Slashdot Mirror
Reddit and the Struggle To Detoxify the Internet (newyorker.com)
In an article published on The New Yorker this week, Andrew Marantz discusses the state of free speech on the Web and takes a look at Reddit, the internet's fourth-most-popular site, after Google, YouTube, and Facebook. Some excerpts from the story: On November 23, 2016, shortly after President Trump's election, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman was at his desk, in San Francisco, perusing the site. It was the day before Thanksgiving. Reddit's administrators had just deleted a subreddit called r/Pizzagate, a forum for people who believed that high-ranking staffers of Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign, and possibly Clinton herself, were trafficking child sex slaves. The reason for the ban, according to Reddit's administrators, was not the beliefs of people on the subreddit, but the way they'd behaved -- specifically, their insistence on publishing their enemies' private phone numbers and addresses, a clear violation of Reddit's rules. [...] Some of the conspiracy theorists left Reddit and reunited on Voat, a site made by and for the users that Reddit sloughs off. Other Pizzagaters stayed and regrouped on r/The_Donald, a popular pro-Trump subreddit. Throughout the Presidential campaign, The_Donald was a hive of Trump boosterism. By this time, it had become a hermetic subculture, full of inside jokes and ugly rhetoric. The community's most frequent commenters, like the man they'd helped propel to the Presidency, were experts at testing boundaries. Within minutes, they started to express their outrage that Pizzagate had been deleted.
Redditors are pseudonymous, and their pseudonyms are sometimes prefaced by "u," for "username." Huffman's is Spez. As he scanned The_Donald, he noticed that hundreds of the most popular comments were about him: "fuck u/spez", "u/spez is complicit in the coverup". One commenter simply wrote "u/SPEZ IS A CUCK," in bold type, a hundred and ten times in a row. Huffman, alone at his computer, wondered whether to respond. "I consider myself a troll at heart," he said later. "Making people bristle, being a little outrageous in order to add some spice to life -- I get that. I've done that." Privately, Huffman imagined The_Donald as a misguided teen-ager who wouldn't stop misbehaving. "If your little brother flicks your ear, maybe you ignore it," he said. "If he flicks your ear a hundred times, or punches you, then maybe you give him a little smack to show you're paying attention."
Although redditors didn't yet know it, Huffman could edit any part of the site. He wrote a script that would automatically replace his username with those of The_Donald's most prominent members, directing the insults back at the insulters in real time: in one comment, "Fuck u/Spez" became "Fuck u/Trumpshaker"; in another, "Fuck u/Spez" became "Fuck u/MAGAdocious." The_Donald's users saw what was happening, and they reacted by spinning a conspiracy theory that, in this case, turned out to be true. "Manipulating the words of your users is fucked," a commenter wrote.
Redditors are pseudonymous, and their pseudonyms are sometimes prefaced by "u," for "username." Huffman's is Spez. As he scanned The_Donald, he noticed that hundreds of the most popular comments were about him: "fuck u/spez", "u/spez is complicit in the coverup". One commenter simply wrote "u/SPEZ IS A CUCK," in bold type, a hundred and ten times in a row. Huffman, alone at his computer, wondered whether to respond. "I consider myself a troll at heart," he said later. "Making people bristle, being a little outrageous in order to add some spice to life -- I get that. I've done that." Privately, Huffman imagined The_Donald as a misguided teen-ager who wouldn't stop misbehaving. "If your little brother flicks your ear, maybe you ignore it," he said. "If he flicks your ear a hundred times, or punches you, then maybe you give him a little smack to show you're paying attention."
Although redditors didn't yet know it, Huffman could edit any part of the site. He wrote a script that would automatically replace his username with those of The_Donald's most prominent members, directing the insults back at the insulters in real time: in one comment, "Fuck u/Spez" became "Fuck u/Trumpshaker"; in another, "Fuck u/Spez" became "Fuck u/MAGAdocious." The_Donald's users saw what was happening, and they reacted by spinning a conspiracy theory that, in this case, turned out to be true. "Manipulating the words of your users is fucked," a commenter wrote.
How is it an eye for an eye, did The_Donald posters edit somebody else's posts?
We could debate that of course but the problem isn't that some opinions are unpopular but that the ARS "community" effectively silences reasonable well stated opinions. Fuck that. Fuck them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Except that on slashdot the comment moderators are at least somewhat randomized. They're not a fixed cadre of ideologues.
Downvotes could be used to identify controversial ideas - often the most interesting parts of the discussion. A troll will have mostly downvotes. A platitude will be overwhelmingly positive. The real gritty, interesting stuff will have both up and downvotes.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Nope, not a problem in the slightest.
You seem to think Reddit / Slashdot / Ars / any site have the monopoly of forums. No, this is not the case. Anyone with a few hundred bucks lying around can quite easily start their own forum and host said "disruptive voices".
