Slashdot Mirror
Reddit Will 'Hide' Vile Content After Policy Change
AmiMoJo writes: It will be more difficult to find "abhorrent" content posted to community news site Reddit, the site has announced. It stopped short of banning the material outright and instead will require users to log-in to access it. The company reiterated its existing complete bans of illegal content, including child abuse images and so-called "revenge porn." Chief executive and co-founder Steve Huffman told users: "We've spent the last few days here discussing, and agree that an approach like this allows us as a company to repudiate content we don't want to associate with the business, but gives individuals freedom to consume it if they choose."
I really feel like the quotes should be around 'vile' instead of 'hide'
voat.co has been experiencing a massive influx of users and interest.
#unrelated
#everythingisfine
How will they determine what free speech is "abhorrent"? Anything that doesn't fit into the SJW group think?
Free speech doesn't have anything to do with a constitution. It's worldwide, not American.
If you have to manually block people, then you're going to get a lot of fly-by abuse from new accounts that people make to dodge the block lists.
If the system allows users to say "auto-hide all people from my screen who have a 50% troll rating or higher", you're going to get a lot of people abusing the system. It's REALLY, REALLY common on political discussion sites for users to dogpile on people whose opinions they don't like and flag them as trolls, and often they use bots to do it more efficiently.
The thing with Reddit is there is just a +/- system. There is no taxonomy in why you moderate someone + or -.Everyone also gets an equal vote, which for some types of discussion, is best.
With Slashdot points are randomly distributed and you can't both moderate and comment, which is appropriate for other types of discussion.. In that way Slashdot got a lot of things right.
The problem neither site is a one size fits all solution for moderation. For actual tech discussion I want Slashdot's moderation. For pictures of Cats I want Reddit's.
Slashdot's moderation and "Anonymous Coward" account also prevented bandwagoning on the Brianna Wu Interview despite her trying to get her twitter followers to do exactly that. They didn't have the same power that they did on Reddit or Twitter so they really didn't affect the conversation.
Usenet just needed a good moderation system built on top of it.
Personally I wouldn't be opposed to 3 separate types of 'moderation' that can be enabled/disabled.
- No moderation. 4Chan, Usenet
- Everyone gets to moderation Reddit
- Not everyone gets to moderate. Slashdot. Mod points are handed out at random.
Each have their advantages or disadvantages. The "inline sharing" is something that should be done client side anyway. After using reddit for a few years and coming back to Slashdot I realize how much more I like markdown for just doing forum posts. Not that I have a problem with HTML but it takes a bit longer to type out the same content. Add a web front end and call it a day.
The best part is if you made it a RFC people could run their own usenet circles. I would love to get a slashdot replacement going outside of corporate control. If you host nodes in a few countries it would be hard to take down. (It's how Usenet was designed).
I'm ready to jump ship from Reddit and Slashdot to somewhere else and would prefer if that somewhere else was a protocol rather than a specific site.
It's kind of come to a head now that there is nothing really left for people to just discuss stuff. Slashdot sold out to Dice. Fark and Reddit sold out to SJWs and "mainstream". Voat is just reimplementing Reddit, but poorly (IMHO).
Why isn't 'moderation' in a RFC yet? It's something that could probably be nailed out by now as we've tried multiple different methods.
I personally prefer Slashdot's style of moderation for most things. (Where its limited to -2 to +5, and you have taxonomy built in). But for some things I prefer Reddit's where everyone gets a vote. Let people write their own implementations of the RFC and let anyone incorporate it into their website. Slashdot and Reddit are open source in the same way that OpenSSL was. Technically open source but such a pain in the ass to get running & modify for most people it wasn't worth it (and we see how that turned out).
The nice thing about it being an RFC is that most of this stuff can be implemented client side. I can write my own app to discuss things. NNTP just needed distributed moderation like Slashdot.
That can be mitigated with 2 things:
Reddit needs an "Anonymous Coward" account so that people don't have to create throwaways for every single thing they don't want to post under their main account.
Reddit needs to limit moderation rights. The problem with Reddit is everyone gets a vote. With Slashdot mod points are distributed based on Karma. (And it actually meant something), you can also not vote and comment in the same thread.
Anonymous cowards always start at +0. Registered accounts always start at +1. But just because you register a dozen Slashdot accounts doesn't mean you get to moderate what other people get to say on a new thread.
My take/opinion:
I expect Reddit will morph into a stupid website like Digg has become. Subreddits will continue for awhile then expire on the vine.
It's a sad day for Americans, unless you like sucking your boyfriend's cock, licking your girlfriend's vagina, changing sex and flaunting it like a peacock's feathers, or are an illegal alien hoping for amnesty and cowering in the corner whenever Trump is on TV and swiping your green card up and down your ass crack.
Because it's "censorship" whether done by private or public entity.
Then you are free to take your money elsewhere. Oh, you don't pay for their servers? Then shut up.
