I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country. So in a way, he was probably the first account on there and became god-king for eternity for the subreddits related to the country. I had no idea who he was, what he stood for, what his plans were for his newfound digital real estate etc.
I feel like the moderated subforum is a fundamentally broken system for dealing with content. I much prefer the Federated / X / Instagram approach where I can deal with users and have the tools needed to curate my own content, instead of relying on some ideologically captured no-name account that chooses what I can or cannot see based on whims.
Your country wouldn't be Norway by any chance? I remember that on Reddit there was one powermod who was dead-set on owning every Nowegian-language forum, and every name that could potentially be a base for people trying to escape him.
wow, is there more on this?
Also, honestly, with AI/LLMs now, do we even need human moderators anywhere anymore
You need both. LLMs can, I think, do the bulk of removing posts that break community guidelines, but you need moderators to define and adjust the guidelines. Most would also like to have a human to escalate a dispute to.
Google is famous for having almost solely automated support, at it absolutely sucks at doing almost anything. AI only moderation would go the same way.
> but you need moderators to define and adjust the guidelines
The comments above you are suggesting that global guidelines are unnecessary. Instead, they suggest you don't need moderation at all when LLMs now give us the technology to filter out the stuff individual users don't want to see based own their own personal policies. I am sure you can come up with reasons to dispute that, but "you need moderators to do the thing you say is no longer necessary" doesn't add to the discussion.
The absolutely broken moderator system of Reddit made me leave it forever after being a regular user for more than a decade. The “god-king” thing simply doesn’t work.
Same here. The power-tripping of mods ruins reddit. Most don't care about the community as much as they care about exercising their absolute power over users.
The site itself is a problem, too. They banned the_donald (which, yes, was spammy, but it seemed to be organic and people had a big problem with it being banned) and nonewnormal (entirely unjustified; the "official" story of/advice for covid is bunkum). I'd be fine considering a ban of actual problem places, I'm not here to defend things on my high horse, but that's nonsense
I'm actually ok with reddit banning it and taking sides in political conflict. I just wish they didn't pretend to be unbiased when it's made it a useless site for discussing current reality.
Edit: to be clear, I'm more concerned about how russia was basically banned from the site but worldnews itself seems like the primary fountain of western astroturfing on the internet. No matter your opinion of putin, that is extremely unhealthy for productive discourse. I don't care about american domestic politics.
I don't think the problem was spam content it was hate content. Hate can be organic
Who decides what "hate" is though? Does it switch with every administration? Free speech, including "hate speech" should be allowed, as long as it doesn't violate the law (calls to violence, etc)
"Everything I disagree with is hate speech"
Reddit is filled with calls to violence, I would say it's gotten quite worse since. What's changed is that it all comes from one side now.
When you curate the echo chamber, the calls start coming from inside the house.
It's really not that hard to identify hate. We don't have to engage in epistemology
The particular problem is said speech quite often leads to calls of violence. And when a few people get banned for that you get dog whistles, sentences that are encoded calls for violence. Eventually the new slang is recognized for being violent and then it looks like the site has allowed calls of violence for months.
A short version of this is, if you let a nazi come to your bar, you have a nazi bar.
Calls for violence are free speech. Calls for "imminent" violence that serve to coordinate it have been decided not to be.
When you claim that calls for violence are not freedom of speech, it's a slippery slope that leads you to absurdities like speech that could "lead" to calls of violence are not freedom of speech, or that secret codes that could be interpreted as speech that would lead to calls to violence are not freedom of speech, or that violent-sounding slang that is eventually recognized as being encoded speech that would lead to calls of violence isn't freedom of speech, or that people who own bars who host people who use violent-sounding slang that is related to secret codes for speech that could lead to calls for violence are nazis.
And since nazis deserve to be violently suppressed...
- [deleted]
I agree that free speech is free speech, the private org that runs the platform has a veto, the assumption that these platforms are the equivilant of stepping into the street to stand on a box is a not realistic.
Even HN is only quasi-free speech, there are rules that will get one censored.
If you love freedom, there are mailing lists and other platforms but they arnt as high on dopamine and the audience gets a little bit more sketch.
Even the US never had free speech—there was always stuff you could/can say to get you gagged by the courts or thrown in prison. Your freedoms always stop at impacting other people.
Somehow we jut gave business owners more freedoms than we gave everyone else....
"Free speech" means you have freedom from retribution from the government. It doesn't mean your fellow citizens need to stand there and listen to your shit, nor does it mean you are entitled to any sort of platform or megaphone. It means you can scream on the side of the road into the ether and you won't be arrested for it.
