For example, the police officers who killed George Floyd clearly had no reason to fear for their lives. Or what about all the black folks shot in bed in no-knock raids?
The first step everyone needs to take to resolve this problem is to stop blaming the victims of police violence.
>It's hard to reconcile that theory with the facts of most of the cases that make the news.
Why would you expect a uniform sampling of cases from the news? Police killed 1000 people last year. Almost 3 per day. How many of those did you hear about? Why would you hear about some vs. the others?
> The first step everyone needs to take to resolve this problem is to stop blaming the victims of police violence.
Who are you addressing this to? Me? I didn't blame George Floyd in the least. That was straight up murder.
I wouldn't, but I think it's important to be sensitive to what people are actually protesting about. It's mostly these outrageous cases and (in the case of black folks) lived experience that make people angry.
People cite statistics to illustrate the fact that these cases are part of a bigger problem of systematic racism. Some people expend a lot of effort trying to explain the statistics away, but that largely misses the point.
The problem is that this emotionally charged state will lead directly to policies designed to defuse the situation rather than solve the underlying problem. This is how systemic issues persist (well, the main reason is 'doing nothing', but i digress)
I don't think it's fair to characterise a response as (merely) emotional just because it's a response to a specific incident rather than a broader trend.
Correct, but then the subsequent question, as the other user pointed out, is WHY? The default position to fill in the gap seems to be that "racist discretion on the part of the police is responsible," but is that actually a reasonable and defensible assumption?
Note that I pointed out that 96% of people killed by police are male, but men only make up 50% of the population. Do you assume that the difference between their per-capita representation is best explained by anti-male sexism? Aren't there a series of other relevant factors you could use to explain the disparity? I suggest you reflect on it honestly.
Don't those numbers need to be normalized to take into account the size of the populations? You posted absolute raw numbers for blacks and whites, without noting that depending on how the categories are defined, the white population of the US is 4-6x greater than the black population of the US. 4x is the absolute minimum, so if you were to weight them proportionately what you posted would show a very different story.
If the most conservative numbers are used (only 4x as many whites as blacks in the US), then it turns into this:
2017
Whites: 457
Blacks: 223->892
2018
Whites: 399
Blacks: 209->836
2019
Whites: 370
Blacks: 235->940
2020
Whites: 172
Blacks: 88->352
But practically speaking, without splitting hairs too much it's a heck of a lot closer to 5-6x than 4x.
"Police interactions" are largely up to the discretion of the police, which is why almost all proposals for police reform include ending "broken windows" policies.
Police interactions, maybe. But actual crimes committed should be a relatively objective metric. Can we discuss that one or it’s not allowed for some reason?
Dehumanizing someone for holding right of center views and then using that unilateral label as justification for targeting them is nothing like domestic violence.
People have started throwing around the labels "racist", "white supremacists" and "Nazi" far too liberally given that these words have the power to destroy lives.
When near center moderates are deplatformed and start to feel targeted for wrong think, you push them to align themselves with the extremists, the only people who claim to actually be looking out for their views and well-being. Not to mention that most of these accusations are based on glaring double standards.
Reddit got too mainstream for its own good. The company desperately wants to become the new social media (think Facebook or Twitter), but many users are standing in the way, making the change from a discussion website to a social media website slow. What made me and many others use Reddit in the first place is that it didn't really matter who you are and what's your political and religious background, the only thing that mattered is what you are saying in that particular thread in a particular subreddit. Now politics and controversies can be seen in all subreddits, people are using the platform just to post selfies of themselves, and with the addition of the "profile" feature, there is an insentive to make a name for yourself there.
So yeah, while a lot of people, including me, hate the changes, it is obviously better for the business, as it attracts a wider range of users. But still, I'm starting to use Reddit less and less, and relying on RSS and HN to get my daily dose of tech news and discussions.
I have no idea what the skin color or gender or sexual preferences of other users on HN are and you don't know mine. That's how I prefer it.
The other day I unsubscribed from a popular Javascript mailing list, after the writer switched from writing about Javascript to writing about how white people and black people should interact.
Or rather I didn't unsubscribe right away: I emailed the writer politely and mentioned how I prefer posts to be about the thing that unites us: Javascript.
Their response: "my platform, my voice", "all tech is political", "this mailing list isn't for you", and later on Twitter: people who unsubscribed are racist and should "eat shit".
I don't believe I'm racist. It's just that I signed up for Javascript tips and the writer switched to politics (in this case, the politics of a country and culture I don't live in).
I'm no more interested in their political views than they are in mine. On the internet, nobody needs to know I'm a dog.
In such a polarized emotionally charged environment, some people are unable to emotionally segregate world news from their personal and professional lives.
These people have become paralyzed and unable to function normally. They allow world events to bleed into every conversation, and feel obligated to support their side and ostracizing anyone that disagrees - further isolating them in their bubble.
I think that social media has increased society's emotional surface area to world events. We no longer isolate 30-60 minutes per day to watch balanced reports on the 6 o'clock news - now it's all the time, hyperbolic, and often deceptive.
Our emotions are being weaponized - and November is going to be a real wake-up call where we will see the magnitude of disruptive power that these polarized social media messages can wield.
Quite right! In this case, the mailing list writer has built a dichotomy into all their communications: either you say black lives matter or you say "all lives matter" and therefore you are his enemy.
Whereas the third option, "I'm just here for Javascript tips", wasn't even under consideration.
So unless you engage with and echo their politics, you fall into the enemy camp by default.
If the statement is to be taken at face value, then yes I would agree. But it it shouldn’t be, it’s used a way of denigrating and minimising the concerns of BLM as well as painting the movement as supposed black supremacists when they naturally take offence at the subtext behind the statement.
While I disagree with the BLM movement, I think that All Lives Matter was an obvious attempt to rile up people and create unneeded conflict. I don't know what you are referring to when it comes to subtext, as it seems that the ALM movement really started to counter the idea that only black people get killed by police or are victims of hate crimes.
"I have no idea what the skin color or gender or sexual preferences of other users on HN are and you don't know mine. That's how I prefer it."
This aspect of HN is specifically WHY I feel welcome here and WHY the content + conversation is consistently of higher quality relative to other forums...It's actually one of the few places left online where this feature remains.
The site became mainstream while still being extremely vulnerable to manipulation by a very small pool of individuals. They've done next to nothing to address how effective and rampant brigading is (among other tactics).
It really doesn't take much to brigade. Write some scripts to get 100 accounts upvoting your posts while they are on new, and chances are after that initial hump you've surmounted with your bots it will catch exponential viewership over the course of the day and make it to the front page.