Because even the single most toxic sub on the entire website which openly tries to goad at-risk users into committing suicide, routinely engages in doxing, and considers brigading to be a core part of their sub's existence still has the favor of the admins.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Because you would have nothing but groupthink as well as groups targeting individuals?
Not to toot my own horn but many of my posts are modded up, I guess because there are plenty of folks that appreciate somebody that doesn't pull their punches or sugarcoat their words in bullshit. I sit in my little shop, run tests, talk to folks, and report what I see trending around me. So why would your system be a problem? Because a certain faction here fucking HATES me, hatred to the point I was cyberstalked for over a year by one member of this faction who must have spent a good 12 hours a day doing nothing but searching the net for every place I posted just so he could spam "die you fat fucker die" over and over and over.
So what you would have is one group saying "We do not like this person, lets erase him" and then it wouldn't matter what this person posted large numbers would mark him troll and block him, which by your system would allow them to erase this person from the place. At least here we have metamods that tend to undo some, not all, of obvious modding based on the person not the content, but if they implemented your system all they would have to do is keep pounding and they could just wipe any person they didn't like from sight, not something you want to hand out to just anybody.
Come to think of it, one of the new sites I have been hanging out at tried something similar. Instead of the usual karma what they have is a points system. You make a popular post? You get points. You start at I think 25 and max out at 50, but where they screwed up was trying out this idea that every downmod would cost not only the modder a point but the one that was downmodded as well, and that once you went below a certain threshold your posts were automatically placed at zero and you didn't get any mod points.....can you guess what went wrong?
What went wrong was a radical SJW then joined the site and tried to make it an SJW haven. I know that the name SJW is sometimes thrown around without care, but in this case? We are talking about a white beta male that advocated the extermination of the white race and that only whites should be charged with hate crimes because of "historical racism" so...yeah classic SJW. He then took a page out of the classic Slashdot "Mikey(insert number)" playbook and made a shitload of accounts, posted just enough positive copypasta in each account to get them modded high enough to get mod points then proceeded to modbomb like there was no tomorrow. Things quickly soured there, some of the most popular posters ended up bailing, until finally the mods caught on and shut down his sockpuppet army and took away his rights to mod.
So the moral of the story? The reason why "great ideas" like yours haven't been tried is because you are not looking at it from the POV of an attacker. You ALWAYS have to look at these things from the angle of "If I wanted to wreck the site, how can I use this to my advantage?". Too many times you look at things like this and assume the users have the best intentions while forgetting there are probably just as many seriously unbalanced douchebags as there is legit users out there, so you have to plan accordingly.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
A lot of thoughtful comments inthese replies.
I don't see that anyone could brigade away anyone else since it's up to the end user who to remove from view. I am not suggesting people marked trolls be auto-disappeared without the end user deciding to take that action. Remember, the same thing happens here- people get modded down and who has /. set to view the 0 rated comments? (does anyone?)
I agree that auto creation of sock puppet accounts is troublesome. I read recently where this many tens of millions of accounts on FB are simply fake.
Nevertheless it seems to me that we should be able to auto-recognize fake accounts. Brigading comments (using secondary accounts for sniping and down voting) should therefore be an identifiable event, to some probability.
I can't believe we can't use the sysadmin's god's eye view of all comments to win this war- it's clearly an asymmetric advantage.
OK just talking about brigading, take two use cases one using sock pupet accounts , the other just ganging up.
In the first case, instead providing a view that just says 50% of users think this comment is a troll (in pie graph form say) provide a view that gives that information AND ALSO a "factor in sock puppetry" overlay, which changes the pie graph to show non-sockpuppet percentages.
Point is, you can't run forever. We can make realistic sock puppetry require a deep time investment. We can make recognition of sock puppets an easy thing and then your investment is gone in a flash. We dont' have to ban sock puppets, we just have to recognize them witha high degree of probability and include that as a datapoint available to users.
Inthe second case where real humans are ganging up, we can detect coordination. People who act together *in certain ways* (to be defined, but don't tell me I can't do it) are highly likely to be coordinating. People who act together because of their shared world view but are not coordinating might look like they ARE coordination, but there are differences between those two cases involving timing and past behaviour etc. etc.
It's not that problems can be felled with a single blow, it's that you can make it time-expensive to successfully engage in the kind of system rigging. You can even bring in outside facts about the world generally to act as a reality check to distinguish genuiine behaviour from non.
It's just a variant of fraud detection, right, but without ever actually having to confront the fraudster (since you may be wrong and don't want to alienate honest users). You don't finger anyone, you let your users do that and then your other users decide and or learn to trust or not those user's judgments.
I guess I feel like this is something people just don't want to invest in for some unknown (to me) reason . It appears that people do a little of this and that the hope for the best. That's the level of technology and sophistication we're bringing to it and I don't know why.
Trolls and maurading bands of assholes are an issue but with enough data points- and sysadmins have datapoints - you can just run trolls and other bad behavior to exhaustion, make it too expensive in terms of time and too low in terms fo rewards. That's how the peace is kept in this world generally.