> "Free speech" means you have freedom from retribution from the government.
No, it doesn't. The concept of "free speech" isn't limited to prior restraint, you're mistaking it for the dominant precedent in judicial interpretations of the the 1st Amendment of the US constitution.
> It doesn't mean your fellow citizens need to stand there and listen to your shit,
Nobody asked you, or claimed this.
> nor does it mean you are entitled to any sort of platform or megaphone.
You should look up common carrier previsions. If we had to depend on your interpretation of law or morality, they'd be able to shut off your electricity for speech violations.
> It means you can scream on the side of the road into the ether and you won't be arrested for it.
If that's all it meant, it would be dumb and useless. What's more, it doesn't mean that, you can be arrested for screaming on the side of the road.
You're wrong in every way you could be wrong.
And even if it does, the mods don't have real control to moderate communities either, so you get the worst of both worlds. I don't go to most queer reddit communities anymore because a lot of them have bots that downvote trans-positive posts, even if the community is specifically meant to be inclusive. There's nothing to couple active participation to voting weight or anything of that kind and voting is not considered "brigading" by reddit if the coordination happens off-site (at least not in a way that'd lead to any enforcement action).
It's makes a great propaganda machine though, given humans have a tendency to measure their own opinions on social clues.
I still haven't been able to figure out how to make an account without it being immediately shadowbanned or normalbanned. Tried again the other day, it was something in between where logged-out users could see it was banned but I couldn't.
You need to ditch and replace all your devices and acquire a new phone number. I'm serious. Virtually all large websites these days employ a lot of fingerprinting and persistence technologies.
And yes, ditch them. Even well over a decade ago, Wikipedia of all places already employed IP address matching to link sockpuppet accounts. You must be extremely careful of never using any device that was associated with your old accounts on the same network as the devices associated with your new account. And that includes devices only seen by association.
> and acquire a new phone number
> Wikipedia of all places already employed IP address matching to link sockpuppet accounts
That’s… well, that’s just not how tcp/ip works. Your phone number has nothing to do with your device IP…
It does when your phone number is used for 2fa in a session running on tcp/ip
It happens to all new accounts. It's known that new account are shadowbanned almost everywhere until they are 30 days old and farmed some karma on a very small set of subreddits that don't shadowban new accounts. It's shocking they ever get any new users, really; as far as a non-technical new user knows, nobody ever reads their comments for some reason.
Just don't use apps. Then the only association is a discardable cookie and IP.
How contagious is it? Can I get other people banned from Reddit by logging into my instantly banned account on their wifi network?
Not that contagious, I'm afraid.
My boss uses Reddit some. I'm banned. At the shop, we use the same IP address (and we do not use ipv6 there).
I tried to log in with a ~10-year-old account that I'd never commented with. A perfect Beetlejuicing moment had arrived and I just wanted to play the game with a short, snarky comment.
It logged in fine, and then: Insta-ban, just like that. (Maybe I should have used a new browser on a new network that I've never used before, but whatever -- nothing of value was lost here.)
Meanwhile, the boss man's access continued unimpeded; this suggests that it is a rather targeted contagion.
And it seems to follow the systems, not the networks.
(If anyone wants banned, just let me know. I seem to have a well-poisoned system to play with.)
This is widly innacurate.
I've always thought than on Reddit (or Digg, or Lemmy or others) common words, brands, names... should be broad "topics" or categories that nobody can claim (first come, first served). You should be able to add a sub/community under a topic, but just like everyone else, and then users interested in said topic could add and exclude different subs to taste.
A well moderated forum (like HN) is great. I don't have time for the signal-to-noise ratio of X.
IMHO Reddit would be better if it had AI moderators that strictly follow a sub's policies. Users could read the policies upfront before deciding whether to join. new subs could start with some neutral default policy, and users could then propose changes to the policy and democratically vote on those changes.
> users could then propose changes to the policy and democratically vote on those changes.
Which, in fact, would open up the same rat race with determining which accounts are real and so forth.
Not disagreeing with you, just circling around this same problem. Feels like the world still isn't ready yet.
If the policies are public, there's a lot more transparency. eg my city of millions of people has a subreddit. The head mod bans people for criticizing a certain dog breed. This "policy" is pretty opaque, but if the AI enforced subreddit rules say "thou shalt not mention the dog's breed when commenting on articles about someone being mauled to death", more people would be familiar with the rule (and perhaps there would be more organized discussion).