You see this happening constantly on Twitter. You see unverified accounts with one or two followers having tweets that are trending within a few minutes with tens of thousands of "likes" and thousands of "retweets" and Twitter doesn't even blink an eye, but its so blatantly obvious what's happening.
What's frightening is that groups like politicians, unions, and extreme right-wing groups could very easily use this technique to quickly and pretty effectively promote or quell discussion.
I just recently saw an example of where this might have happened. Very suddenly a comment in a discussion I was following - what initially was a popular up-voted opinion (i.e discussing police brutality) - got down-voted into oblivion (from +5 to -25) in less than 5 minutes. The comment was deleted soon after - probably to protect their score.
This kind of quick/easy manipulation by bots can't be easy to detect/deal with yet I fear it may become mainstream.
Extreme right-wing(and center-right) are countered by the extreme left moderators and administrators. I assure you, if left-wing posts started being vote brigaded, Reddit would ban all those involved. They can already detect and ban vote brigading, they just don't care to stop it.
I think the real problem facing the reddit corporate folks is that people on that site are slowly but inexorably coming around to the realization (if they aren't there already) that what makes a site good from the user's standpoint is pretty much antithetical to making it profitable.
Unfortunately for reddit, the site owes its existence to the users who built communities there, and when heavy-handed changes are introduced in classic reddit fashion (invariably user-hostile changes with little to no advance warning nor recourse), the users rightfully feel their senses of ownership being offended.
It's also the case that users are losing places to have free and open anonymous conversations with a bit of fun. I don't think it's just reddit, I've felt the squeeze on the whole internet. "The world is still a big place, there's just less in it" - Captain Jack
LiveJournal / Blogger (1999): Words are more important than styling. I'm going to be a writer someday.
LinkedIn (2002): You know who has money? People with jobs. Or people looking to give people jobs.
MySpace (2003): Webpages for people who don't webpage or understand contrast. Also my favorite song auto-playing ON THE INTERNET.
The Facebook (2004): Realization that most people suck at graphic design. You'll be shocked to learn what your friends and family believe! Ooh, there's a lot of money in gaming -> targeted advertising -> web tracking.
Reddit (2005): Remember why people used BBSs? Reddit does! Condé Nast doesn't. YCombinator does! Wait, volunteer admins have their own thoughts?
Twitter (2006): Here's a single speech / thought bubble above my head + how I feel about others' bubbles.
Tumblr (2007): I hate apps, but love pictures. Yahoo: We're still cool!
WhatsApp (2009): Remember when you could do everything from the Yahoo! homepage? WhatsApp does! Facebook: Hungry... CHOMP.
Instagram (2010): Pictures are more important than words. Photos for people who don't Lightroom. I'm going to be a photographer / model someday. Facebook: ... don't mention us here. No wait, do. No wait, don't.
Snapchat (2011): The worst thing about social media is people being able to read my old posts. Ooh, there's money in gamifying Facebook to boost engagement metrics.
Google+ (2011): SOMEONE SAID I CAN HAVE MY OWN SOCIAL MEDIA ON THE INTERNET. Internet: Okay, boomer.
Telegram (2013): Security for people who don't attend PGP signing parties.
Mastodon / Fediverse (2016): Give me freedom or give me de... hold on, let me update my settings, something br--. Internet: Okay, rms.
TikTok (2016): Memes for people who don't Photoshop.
China: {Cambrian explosion}. As long as the name is two, repeated consonants. And the logo is a racoon.
I don't like reddit because discussion is always influenced by what needs to be said in order to be more popular. If reddit got rid of usernames and karma then I think it would be ideal.
'Karma seeking behavior' is a problem even on wholly uncontroversial subreddits. Shit like "my girlfriend baked me a cake with [subject of the subreddit on it]" is really uninteresting content after you've seen it for the thousandth time but gets upvoted pretty reliably. Reddit's system simply isn't an effective moderation system if you want to establish a thoughtful community because cheap pandering to the crowd is easier than finding or creating thoughtful content.
What's the difference between a click and an upvote then? It can still be gamed as easily (maybe even easier).
Also, it has a major problem: if users know that popularity is based on clicks, then they can't click on anything they might disagree with (to simply learn more about it) without amplifying the signal as well. The incentives of user behavior are changed in to a self-censorship of what the user allows themselves to read, likely enforcing bubbles even more.
Do you know of any federated/distributed alternatives to reddit? Although, maybe the argument is we don't actually need a social media platform at all just RSS.
It took me some time to have my RSS feed setup the way I want it, but it is such a fresh breath of air. A thing I noticed is that my opinion about a certain subject gets influenced a lot by the top comments, whether here or on Reddit. I sometimes even read the comments before reading the article. Having to read an article and giving myself enough time to form my own opinion without directly checking what the comments "want" me to believe was refreshing. But still, having comments is important to see something from a different angle, which is why I still browse HN and reddit.
This is part of the problem. It is not easy for new users to access...
First, you need access to a news server. These folks offer a free public one: https://www.aioe.org/ There are also other paid news servers but I don't want to advertise for them.
Just like good people don't want to work with bad cops and leave the force, good people don't want to be forced to interact with racists and misogynists, and reddit has had a problem with both from day one.
“After making a shit ton of money, raising way more money then we needed to, and ultimately handing the future of the platform to soulless investors, I’ve decided to leave to better support people oppressed by police brutality” seems like a more honest statement to me but I guess it doesn’t read as well.
Edit: Snark aside, his actions and financial commitments to various organizations (as well as some of his future earnings) are commendable. If more founders and executives took these actions the world would be a better place. There's always more that can be done, but that shouldn't stop us from committing smaller actions as well.
It really does seem like the run up to this November is going to do lasting damage to a lot of social media platforms. Friends are gonna turn on friends on some platforms, and on others people are going to lather themselves into blind uncontrollable rage. Beyond not being healthy I don't see users being happy with spending their time doing this. The addictive rush of having your biases confirmed can only provide so much joy.
I am going to try to say something neutral, not related to current politics. Frankly, I'm doing so because I'm curious if such a comment is even possible.
- I applaud anybody who takes a moral stand, especially if it might cost them something they hold dear.
- Whenever people complain about social media, the usual response is "But these are private properties. People can do what they like with them." I agree that this is the role of private property
- It's a fact that these social media networks operate because of the network principle, that is, it's much easier to get into than to get out of. It's also a fact that just a few media sites control the vast majority of online conversation and commerce
- Might it not have been useful for this moral stance to have been taken much earlier? First, you made your money and built your company. Walking off now isn't exactly standing in the soup line next week. Second, lots of folks are stuck with your product that might now be changing its operating parameters. Third, there's no way to predict what future event might cause even more changes.