Also, you'd have a stronger point if the article weren't about doxxing people and really obvious lies tied to a specific person (Pizzagate / Hillary). Constructive conversations about gun control? Debates about abortion? Those are topics worthy of "veto power", not the garbage there. I mean, Hillary's not even a contender anymore and they're still going on about it.
Painting with a broad brush are we? R/The_Donald also has high quality posts such as the one detailing the over 500 companies DT ran prior to his run for the presidency. Mass amounts of research went into that thread and I quoted it quite often. Even google put it as a top link in a search for "Donald Trump companies". The truth is, most trolling and violations are done by a small percentage of the population that has an undue amount of influence on the rest of the community's reputation.
What we need to detoxify is our minds, not Reddit. We can pretend everything is hunky dory. These people exist. Most of them would be could be persuaded. We ignore them at our peril. They vote. In large numbers. In off year elections.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Reddit is especially insane with its modding. It's baffling, really, how they never attempted to fix the utterly broken system they started off with.
1) Unlimited up/down modding
2) No meta-modding
3) No sock-puppet control
4) No effective karma of any sort for good posts or good modding
If they had addressed any two of those four, I think it would be a totally different environment. As it is, it's designed to be abused by those with the most time and single-minded focus on their hands, and there's nothing anyone can do about it except fight fire with fire. And for most people, they don't have that sort of time and energy.
Having suffered under a number of modding systems in my life, I attempted to come up with one that deals with gaming the system, prevents echo chambers, rewards positive contributions, and doesn't overly disrupt the flow of communication. And you know what? I don't think it's possible. Sure, you can get most of those things in a modding system, but it's damn hard to get them all. And what I modeled which seemed to be close was so opaque that it would likely lead to tons of censorship and conspiracy complaints. /.'s modding system really isn't half bad, compared to all the others out there. And having tried to come up with a better system, I can sort-of see why so many sites just gave up and implemented a known broken and bad system.
Still, Reddit's is about the worst. I think even 4chan's is better.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Slashdot's moderation style is still hands down the best I've seen. I wish more sites adopted it.
I would actually pay money for a good Slashdot moderation style site for discussion other than technology.
Most people who think/say "They are all wrong, *I* am the one who is right" are wrong.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It's a circle-jerk echo chamber
With unlimited up/down modding, which just reinforces the statement above.
Slashdot is just as bad.
I read /. with zero posts hidden, and you know what? 95% of posts modded down really desperately deserve to be modded down. They're not modded down because they're controversial; they're modded down because they are trolls and assholes trying to be offensive and shocking.
There may be 5% of the downmodded posts that are controversial, but I'd guess probably not even 5%-- and even there, it's likely that the opinion is expressed while offhandedly calling other people posting a "cuck" or a "snowflake" or a "libtard" (or, a "rethuglican", take your pick, left or right) or a "smelly chimp lover".
comment threads without moderation are toxic.
The problem with a simple up/down is it allows no classification. At least Slashdot separates by Troll, Flamebait & Offtopic.
Yet your post is here. You are free to moderate their posts and they are free to moderate yours. Seems fair to me.
Except that on slashdot the comment moderators are at least somewhat randomized. They're not a fixed cadre of ideologues.
Yep, as was repeatedly brought up during the anniversary celebrations, Slashdot still has an elegant, well-conceived, and (in light of other sites' abject failures) surprisingly effective modding system. The reason Reddit doesn't fix theirs is because mob rule gives you a nice mob to advertise to.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Sorry, I don't buy this. I'm following online discussions of controversial topics for more than 20 years now, and I cannot recall many instances where these would really and genuinely be enlightening or beneficial to anyone. This is extremely rare. The best thing you can get from such discussions is unreliable, superficial knowledge by testimony that you have to check manually with other sources anyway before you can trust it. In other words, I don't think that online forums are good for discussing controversial topics. Even the local pub fares better in terms of civility, reasonableness, politeness and overall friendliness, listening to each other, rational exchange of standpoints and ideas, constructive dialogue, etc.
On Usenet we used killfiles, they were a somewhat of a solution to keep the crackpots and conspiracy theorists at a distance, though not ideal. Centralized forums like Slashdot don't want to empower users, so they don't give them the same functionality.
In my opinion, civil public online discourse with anonymity or pseudonymity is only possible with a combination of heavy moderation, temporary IP banning, and shadow-banning. It has nothing to do with left or right or freedom of speech or anything like that, it's just a matter of common sense and extensive experience that without moderation and bans the number of toxic shitposters will raise above a critical threshold. Trolls and crackpots, whether they do it for fun or because they have mental problems or political agendas, have way more time at hand than reasonable people. This is a fact of life.
Forums with less moderation work fine in smaller communities oriented towards common goals. But even these usually need quite drastic measures against hostile takeovers at hand - see IRC wars, etc.
Echo chambers: These exist, but people who are susceptible to becoming seriously influenced in their life by their online participation in a "circle jerk echo chamber" have much more of a problem than just these echo chambers. Most people do not have this problem. Nowadays there is 0 problem of getting good information on practically anything. On the contrary, we're swamped in insanely accurate and fast news, which leads to a distorted negative perception of reality. Echo chambers are only a problem for certain personalities who would find their echo chamber in real life if they don't find it online.