I was on a subreddit for a while that voted on rules and had a rotating dictator to facilitate them. It worked decently well, although it never got to the point where the sub was brigaded. This was also pre-LLM so moderation was still a big time sink and the sub eventually fizzled out
That’s because certain dog breeds aren’t more likely to maul and saying otherwise is ignorant fear mongering.
Try criticizing Apple or China or other sacred cows and see how quickly your post gets flagged.
Same for italian forums. I don't believe bot and spam are to be blamed fully.
It was just a copy of reddit. How useful?
Has any popular site tried an approach where you dynamically select your mods as more of a content filter than global moderation?
Most places can hide posts and block users at the user level, so why not select which mods can do that for you?
Yes. Subforums should elect mods democratically.
sadly, a nice idea that is painfully naive with how computers are used in reality.
One need only remember how easy it was to take over IRC channels with a few hundred bots to see the endgame of this rationale… it cannot be patched out, it’s inherent to the internet.
That which would make a vote valid; can (and will) be gamed.
> it’s inherent to the internet.
Who said the election needs to take place on the internet?
A paper ballot-style election, while not perfect either, works well enough in practice.
It could work depending on how it is set up. Maybe only accounts with n-number of years get 1 single vote, and maybe don't let any random 2-day old account get a vote.
So now accounts are worth even more money or reason to steal.
As long as sub forums can be created easily, users may pick their sub forum and thus indirectly moderator.
In this setup having users elect the moderator leads to cases where small groups create their special interest group and then some trolls challenge the moderator.
Their may be some oversight on the large sub forum, but not all.
Necessary for this is that subforums can't have unique names. If a bad mod can squat all the words like "computers", "programming", "coding", newcomers aren't going to know the best subforum is called "RealProgNoBadMod"
Yes, the "important" ones need some special attention. If "democracy" where anybody can create arbitrary amount of accounts is however questionable.
The vast majority of sub forums however are more targeted and smaller to begin with.
Squatting is bad no matter how niche the topic
Squatting also invites corruption and selling rights to control what is posted to a sub.
You see this in city-focused subreddits. But the reality is the name is power. New users type in their city and join the original one. The hostile mods suppress mention of the new one. It never manages to get critical mass.
Stack Overflow does this and it works far better than arbitrary tyrant style moderation.
Crucially, SO's election system needs to be bootstrapped: users aren't eligible to vote until they have a history of participation. The level of participation is fairly trivial, but it provides enough signal to allow a reasonable detection (and elimination) of bot / sock puppet networks without resorting to crude measures like blacklists or "bot tests".
For new sites, this meant that the bulk of moderation was done by employees, followed by employee-appointed temporary moderators. This dramatically reduced abuse, but also reduced the explosion of new sub-communities that sites like Reddit thrived on.
Stack Overflow is dead now.
I don’t think it was ever very good.
It was pretty decent in the mid and late 00s. The community started turning toxic in the very early 10s and by about 2015 was quite poisonous. The saddest part is that the problem was known and spoken about frequently, but the response to that from staff and/or high-level mods was to just double down and dig in.
I'm too old, but it seemed like it would be decent for a beginner in the mid-to-late 00s. But it never handled advanced, difficult topics very well.
Probably, but now it's actually dead by all the metrics. People ask LLMs instead because they won't close their questions.
A democratic election requires that the elected be your employee, where you work with him on a regular basis to direct him in his job. That works (ish) in government where people doing the hiring have heavily invested life interests in it succeeding.
Does a subforum offer the same? Once the mod is elected, are you going to sit down with him each day to make sure he is doing the job to your wishes and expectations? I say (ish) in government because it often doesn't even work there, even where people have heavily invested life interests, with a lot (maybe even the vast majority!) of people never getting involved in democracy. A subforum? Who cares?
If there were to be elections, it is unlikely they could be anything other than authoritarianly, with the chosen one becoming the ultimate power.
Why? Genuinely curious.
I am a big proponent of (direct) democracy in general.
Internet is way behind on democracy. In general everyone likes democracy until they're in charge, then they realise they're the best person to be in charge and the idiots who vote don't have a clue, and should probably be banned if not beheaded for speaking out of turn.
You'd have to weight votes by some kind of participation metric to solve the problem of very little authentication of the voters
This is why moderation choice should be based on metrics, not first cone first served.
>> I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country.
Are you sure? My understanding is that accounts were only allowed to create two communities.
On Reddit? It's horribly intransparent but there seems to be a special class of people to whom the normal rules don't apply.
That limit wouldn't stop you creating more communities with more accounts anyway.