Once again, kudos for reaching inside and doing a gut check. Life is full of a bunch of people, all with different opinions and points where they would change their mind. That's a good thing, but is this just something that keeps getting more and more restrictive over time? If so, might want to put that on your sign-up page, perhaps periodically remind folks. (This is a rhetorical question aimed at every service that does what reddit does online)
> I applaud anybody who takes a moral stand, especially if it might cost them something they hold dear.
I also applaud anyone who takes a moral stand about what they are willing to do, especially if it might cost them something they hold dear.
If that moral stand involves enforcing a standard of conduct on others, then it's anywhere from slightly to extremely more complicated. Enforcing behavior on others for the perceived benefit of all has been responsible for some major problems in the past (for example, not allowing people to express their sexuality), so let's be careful how much we throw in with those pushing to instill a level of behavior on those who want a place of their own to speak freely (to take as an example another part of the comments here, where Ellen Pao calls out Ohanian re: the_donald).
Many of us may support it in this case because it aligns with our values of inclusion and tolerance towards others (even if it's sort of a catch-22), but it's not like leaders of moral charges haven't been known to go too far before, nor like movements haven't been co-opted by other interests before.
Edit: Clarified where the example I was referring to came from, since that might have been confusing in isolation.
You can have a series of these things over a few decades and then suddenly end up in a much different spot than when you started out. Humans have done this before. More than once. In fact, it's probably the natural outcome of situations like this and requires some sort of strong provisions to keep it from naturally happening over and over again. It's not like any of this is new.
A lot of people seem hell-bent that this is not the case, however. I'm curious to see if they're able to look at their own actions from just a small remove. If so, why? If not, why? These are technical, UX questions. They might involve sensitive matters, but that's only the more important reason for working them out.
All UI/UX issues shouldn't be about some version of wringing another .4% of sign-ups out of the funnel. There are things that are more important by orders of magnitude.
Let's be honest and realize that for some tech senior execs, they've been made aware of these issues many times in the past.
I'm not getting into whether it's right or not to have a code of conduct, just whether these statements or actions are really deserving of much if anything.
What I find most interesting about all of this "woke" behavior from Ellen Pao and Alexis Ohanian is this:
A few years ago, when racism was brought up on social media during the 2016 US election and a Canadian federal election, Alexis publicly pushed back.
Similarly, activists complained that Pao hired people who had worked at Reddit and previously discounted policies against homophobic, bigoted, racist, etc subreddits and comments/harassment.
People like these were in charge of a world famous, social media site where they were more aware than many others in tech about the very things they are now aghast over.
To me, it's a bit like if I'm telling a software manager about bugs in some banking application that can sometimes deduct money from random accounts and they're like "Ship it, ship it anyway!" lol.
Reddit mods wantonly abuse their power and I'm not even talking about politics.
Ever been to r/science? 8/10 comments are deleted and those posts can't be read ever again (I'm understating that number, if anything). Honestly, half the reason I come here is because you can still view dead comments - censorship is a surefire way to get me to leave your community.
> Ever been to r/science? 8/10 comments are deleted and those posts can't be read ever again
Note that this is clearly spelled out in the subreddit rules, and is by design. 8/10 comments on reddit as a whole are jokes, anecdotes, off topic, or simply low quality. /r/science tries to promote high-quality discussion of actual science, does so by heavy moderation, and doesn't pretend they're not deleting most comments.
Personally, I am very happy all the cruft is deleted there.
I'm not saying there's no abuse of power, but /r/science is bad example to put forward when the rules are clearly spelled out and enforced.
> 8/10 comments on reddit as a whole are jokes, anecdotes, off topic, or simply low quality.
I would guess that is a significant underestimate. I had one post become reasonably popular, and I was amazed at how awful, low quality, and incredibly redundant the replies were. 99% of all the top level replies were some version of the same low-effort comment.
This is what I miss from the old Slashdot. There you didn't just up- or down-vote comments. You specified if it was "funny" or "insightful" or "redundant" etc. [0]
I could then filter comments by what I was looking for. Between that and the meta-moderation, they did a great job.
I would love to see something similar on reddit. Instead of mindless updoots. Or maybe let me filter out comments that aren't at least n characters long?
(Or, maybe train a classifier to detect puns and hide them :)
I liked the old Slashdot moderation system. I wonder how it would scale to Reddit's traffic. My gut feeling is that it wouldn't scale well at all, but I could easily be wrong about that.
The biggest problem would be bad actors. Internet discussions in the late 90's probably had more good faith participants. People chosen for moderation would be more likely to take it seriously. In ways both good and bad, the culture was very different then.
I (possibly naively) still think the majority of people online are acting in good faith according to whatever they believe. But, with the massive online population increase comes an increase in the absolute numbers of people acting in bad faith. Even if they're still a small percentage of the whole. A Slashdot moderation system would give those trolls, bots, and astroturfers some considerable power to shape the direction of a discussion. Probably would increase the number of bot or sockpuppet accounts in order to snag a greater percentage of the randomly assigned moderation slots.
But, that's just my assumption. Would be interesting to see it tried as an experiment. Maybe for the next Reddit April Fool's project.
> Internet discussions in the late 90's probably had more good faith participants
Not probably. I think definitely. There were tons of trolls back then, but they were trolling in good faith as well! (I mean that. They just posted shocking and vile things, for the lulz. They didn't promote their corporate brand or try to influence other nations' elections. They were good faith assholes :)
I think you're right. It's a really hard problem to solve; anonymity and reputation are difficult to combine. And meta-moderation itself could be seen as giving even more influence to the power users of these platforms (i.e. /u/gallowboob).
I kick around some ideas now and then about alternative rating and voting systems. Usually in the context of fake Amazon reviews, but the same general problem exists here.
What if users were limited to just 1 vote (up or down) each day? Or x ups and y downs? Whatever. Would that limit the votes on silly one-liner puns and encourage people to spend their precious vote on something more interesting? If you combine that with minimum account ages and maybe some minimum karma, I think it could work. Hell, you could vote more than once if you're willing to spend it out of your own karma. I'm sure I'm missing some aspect that tanks my idea. (Is there something for this like there is for spam-fighting ideas? [0])
If I don't stop tying now, I'm liable to bring up some sort of blockchain solution. And nobody wants that.