I've been on Slashdot under many different handles almost since its inception, and I would say that in the past 5 years or so it has failed. Why? Probably just because more people are online, and you only get along with most people personally, not by "discussing controversial topics" but by dealing with them in daily interactions. There are still forums that work, reddit is not bad in fact, and I spend more time on another forum that I do not want to mention in order not to get trolls any ideas.
There's a difference between admin and user moderation.
If I were to post on this site about how the Holocaust was faked, I'd be downmodded into oblivion (I hope). On certain subreddits, you could be upmodded for such things. And sure, you can believe that Hillary Clinton is running a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor, and that's all fun and games until someone starts shooting a gun inside.
Like many on this site, I'm a proponent of free speech -- but with user moderation to prevent stupidity. One of the problems with Reddit is that subreddit nature creates echo chambers. As many have pointed out before, websites are private businesses and have a right to kick people out whom they don't like. If someone walks into your pizza parlor and accusing you of running a child sex trafficking ring, you can ask them to leave -- and that's not censorship -- any more than it is a bar kicking out a rowdy patron.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Slashdot's moderation style is still hands down the best I've seen. I wish more sites adopted it.
I would actually pay money for a good Slashdot moderation style site for discussion other than technology.
I do enjoy the meta-humour where all the posts praising the /. moderation system are generally score 4/5 while the ones opposing are being modded down into oblivion.
I stole this Sig
./ seems to do well allowing downvotes. There's certainly bias on certain subjects, but in general you find high quality comments on both sides.
I think technology (the moderation system) plays a role, but as tech people I think we tend to overemphasize technology and understate the role of editors in establishing a site's culture. The /. editors simply don't post the sorts of stories and summaries that attract trolls and extremists, as a result the people who mod tend to be more reasoned and open to opposing ideas.
Sites who post controversial stories to drive page views are going to have lower quality comments because that's the people they attract and the tone they set.
Sites who allow users to post stories are going to end up with sections that are cesspools.
I don't think you can fix reddit with the right moderation system, whenever users control the content there's always going to be problematic content.
I stole this Sig
"One commenter simply wrote "u/SPEZ IS A CUCK," in bold type, a hundred and ten times in a row."
Just because the delivery is off, it does not mean the message is wrong.
> Trump bashing and SWJ stories
But those are an important public service. We need to fight Trump.
You can set the site to show you all posts regardless of score. I know I do. And then you just ignore the score. That said, it is an effective tool to attack the majority who don't mess with settings and just use it with default settings.
My biggest problem with reddit however is that it's a platform that is essentially in hands of clear cut ideologues, who are segregating the site into system where they constrain certain viewpoints to certain subreddits only via admin assistance (i.e. shadow bans). That results in people with certain opinions that reddits administration finds to be disagreeable to be essentially locked into places with nothing but others that agree with them for company. Which in turn creates an echo chamber which radicalises people as overton window shifts towards the extreme. The_Donald is a good example of this. It started as a genuine pro-Trump grass roots political movement and became an extreme echo chamber as people who got punished through reddit's administrations suppression of pro-Trump views started increasingly flock in there to vent and as a result radicalise one another.
And this is in reddit's interests to do. People in echo chambers spend longer on the site. Same thing as we have seen with facebook.
That said, reddit is also interesting in how the overton window has shifted. I remember the time when just implying that islam and terrorism are connected was ground for automatic permaban from r/Europe. Same mods still largely in place, but they no longer have the mindset to ban entire threads and scores of users discussing the topic. It took Bataclan, several trucks of peace, pedophiliac muslim grooming gangs branding little girls with hot irons "because they're white and so trash" according to their own words in court, and Cologne mass harassment to get there. But it was dragged there, mods kicking, screaming and mass banning all the way. It's a good microcosm of society.
What I remember most about attempting to meta-moderate is that it was incredibly frustrating. The comments were always presented singly, and because most slashdolts can't be bothered to quote what they're responding to the comments were usually completely without context. The point of meta-moderation is to judge whether or not a moderation was made appropriately, but this is often an impossible judgement to make without context. I quickly gave up.
Nowadays I just try to moderate fairly and pretty much never post with my real account because I've usually already moderated some comments (yes, just like right now) on a story already and I hate to nullify moderations that I think are fair.
I think that this community and academics at large could probably come up with a decent working moderation system.
As a start you'd prepare moderators via a graduate entry university course (MMod) covering procedural fairness, free speech issues, logical fallacies as well as filling in some factual basics in the humanities and/or sciences (to pad out the blind spot left by the original degree). The practising MMod would be required to undertake continuing education and be subject to periodic work review. Of course moderators would refrain from voting or in any other way becoming involved in party politics. After we have capable and bias-free moderators we could start getting serious designing systems ... ;)
Until then we may just have to survive the fact that publishing unpopular opinions invites social censure.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke