God Dayumm
Banned
Hopefully this means they obliterate all the racist and gross subreddits
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Ellen Pao didn't even fire Victoria Taylor
- Thread starter Brakke
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Hopefully this means they obliterate all the racist and gross subreddits
j_k_redtail
Member
I have to add:
It's completely nuts of course, but it makes sense to a certain kind of mind.
This is one of the most Machiavellian things I've ever read. "We'll keep the various distasteful forums, but no one will care as long as an Asian woman is the face of reddit. Brilliant!"
It's completely nuts of course, but it makes sense to a certain kind of mind.
lmao, welp, it'll be interesting to see where reddit is next year. voat, too. i bet reddit is still relevant.
Amazing
This statement doesn't make sense. They already banned illegal content and things that could conceivably land them in legal disputes - such as subreddits that habitually harassed individuals and groups. Any action beyond that is the opposite of allowing a user base to govern itself.
This also doesn't square with what he was just discussing earlier in his comment - in which he points out Reddit was never meant to be some bastion for free speech. So which is it?
This entire thing is a shit show and being handled incredibly poorly by Reddit. Just shut up except to say "we hear you, we're sorry, and now we're going to give you some of the things your moderators have been asking for for years". Not this mixed message, passive aggressive, "hey let's see if we can pull off a Digg 2.0!" response.
Yishan has gone nuts. He's just really mad his good friend got ousted. I wouldn't trust anything he says.
Aquavelvaman
Banned
Purge hype! Glass the planet! Burn it down!
j_k_redtail
Member
Not sure I follow. My read is that:
1 - reddit wasn't supposed to be a bastion of free speech above all else; that was just a means to an end.
2 - they let it become a bastion of "free speech" (a) in order to appear welcoming to all kinds of discussion and (b) because it hands-off moderation was the only policy that would appear to be non-arbitrary. In the three years since that original statement the administration hoped (naively) that the site would govern itself.
3 - Instead reddit became unwelcoming to entire populations of users, as the nasty parts of reddit self-organized into their own subreddits and metastasized to other parts of the site. (And there isn't any way to deal with the cancer: while users can police individual comments in individual threads, they can't "downvote" an entire subreddit out of existence. Users don't have the power to eject the primary tumor(s).)
4 - therefore they are clamping down.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
chaobreaker
Member
DICKS AHOY
Banned
m00t would have some advice for Reddit in regards to publicly fucking with part of your userbase after the 'cuckening' last year on /pol/.
smokeandmirrors
Banned
I hope the ban hammer is swift and that all the whiny little 'free speech' reactionary assholes fuck off and move to voat finally like they've been threatening to do for ever now
NeOak
Member
Here, have some popcorn.
They were hoping that the userbase could govern itself in a reasonable manner.
What they see is that the userbase has turned cancerous and the shitty elements of the board are driving away reasonable posters.
The principle of free speech is important in that it allows opinions against the grain to be heard. In reality, many people abuse it to make common shitty hateful opinions verbose and difficult to ignore.
It'll require significant effort like it does here on Neogaf to get an environment that fosters intelligent and outspoken discussion (although there's a clear bias here because mods and admins are very aggressive), while reducing the amount of shit show that drives away good posters at the expense of low quality posters.
Good posters bring users to the site. Poor posters drive them away. The issue has always been how to maximize the former and reduce the latter - and changing strategies after you've gotten feedback from results is entirely reasonable.
Man all those /FPH users must feel so stupid after this. It was disgusting how they were saying such racist and offensive things about her and it was somehow normal for them to go after her just because their hate group of a sub got banned.
This kind of stuff really shows the dangers of the mob mentality of a large community and to me just proves alot of sensoring and moderation is needed. If you let a site run wild it will disastrous cause the people who are usually more vocal are those hateful people who have nothing better to do than spite hateful stuff at others they don't like.
This kind of stuff really shows the dangers of the mob mentality of a large community and to me just proves alot of sensoring and moderation is needed. If you let a site run wild it will disastrous cause the people who are usually more vocal are those hateful people who have nothing better to do than spite hateful stuff at others they don't like.
Seductivpancakes
Member
You would have that gif.
It's pretty much in with everything else they did in the name of "social progress".
Pao's lawsuit backfiring definitely threw off the math there.
tearsintherain
Member
I hope some of this gets folded into season 3 of silicon valley.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
That's pretty hilarious. It's poetic, even.
