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."

Comments

Note to editor

[Anonymous Coward]

I really feel like the quotes should be around 'vile' instead of 'hide'

Slippery Slope

[Anonymous Coward]

How will they determine what free speech is "abhorrent"? Anything that doesn't fit into the SJW group think?

Re:Slippery Slope

[Mashiki]

It has plenty to do with free speech, if you don't grasp that censorship exists at a government, business, publication, and personal level for whatever reason, you need to go spend more time out in the world. That means getting out of the country you live in.

You seem to have a problem understanding the difference between private and public. And I'm sure you're going to go ah-ha, but reddit is private. True reddit is private, reddit also bills itself as a bastion of free speech, or did...at one point. Reddit also claimed they're not banning ideas, they also claimed they're only banning actions. Which is of course why they've banned people for ideas, and treading on their 'safe space' policy, which is of course a feels based policy.

And you go ask the mod of Neofag who was shadowbanned* for asking for the sub to be unbanned because they never harassed anyone. So yes, that was a ban because of 'reasons.' And subs like SRS and Gamerghazi are already trying to get subs banned because of feelings, and things they don't like. There's no threat to them, or other people...it's all things contrary to their feelings. In their world, hurt feelings are "what is reasonable to protect themselves from."

*Neofag was a circle-jerk sub.

Can someone answer me this?

[WOOFYGOOFY]

I don't understand why the following doesn't solve all discussion board problems with trolls. OK here goes:

1) the ability to declare someone either interesting or a troll (or neither) and have such cumulative count public.

2) have the option to hide from your view all posts by poster X

3) have the option to hide all poster's posts hidden by one or more posters you think are interesting

4) have a reputation report available on each poster, including yourself, on how many or what % of posters are hiding that posters posts and how many of those posters you marked interesting.

Done.
\
RESULT:

1) you can learn from long timers who the trolls are and inherit their preferences.

2) you can block someone without declaring him to be a troll

3) you can see how people see you. Trolls whose posts aren't seen go away.

Slashdot has something like this in prototype. But it seems simple to me. Implement that and you're basically done.

Seriously, what am I missing?

Re:Can someone answer me this?

[0100010001010011]

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.

Re:Can someone answer me this?

[0100010001010011]

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.

Re:Can someone answer me this?

[nickweller]

"Seriously, what am I missing?"

This bit, it's called brigading ..

What is "brigading" and how do you do it?

Re:Can someone answer me this?

[Last Warrior]

This is not a troll. Ive been on /. for a very long time. I left /. for a very long time and came back more recently. /. has a niche. even with that people still complain about the moderation system here.
Are you guys (and gals) seriously implying that reddit should basically be turned into /.
Aside from the stupidity that they are currently embroiled in, I can't see another way to more effectively destroy reddit than to try to implement the /. principles there.
Reddit is a social site first and then a news and information site second. To leave moderation in the hands of a few select people takes most of the social aspects away from people.

The strength of reddit is in the community and not in the content. there is probably as much or more garbage that goes through reddit as good and interesting content. The benefit is that the worst of it is obscured through a subscription model where you only subscribe to the groups that you are interested in.
Moderators already have to much power and pull there. and The shadowbanning nonsense, while i can understand the original intent, is being abused by people with power to silence people they disagree with.

Im a member of both of these communities. What reddit does now is going to determine whether they go the way of the dodo (Digg) or they continue to be a viable social community for discussion of any topics of interest to people. Hate groups can stay in their little silos and feel like they can have their free expression as long as it doesn't trickle out into unrelated groups. Subscribing to those groups should come with a stern warning or two to make sure that people with sensibilities know to avoid it.

I cant stand the hate and vitriol. The hate groups are a blemish on the internet and the world. But if people start banning that speech, that means they have the power to ban other unpopular speech or even people they disagree with.

Re:Can someone answer me this?

[fisted]

Mod points are handed out at random.

No, it's linked to karma

Re:Can someone answer me this?

[Mashiki]

Easy enough.

Re:Can someone answer me this?

[hairyfeet]

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.

Re:Can someone answer me this?

[WOOFYGOOFY]

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.

This summary is wrong, they are banning content

[guises]

Reddit introducing three tier content tiers: approved / hidden / banned. They announced that they would hide some of the undesirable content, as the summary said, but they are outright banning other content - they gave the example of /r/rapingwomen as a subreddit which would be banned, not hidden.

The differentiator between a sub to be banned and a sub to be hidden is officially the promotion of violence. Given the unlikelihood they that would start banning subs like /r/justiceporn though, the real differentiator is probably better characterized as: "subs which we don't like and which also have a violence theme."

Re:Freedom of Speech?

[Anonymous Coward]

Free speech doesn't have anything to do with a constitution. It's worldwide, not American.

Re:Freedom of Speech?

[ckatko]

You're actually correct... contrary to the hivemind. The US constitution protects the Freedom of Speech from government interference. It didn't create the idea, it protects it.

Likewise, in most societies, Freedom of Speech is a cultural law. It's assumed. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" was from Evelyn Beatrice Hall in 1906. Going all the way back, Athens, had the Freedom of Speech in the 5th century B.C.. The Romans also had Freedom of Speech. It's also apart of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and binding on all UN member states.

Just because the USA government's constitution only protects the Freedom of Speech from itself, doesn't mean it's not fucking important, worth fighting for, or a real thing outside of the government interactions.

Moreover, Freedom of Speech does move into the private sector in certain situations. Such as the landmark Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins case of 1980. In California, per their additional state constitutional wording, you can exercise your right to free speech in private shopping centers as long as you are peaceful. Many states have similar wording but have not followed as they are worried about the implications. But the point remains, the idea that "Freedom of Speech" means nothing except with regard to the USA federal government is a stupid lie.

Re:Freedom of Speech?

[ckatko]

I forgot to mention this quote from the UN resolution:

Article 19 states that "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Meanwhile in SRS business continues as usual

[Shadow of Eternity]

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.

Re:Meanwhile in SRS business continues as usual

[meta-monkey]

Your sig is a good explanation of the way voting on reddit is supposed to work. An upvote doesn't necessarily mean you agree with something. You're supposed to upvote things that "add to the discussion" and downvote things that do not, regardless of agreement.

For this reason, "brigading" is a bad thing. If, say, a bunch of chocolate pudding afficiandoes on /r/chocolatepudding watch the general /r/pudding sub, and any time vanilla pudding is mentioned, they post a link to the thread and everybody from /r/chocolatepudding goes to downvote the pro-vanilla comment, that's not really helpful. The vanilla pudding comment was adding to the discussion, but not expressing an opinion the chocolate pudding crowd liked. Downvoting it en mass is bullshit.

SRS is /r/shitredditsays, a forum wherein people notice "offensive" things said on other subs, and post links to them. The entire purpose of the sub is to post links to comments and posts you don't like. And gee, I guess maybe if other people don't like them too, they might, I don't know...go downvote those comments?

And of course they go beyond merely downvoting that one post. Some redditors have been known to go through somebody's entire post history, downvoting everything they've ever said. Or worse, sleuthing their real identity, and harassing them offline, or contacting their employer and trying to get them fired for something "offensive" they've said under a pseudonym online.

So, how can the problem be "harassment" and "doxxing" when SRS is still allowed to exist?