I personally think they should rename the sub. /r/science is way too generic of a name, and unless folks study the sidebar as they are coming in from /r/popular or /r/all, they have no indication that their questions and anecdotes are completely unwelcome and will be deleted. It's an incredibly frustrating experience and I think it just damages the perception of 'science' by those that are trying to wade into it.
Honestly, the number of deleted comments on r/science is probably a good representation for how garbage most comments on reddit are.
The main rule that gets comments deleted: "Comments that only rely on a user's non-professional anecdotal evidence to confirm or refute a study will be removed".
It's just not useful to have those types of comments on a science based thread.
Of course, it's hard to audit the moderators. We don't know if they're deleting comments outside of their rules as well.
Bad example - people frequently go to r/science posts when they hit the front page and toss in non-scientific anecdotal evidence, or they will argue with the post using bad science, or they will offer their non-scientific 2 cents on the politics of a study.
The reason why content-heavy subs r/science and r/AskHistorians haven't devolved into the cesspool that is the rest of Reddit is specifically because they keep everyone on topic. You know, actually moderating the discussion.
The best subreddits are those that are either a) very tightly moderated or b) obscure enough for the Eternal September not (yet) having happened to them. Most of the rest of the content is extremely low quality.
I completely disagree with your latter statement. Redditors constantly push garbage replies to the top of nearly every post. So, so often I come across top comments which are attempted witty one-liners which contribute next to nothing are followed by _tons_ of equally useless comments OR it is clear the top comments didn't read the article or are pushing their anecdotes as evidence to the contrary, etc (the irony of that is not lost on me right now).
I don't think all forums need to operate the same, and it's beneficial that they don't. There should be places for people to say whatever the heck they want, and places that are moderately moderated (heh) and places that are tightly moderated.
Well, good for you! Myself, I enjoy places like r/AskHistorians or r/sex which absolutely would not exist in their present high-quality form without very active moderation.
I don't moderate r/science, but I do help moderate a pretty big sub that is unrelated to politics that similarly tries with varying success to be polite and on topic
There's a lot of bot and other obvious spam that we catch with programmatic moderation
The vast majority of comments we manually remove fall into one of four categories:
* Stuff that is just random off topic, nothing to do with the sub
* Stuff we redirect to another sub (politics, relationships, etc)
* Stuff that is scammy, or straight up soliciting
* Stuff that is outright insulting ad hominems. The bad end of this category makes you lose faith in humanity, so you kinda have to turn off your soul when moderating.
So if I had to guess, a good chunk of those deleted r/science comments aren't just "scientific opion with no basis" or "flat earth!", but also things closer the form " \\\\ you \\\\ing \\\\, your \\\\ing mother too, I hope you all \\\\ing burn in hell you \\\\ \\\\\* \\\\\*".
While I'm sure accidents happen, many of those comments are deleted because they are joke comments/shitposts not pertaining to science. In my experience, that kind of content is not tolerated on HN either, probably for the better.
Indeed. If HN were to become as popular as Reddit, and wanted to retain the current quality of discourse, you can bet that the mods would have to delete 80% of comments as well.
It's only a UI problem that displays the deleted threads with the deleted annotation. In truth, that sub is better for it. I'm sure everyone wants to share that their grandma doesn't follow the pattern in a paper and everyone wants to enlighten us about correlation and causation and everyone wants to tell us what sample size is reasonable off the top of their heads but it's sooo boring to read that.
Any "top-level" subreddit that is a single-word topic becomes overrun with too many people and also subject to Reddit cultural enforcement, like r/news, r/science, r/pics, etc. If your experience in Reddit is formed mostly by r/all, the popular subreddits, or browsing defaults, you'll suffer.
Right wing discourse tends to incite racism, violence and hate against minority groups and people of color. How do you moderate such without regular mod teams intervening, or users moderating each other if you want to provide a welcoming environment?
I think that resignation as a form of protest can be powerful when you are a junior member of a team and you think senior members are doing the wrong thing.
But when you are on the board of directors, you are the boss. In that case resignation is an abdication of leadership and a tacit admission that you have done a poor job.
From what I've seen, junior staff protest-quitting has little to no impact, as they're generally viewed by higher ups as easily replaceable.
Senior level people in meaningful positions (as opposed to figureheads) are harder to replace, and protest-quitting will have more impact, but in most cases, those impacts tend to be short-term, especially with larger organizations.
Reddit and 4Chan are the two sides of the same coin for me. Just their ideologies are different. At least the people on 4Chan are self aware about how toxic they are.
But the mods (at least on the popular subreddits) on reddit love to ban anything that isn't far left.
I don't mind echo chambers but the lack of self awareness always rubs me the wrong way.
Because I have seen multiple times that any political post or comment right of the far left getting banned?
And reddit isn't connected to real life and "mainstream" in any way. In fact they can give Twitter a run for their money based on how disconnected from reality they are.
Yeah, this 100%. If you went by what Reddit and Twitter thought was going to happen in recent votes and elections, you'd think that Sanders would be the Democratic nominee in 2016, that Trump was not going to be president, that Britain would vote to remain in the EU and that Jeremy Corbyn would lead the Labour Party to victory over Boris Johnson and the Conservatives.
The fact that all those predictions turned out to be wrong indicates that at least a sizeable percentage of the population is further to the right politically than the majority of Reddit or Twitter seemingly is.
You may not always get banned for having the opposite opinion on topics like those (though it definitely happens in quite a few subreddits), but the point is, the prevailing consensus on those sites is certainly a lot further left than the mainstream as shown by election resultls.
I think in the big political (and even many of the non-political) subreddits, there is tolerance only for a very narrow band of centrist Dem opinions, and anything outside that band to the left or the right is heavily downvoted.
Is that the way that centrist democrats express themselves because the language and attitude comes across as extremely caustic. I considered myself a democrat for the vast majority of my life but now I no longer know what I am if that is the bar that is being set.
4chan is unmoderated, reddit is heavily moderated. how on earth are they 2 sides of the same coin?
nowadays, it seems like anything unmoderated starts going right. it used to be the opposite.
mildly OT - the only thing they have in common is that they are infiltrated by bots which just serve to amplify the extreme discourse. there are some interesting bot-bait threads on 4chan where people communicate text via obfuscated text images, but bait bots with text replies (i.e. "hillary bad pizzagate"). the bot replies then become obvious because they reply to the bait text which is off-subject, but the real people reply to the text images with obfuscated text images. the bots were right wing extremist and comprised maybe 60% of the replies.
i saw someone had an interesting idea to make a "deep fried" image board or plugin, where text replies are posted as obfuscated images which are unreadable by bots, so people can more easily distinguish bot replies from human. i imagine discourse would improve considerably.