Any commentary with zero or lax moderation eventually ends up like the comments section on news sites: typically vile, abusive, conservative posters typing out their weekly Fox News catchphrases and arguing with the ideas in their own heads. It's a bizarre phenomenon that always happens in the absence of moderation.
b-b-b-but we self-moderate! you just don't understand the obvious benefits of child porn or minority bashing or rampant sexism! stop oppressing me! free speech! free speech! first amendment!!!!!!
Starfish Hero
Member
This is a beautiful, beautiful train wreck.
This is literally playing out like a movie.
I have to admit, I was part of that big, anti-corporate mob on that big night where all the subreddits went private. But now that I'm taking a step back from the hyperbole of the comments section on EVERY related post, it's kinda hilarious what's happening.
Can't wait to taste the salt.
I have to admit, I was part of that big, anti-corporate mob on that big night where all the subreddits went private. But now that I'm taking a step back from the hyperbole of the comments section on EVERY related post, it's kinda hilarious what's happening.
Can't wait to taste the salt.
BUNTING1243
Banned
If Pao was seriously trying to prevent more subs from getting banned this is fucking hysterical. Eat a dick, you dumb Reddit babies.
lmaoooo
The comments section is hostile right now and it's infuriating me to read it. The worst part is that I can't even contribute to the discussion because the mob mentality will have everyone downvoting the anti "free hate speech" movement.
The setup reddit has is kind of fucking backwards sometimes. Downvotes should be abolished entirely. A comment section of solely upvoted comments would promote a healthier community and discussion.
The setup reddit has is kind of fucking backwards sometimes. Downvotes should be abolished entirely. A comment section of solely upvoted comments would promote a healthier community and discussion.
You're speculating but that's an empirical question; it could go either way. What makes you think downvotes encourage toxicity? What's your evidence?
Pegosaurus
Banned
at this point i don't really care about this kind of news anymore, I'm just enjoying the ride until reddit burns to the ground
bangbang i'm a timpani
Banned
pao came out on top of this? shes an awful person outside of reddit and now she looks like a good guy? lol.
Antiwhippy
the holder of the trombone
It basically allows the mob to censor what they don't want people to see.
I have no research into it of course, but speaking from personal experience, innocent comments I make are often downvoted without reason. These comments dont detract from the discussion at all, but, in some cases, are simply questioning the parent comment, or asking them for more information. The downvoting discourages me from continuing the conversation, especially because
A) The mob mentality of the site sees one person getting downvoted, and continues to downvote that post / their other relevant posts. Seeing the initial negative marks kind of steer it in the direction that others will continue to take it in.
B) The downvoted posts are often coupled with heavily upvoted posts from other users, which give off this sort of "you are wrong and i am right" vibe.
Often because of this, I end up just dropping the conversation, knowing everything I say will get buried without any real reason.
IF, for example, only upvotes were allowed it would seem to me as more encouraging. If you don't agree with a post, you ignore it, and do nothing, OR add to the conversation. If someone comes along that agrees with your post, they can choose to upvote it. Seeing a negatively voted post brings with it negative connotations, when they are often not necessary. Posts that are spam or abuse should be reported, rather than downvoted.
Again, all beliefs based on personal experience. It may or may not work. Another possibility is simply hiding the score to remove the negative implication the post has adopted, and simply have the posts ranked/ordered based on their hidden score.
Perfect Cha0s
Member
If anything, I think it'd be a good step towards returning votes to the intended purpose: giving visibility to posts which the community finds contributes to the discussion. They're more or less used as "I agree/I disagree" buttons currently.
Some subreddits already don't allow downvotes, and/or hide the comment score. I do see better discussions in subreddits that do this in general. It can't help some subreddits, however, because the users are basically a majority of knuckleheads - disallowing downvotes or hiding scores can't increase the quality of discussion in subreddits like that.
That's what I'm saying about it could go either way. "The mob" could be good or could be bad. If the mob is censoring out external links to child porn, then yeah, it's good to have downvotes.
Democracy is the ficklest force, and it's extremely difficult to build tools intended to promote it as an end. Plus, sometimes even a perfectly-implemented, incorruptible democracy produces bad results.
This is interesting but this isn't science either. We can easily imagine that subreddits already inclined to quality discussion choose to implement features they think will promote quality discussion.
The only subreddit I specifically care about is somewhat tools-immune. It gets so little traffic that I can read all the activity in 24 hours if I just spend a few minutes with it before bed. No tweaks to tooling will change those discussions. The only thing that will change it is some sudden influx or exodus of users.
BreezyLimbo
Banned
Yup. Sometimes to keep the worst parts of the community in line, you have to humiliate them.
I'm new be nice
Member
What is all this about exactly?
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