4chan moderates illegal content, porn on non-porn boards and content unrelated to the board such as cats on a dog board. Not completely unmoderated, but pretty close.
4chan has paid moderators and unpaid volunteer janitors keeping the beast in the state that its in, imagine what a wasteland that site would be in absence of any moderation.
Just take any (communism, revolution etc) agenda from the far left and try to post against that in some popular subreddit. I guarantee that you will get banned immediately. At this point they should just post a "Only Leftists allowed" banner. That would be so much easier.
Why even lie like this. r/unpopularopinion is basically conservative talking points 101 for instance. Do you seriously think posting "I don't think the means of production should be seized" will get you banned from r/pics? Come on.
>So on a supposedly unbiased website the only place conservatives can hang out is at r/unpopularopinion? That doesn't sound wrong to you?
Conservatives are a minority in America, so it makes sense their opinions would be unpopular by virtue of that.
There's nothing that's not political, every aspect of life is political, how we distribute resources, interact with our neighbors, basically everything is political and sidelining political discussion is itself a political act which benefits whoever is currently wielding power.
Well, not every eligible voter voted, and Trump lost the popular vote. The electoral college works in such a manner that the national popular vote doesn't matter, and a minority can elect a president. In fact, a conservative has only once won the national popular vote for President since 1988, and that was Bush in 2004.
The Senate holds a conservative majority because it's structured to represent land rather than people, and conservatives are occasionally able to take the House because they use districting to deprive the majority of voters of the majority of representation.
I mean, a quick search of /r/politics, which is liberal, suggests to me that you're over-stating the case. Conservative posts are often unpopular and people expressing conservative views get a lot of downvotes, but it was simple to find posts that go against the culture of the subreddit[1][2]. I wouldn't recommend /r/politics as a place to discuss politics - I agree it isn't representative of the median US voters' view.
I think it's one thing to say reddit is mostly people'd be leftists, which I agree with, and another to say that conservative opinions are explicitly banned. I think conservative opinions are unpopular and the imbalance makes reddit a poor place to understand the politics of the median person in the US, but non-leftists are allowed.
> Influential US Republican Senator Rob Portman has renounced his opposition to gay marriage. The Ohio senator said he began to change his mind in 2011 after his son, Will, revealed he was gay.
It's great that people change. It's not great that it frequently takes a direct familial relationship to cause it.
Our aspirations might be vaunting past what humans are generally capable of. I completely agree with you, but since I see over and over (and over) that only direct relationships engender change, I finally conclude that this is where humanity is at. We can call it a bug if we like, but it doesn't mean we can change it.
It only looks like a bug now because we are insisting on building complex, globalized societal configurations which don't play well with that limitation.
Doesn't globalizing promote the creation of more direct relationships, with a broad diversity of people? Giving one a spectrum of ideas and experiences - thereby engendering change?
We are human, experience is how we learn. Rather than moralize against it because there is an ideal human you’d prefer recognize that there is a clear and known path to helping people humanize their worldview through exposure.
Remember how the conservative establish was anti-marijuana, and before that anti-gay (well, still some are), and before that anti-mixed-race-marriage, and before that anti-long hair?
Yes, I routinely see left leaning political ads on the front page. I really don't see what good could come from Alexis's resignation. The site is already a left leaning echo chamber and most of the controversial subs are quarantined or outright banned. Any new ones that crop up are routinely removed. The most controversial (the_donald) has been effectively shutdown for months and removed from r/all for years. What more is there to do?
Remember when HuffPo was actually a decent, political scoop/gossip site? It was far more balanced then. It got hot when it veered left, but today it's an unexciting story mill.
I wonder if that's the path reddit is headed towards.
It's simple, you take the inverse. If you are looking for the right leaning accounts, look at the most downvoted and controversial comments in a given political thread.
I will say that true conservatism is few and far between, and it doesn't help that the viral strategy the GOP has settled on in recent years is heaps and heaps of outright false or racist memes, so there just isn't much good right leaning content being written or created to begin with that isn't far right.
sorting by controversial is usually much more interesting anyway. top comments on reddit are almost always a meaningless quip that echoes the message of whatever is being shared.
right? i never ever see right wing content on reddit's /r/all frontpage, but i ALWAYS see left-wing content (including there small subreddits with 10k+ upvotes).
see, i'm not conservative (i'm absurdly socially liberal and a bit fiscally conservative -- i prefer less taxes and less government spending in general) but it's baffling that people call reddit a "right-wing-cesspool".
if you look at unfiltered /r/all right now, most posts are related to the current protests.
I'm fiscally conservative, and even trying to discuss those ideas on Reddit has met me with downvotes galore without being discussed. Even while trying to be respectful and open-minded. I gave up after a while. A lot of people can't fathom how conservative ideas would be shunned on there until they actually try to discuss them.
Reddit is comprised of a lot of younger people who are indoctrinated to think in certain ways and haven't ventured far outside of their ideological bubble. So I just chalk it up to that and don't even go there anymore because nothing there adds much to my life other than pointless distraction.
I'm a libertarian socialist/communist (aka rabid leftist) and even I am often annoyed by how much of a "liberal" (whatever that means anymore) echo chamber reddit is.
People who have great points against the hive mind are often downvoted into oblivion. It's less of a place for discourse and more a place for voicing agreement. The worst experiences I've had are in the socialist/communist subreddits themselves. I've been banned from those places for saying things like "artists and homemakers are proletariat." I guess if you don't have a hammer in your hand you're just a neo-liberal reactionary??
And sure, T_D is a violent cesspool that should have been gone long ago, but in general I'm sick of social media platforms deciding for us what views are acceptable and what aren't. Their algorithms constantly guide people into weird places that drive engagement but at the expense of critical thought and real public discourse.
I'd much prefer free speech and neutral platforms over corporations deciding what we are to believe. But I suppose reddit's problems are now cultural and that's a more difficult problem to fix than adjusting an algorithm.
>I'm sick of social media platforms deciding for us what views are acceptable and what aren't.
i couldn't agree more. i never commented/subbed to the_donald. i added to my /r/all filter and i don't have to see it anymore.
btw, i do that to 99% of all political subs -- i just filter them, and now i don't have to interact. now, do i want them banned? nah, no way -- everyone deserves a place to discuss whatever they want, be it extreme left or extreme right politics. hell, i even disagree with chapo trap house being quarantined! no community should be "quarantined".
I've also been thoroughly confused by a weird form of "liberal" that has infested social media. It's not necessarily left-leaning as in "help the poor workers, unionize, strong manufacturing domestically, etc". It's "offshore everything, maximize profit" damn the workers. It's very much not a left position in the traditional sense.
Yeah it's bizarre. (Us) Americans sure love to chop up our words, and it seems even more we love to create binary classifications for three different axes of beliefs (social, political, economic). Like, ok, if I'm a communist but believe the government should be as small as possible to serve only its core set of functions, which box do I fit into? If I think women should have the right to choose what's best for their bodies, but I support free speech and the right to bear arms, what am I?
The whole left vs right, liberal vs conservative thing is so stupid, but our FPTP voting system and media are happy to keep the fight raging.
>Like, ok, if I'm a communist but believe the government should be as small as possible to serve only its core set of functions, which box do I fit into? If I think women should have the right to choose what's best for their bodies, but I support free speech and the right to bear arms, what am I?
that's how i feel -- i want a small government and i want people to do whatever they want with their own bodies while being able to own guns.
people say i'm libertarian, but i don't agree with a lot of libertarian points of view (i still think government has a place in society and i think we do need some social safety net, like public health care and even negative income taxes.).
there's not a box that i feel inside other than "classical liberal" (in the milton friedman sense of the term) but whenever i say that, i' met with either laughter or hate.
honestly, it's quite hard to discuss political issues nowadays on the internet, where everyone is super extreme and if you don't fit any boxes, you get silenced (including here, btw).
Then only subscribe to subreddits that you want to see. Like FB, most (not all) complaints could be solved by doing a few minutes of work to hide what you don't want to see.
What "political agenda"? If anything, the original core of the site was very left-leaning or heterodox technophiles that didn't have a home on Slashdot. The political parts of the site are now very much deadlocked in the center-right frame of the Democratic party, pretty far away from what the site once was.
The fact that you'd describe Reddit as "center-right" currently is enough to tell me you're coming at this from a very different perspective than the average person.
I would say that Reddit began as libertarian, and is now far-left.
I wouldn't call Biden far-left by any means, and the support he has on Reddit doesn't seem to be much more enthusiastic than "he's the best chance we have of getting rid of Trump."
Or posts and content that have an agenda behind them are popular and naturally end up on the front page. I see a lot of speculation about reddit being manipulated and no evidence of such manipulation being posted.
> the original core of the site was very left-leaning
I don't remember it that way. I remember it being very libertarian (Ron Paul was the Bernie Sanders of 2000's reddit) for a very long time. I believed that the shift to a left-wing orientation was organic and representative of the general population UNTIL the whole T_D thing came along... T_D was doing the same thing, pulling the site to the right, until Reddit's owners worked overtime to make sure that didn't happen. That makes me suspect that the liberalism was also artificial.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, perhaps over how people are defining core.
In terms of the user base, I definitely remember early Reddit having a strong libertarian bent, or at least significant conflict between libertarians and more mainstream leftists. Things seemed to shift left roughly when the Digg influx happened.
I find it pretty funny that you're accusing reddit of being "artificially liberal" when it's actually organically liberal thanks to its demographics and history. The market has chosen, isn't that the libertarian way?
I'm guessing there's really nothing that would convince you that your views just aren't as popular with reddit's audience as you think. You'll have more luck with the Facebook 5G truther crowd.
As someone that doesn't use reddit much, could you explain? I thought the front page was essentially a combination of popular things from the subreddits you regularly visit?
1) Group Isolation. You can be banned from groups and not the platform. This allows for the notion of being toxic in a specific context, but not in the broader context, which I don't believe is possible. Either you are a toxic user, or not. If not, disagreeing with the zeitgeist of a specific group should be a welcome part of the groups discourse, otherwise the group only serves to radicalize.
2) Free for all discourse. If everyone gets an unlimited platform, the loudest and most absurd will speak the most, and subsequently be heard the most. You need level, artificial, limits to how much a single person can contribute to any given discussion in order for it to be balanced.
When switching from a physical medium to discuss things, to a digital medium, we lost key limiting factors which helped free speech be an effective way for society to operate. You can only yell so loud and at so many people on a street corner, and you can only avoid hearing others' opinions so much when leaving your house. The internet has done away with both of those, and an ideal platform for discussion needs some mechanism of providing both.
> I believe resignation can actually be an act of leadership from people in power right now.
Yup. It starts from the top and trickles down. Thats why the U.S is so far gone.
The funny thing is we will all be talking about a new case in the future. Then another high profile person will be throwing money at the situation. Maybe something different is needed?
Also how on earth are certain subreddits still up and running is just beyond me.
>I have urged them to fill my seat with a black candidate
I'm not american but does racial quotas have any support? Say every company should have X% of N races on the board? South Africa for example have something like this in their (still majority white) sports teams.
>I'm not american but does racial quotas have any support? Say every company should have X% of N races on the board?
There's huge support for both it and gender quotas, but they're wrapped up in "Diversity & Inclusion" initiatives that focus outcome equity over opportunity equity.
Somewhat ironically you'll also find that the ranks of D&I in corporate and academic America are overwhelmingly filled with white women.
Americans do more or less support affirmative action programs, but the details matter:
> "Poll results vary widely, for example, according to specific question wordings. In general, historical polling data show that Americans have an overall positive view toward "affirmative action" and programs that increase opportunities for minorities, so long as these do not confer an unfair advantage for minorities in the form of "preferential treatment" or "lower standards."
More concretely, compare the following proposition:
> "Setting quotas for the number of racial minorities hired or accepted, but requiring them to meet the same standards as others (66% favor, 32% oppose)"
To this one:
> "Setting quotas for the number of racial minorities hired or accepted even if it means lowering the standards in order to make up for past discrimination (18% favor, 79% oppose)"
Mostly irrelevant, but I got to meet and work with Alexis for two days back in, holy shit, 2013 now, when I was still a teen and my brother had a startup at the same place Imgur was made (haha, now I'm doxxing myself, and - I've also met with Schaaf more than once)
I was in San Diego for some college stuff last Summer, and became friends with a fairly eccentric/successful dude through an even more eccentric hobby we shared... And out of nowhere, he starts dating Alexis's like... First cousin.
Anyways, Alexis seems like a great guy, family seems pretty great and well rounded (I say this because of how she described their yearly reunions)... yeah. Life's weird :O
Alex has stood by and defended years of Reddit bad behavior. Doxxing, openly racist boards, planning raids, targeted hate campaigns, pretty much everything you'd expect from an unmoderated online forum. And he's supported the moderators that support those forums. Hiding behind the false cries of "free speech" makes you a coward.
I really don't know what they want anymore. How much cleaner than Reddit does it get? There is nothing left that is even remotely controversial. I'm so confused.
The way he said BLACK candidate also feels really weird. We get it - you want to virtue signal. Make it a little less obvious.
Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle? It's against the site guidelines for good reason—it destroys curious conversation in two ways: first by being predictable (so the signal/noise ratio goes down) and second by being inflammatory (so it evokes worse from other people, leading to a downward spiral).
Also, please don't post flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments generally. You've been doing that a lot lately, and we eventually penalize or ban such accounts.
I genuinely think you have it backwards. The SNR went down significantly during the last weeks - which is understandable with events that dominate the news cycle so much. But HN was absolutely flooded with feel-good, no-content articles about just how good the author is, with everyone in the comments chiming in on how good they are and how bad all the opposing voices are.
That is not "signal". Voices like mine and the few others are though. And they are certainly not predictable as they're literally against the overwhelming majority of homogeneous posts in the other direction. The following downward spiral is evidently caused by the majority who doubles and triples down on their virtue signalling - not the people causing the signal/"trouble".
Now I know what you really mean of course. You don't want dissenting opinions. But you shouldn't frame this as a SNR issue.
The existence of bad comments doesn't justify adding more bad comments, and certainly not worse ones. That's how internet forums destroy themselves. Putting all the blame on the other side is just another battle move.
This has nothing to do with not wanting dissenting opinions. That's a cheap thing to say, because everyone always feels like the mods are against their side and secretly supporting the other. The issue is that your comment was obviously in the flamewar style.
Please stop using HN for ideological battle. We've had to warn you about this more than once before.
Are you joking? There's a huge number of cesspools still on reddit. Stuff like thedonald, theredpill, all sorts of blatantly racist/misogynistic communities.
From what I can see the_donald is effectively dead and theredpill is also quarantined so it might as well be, since quarantined subreddits are always eventually banned.
No, it has effectively been banned. It was forcefully taken over by the administration. While it technically still exists, it actually moved entirely to its own dedicated website.
"Effectively banned" is not the same as banned, and it's these conspicuous half-measures toward /r/the_donald that resulted in criticism from Ellen Pao as noted above, among others.
These are the first examples that come to mind. There are many more with similar userbases that has migrated from them. Don't forget all the Pizzagate/QAnon stuff, incels, etc. Here's a longer list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
Also, quarantined != banned. It's still on reddit, and those users spread out onto other non-quarantined subreddits and spew the same kind of garbage.
The problem with having a cesspool is that it attracts lots of those types of people to your site in the first place, and ingrains it in them that that kind of behavior is acceptable. They then start acting like that elsewhere on the site and lower the level of discourse everywhere.
Ban the cesspools and most of those people will actually leave the site for good, as what drew them to it in the first place is now gone. You also no longer have any cesspools serving as negative guideposts for making bad contributions. So if you moderate your site well, and just get rid of this kind of stuff, it ends up much better in the long run.
When I sort by date submitted the last post that came up was 2 months ago. That seems pretty dead to me.
Edit: Also the sidebar says there are 600 active users. I assume that includes me following your link. For comparison /r/news has ~68,000 users as of this writing.
No the sub doesn't exist anymore. There was an admin takeover and they left it in this odd "technically existing" state for some reason. TD is gone - you can look for stories about it some months ago.
The top comment on the link you posted is, "Are we back?" Reply is "Still only approved posters I think."
The link itself is to a pinned, mod-posted, announcement link to an article about an executive order to strip social media platforms from liability protections from charges of bias.
The most recent non-announcement post was two months ago.
Other choice top-level comments:
- "Huh and coincidentally I see a TD post on my feed for the first time in months."
- "TD COME BACK"
- "The Phoenix shall rise from the ashes"
- "OMG it’s been so long, I have missed you all my friends!!!"
Meanwhile, taking a jaunt to thedonald.win, shows what is basically a reddit clone with much more activity, easily verifiable with two minutes examination.
I'm not a /r/the_donald reader/subscriber/whatever, and haven't followed whatever reddit drama has transpired, but it's pretty clear they've been shut down for a while.
/r/The_Donald has effectively been archived and marked read-only. There's no or little activity - the link you posted was an exception - all users have moved over to a third party site.
While one could argue that Reddit should have removed the subreddit sooner, I'm not sure that would have done them any favors (see Streisand Effect.)
They opted to strangle the community slowly, hoping it would dissipate. But it just moves elsewhere, like it always does.
Anecdotally, and interestingly, I've only ever seen the phrase "virtue signal" from the alt-right/white supremacist/Trump supporter group. I think I understand what it's trying to convey, but it seems to be used anytime someone sides with something with which that group disagrees. It's like a "dog whistle" for white supremacists and personally when I see it used, it makes me question everything else that person said.
I don't know. The minorities I talk to tend to be quite aware that some people are engaging in point-scoring for ultimately self-serving purposes. However, they are not usually loud about this observation, so the sentiment might get lost in the noise.
Really? The lgbtq+ community has huge debates on virtue signaling every year. Many view pride as being completely overtakes by companies virtue signaling.
They are all 'quarintined' subr-ddits, that are not part of the larger community, and are more or less muted until you join them. Not quite the same. Don't get me wrong, I am no fan of r-ddit, but for very different reasons that are not fully relevant to this discussion.
The horrors we ban for are usually considered (by their submitters) to be perfectly normal, and we often have people starting debates with us about our own rules because other subreddits permit passive bigotry across race, gender, orientation, etc.
There's a lot. You've just closed your eyes to it. We've had mods quit because of the volume of crap.
The approved comments are actually the extreme ones. Eg.: Post: "After 10 years of marriage, today my husband didn't say good morning back to me. Is that normal?". Comments:"OMG the monster is probably planning to kill you, you must leave him at once and ruin his life."
> The approved comments are actually the extreme ones. Eg.: Post: "After 10 years of marriage, today my husband didn't say good morning back to me. Is that normal?". Comments:"OMG the monster is probably planning to kill you, you must leave him at once and ruin his life."
Two things:
1. Post: "After 10 years of marriage, today my husband didn't say good morning back to me. Is that normal?"
These should be reported - they fall afoul of the moral judgment rule. The subreddit is focused specifically on requests for advice, not retrospective analysis. Because of the volume of moral judgment posts we receive, we tend to ban submitters for a day simply because it's written both into the rules and as a pinned post on the sub.
2. "OMG the monster is probably planning to kill you, you must leave him at once and ruin his life."
We're not empowered to do anything about these - the only solution we have is to suggest that people try to disregard guidance that screams "dump" without going into why.
> Well you are well known to ban very good advice on a very specific topic - but we both know that even mentioning that would get me into trouble.
The only advice we ban for are:
1. advice advocating for intolerance against a protected class (e.g. lgbtq+, race, etc.)
2. anything involving violence or suicide, regardless of jokes.
And beyond that, we're obligated to remove submissions involving CSA per Reddit (or Reddit Anti-Evil Operations does it for us), and in such an event we provide resources the submitter can use to seek help or an escape.
Man I remember how much of a controversy it was when they killed /r/jailbait and a bunch of other subreddits. That was back when it actually seemed like a community with inside jokes about narwhals and bacon and nonsense.
I don't know if their desire to please advertisers is responsible for the fact that it's now a ragebait click farm, but it sure seems like they are connected.
The man is married to a black woman and has a biracial child with her who will be seen as black by and large. It is a personal issue to him.
But even if it wasn't a personal issue to him, I'm more disturbed by the number of people who 100% fail to engage with an issue and dismiss it as virtue signalling, as if a person couldn't authentically care about the issue.
Yes, Ohanian is a rich guy, but by stepping away from his role at reddit, it is foregoing likely future income. He is going to spend time working on these issues. Why is that so easy to dismiss?
Why does he have to say it? Because there are jerks out there who will dismiss his actions as virtue signaling. He is stating it is personal and he is committed.
Do complain this much and call it virtue signaling if someone says they served in the armed forces and they love the flag?
>Why does he have to say that he's married to a black woman. That he has a black child. That he is quitting. That he's hiring a BLACKKK person etc. Just do it man, don't make a wave.
Because he's trying to make a statement that racism is wrong, and because he wants the reasons for his resignation to be publically known, of course.
>People are being radicalized on your site. Ideological violence—murder—is committed by people who were heavily involved in hate communities on reddit that are still not banned as of today. All you jellyfish can muster up is some finger wagging and a yellow triangle to let them know that they've been so naughty that they get an ad-free experience and the inability to give reddit money through awards. Here I am wishing every subreddit could be so privileged.
It seems like you don't have a great understanding of what's going on in the USA right now. This isn't virtue signaling, which is usually more about posting on social media or using a hashtag. You might disagree with the actions he's taken, but Ohanian is taking action, not just paying lip service.
r/mgtow, r/metacanada, r/KotakuInAction, r/TumblrinAction, r/unpopularopinion, r/politicalcompassmemes are candidates. The subreddit about the upcoming AAA game "The Last of Us 2" is pretty vile aswell.
If you consider KIA, unpopularopinion and making fun of TLOU2 as vile then I'm not sure what that word even means.
plus: There are regular calls to murder all cops these days on reddit. In plain sight. Just imagine what would happen for any of those "bad" subs if they wouldn't remove those within seconds.
>KIA
The mods had to stop in and tell their own subreddit to stop celebrating the death of a trans e-sport player [1]. A year ago or so they also had issues with white supremacists.
>TLOU2
Just some choice picks from a recent thread [2]
"Everyone that is part on lgbtq should go live on an island. I wanna see how long you last. Since you hate straight people. And dont know how to reproduce because you think ass holes feel better than pussy."
"They'd need migration to reach replacement level for their plummetting birth rates "
"Because their fuckery and meddling has brought us to this, be gay in silence instead of shoving ity down everyone's throat. You are the fucking minority. LGBTQ is an evolutuionary dead-end for a reason"
"SJWs need to be castrated. Yikes."
"Gays are parasites. They don’t reproduce but steal instead, corrupting the youth through pedophilia. See: Milo. See: Steve Huffman. Many such cases!"
>unpopular_opinion
It used to be pretty questionable a few months ago, but maybe it got better. I haven't really bothered staying up to date on it.
Sounds like you aren't fan of those subreddits but should they be shut down if they are not violating the site rules? The fact is that those subs are heavily moderated. If they weren't they'd be the first to go.
The point is that the rules should be changed to disallow those sorts of subreddits. Let those users go somewhere else; reddit has no responsibility to society to host them.
I'm fine with these subreddits, aslong as they're properly moderated and not calling for violence or start brigading other subreddits. When the whole Jessica Price controversy happend there was a lot of new users on r/Guildwars2 that never posted there before or even played the game. I don't agree with them and think they're vile, but aslong as they don't break sitewide rules I'm ok with them.
unpopularopinion and politicalcompassmemes are not even remotely close to being candidates and including them in your list sounds very extreme and politically correct.
Sounds like typical conspiracy theory behavior to me, not sure what you expected from a conspiracy subreddit or why you would want the subreddit banned.
Outright falsehoods aren't always conspiracies, they usually lie in the unknowns. It's one thing to say Clinton is a secret Chinese sympathizer, it's another thing to say she was born and brought up in China. Many of the fake news things fall into the latter category, just lies designed to promote the far right.
Conspiracy theories used to more neutral like 5 years ago. Now they're exclusively far right and anti-liberal.
Yes and the people who populate that subreddit comment everywhere else, too. Same goes for other misogynist/racist/right-wing subreddits. The proliferation of these subreddits leads to a proliferation of low-quality users.
doesn't reddit have that extension (forget the name) to ban users across all subreddits and tag them etc ? (not from the site but for your own browsing)
The more and more I hear people debating what to do with the overt hate speak on the internet the more I think that having it out in the open (and the harm that follows for the groups that the hate is directed towards) allows the rest of us in the system to offer correction and rebuttal that if censored or deplatformed one is unable to do. I can't say it as clearly as Ben Thompson did on his take on what Facebook did in regards to Trump's subversive tweets.
I agree with respect to mail in ballots. Personally, I'd love if my state made it easier to vote in the mail or online. Right now you need two witnesses for an absentee ballot. But it needs to be done right and not right before an election.
> 5. Try to change the rules of voting next election to mail in ballots. Which are less secure than voting in person. If people can wait in line in a grocery store, why can't they wait in line to vote. I don't get it.
Millions of people are not going to grocery stores.
Ordering they have to hire a Latino or Asian would be just as bad.
Reddit thrived because it was a platform for all misfits - not just left wing misfits.
Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave. He felt it was better that extremists be exposed in the light of day rather than be hidden on private chat boards. He also would have been against dark patterns to make people install a phone app so Reddit can spy on your telemetry for advertisers.
> I am obligated to call you out: You should have shut down the_donald instead of amplifying it and its hate, racism, and violence. So much of what is happening now lies at your feet. You don't get to say BLM when reddit nurtures and monetizes white supremacy and hate all day long
https://twitter.com/ekp/status/1267689503797342208