It still blows my mind that I got a multi-day suspension for calling out a pretty obvious Russian shill and calling him a moron. He’s still posting, btw.
I mean, it's not like smaller forums didn't have an issue with power hungry moderators who would ban you completely for stupidest things. The same people are now subreddit moderators. This isn't really a problem with reddit.
That's not what I'm talking about though. Forum bans and subreddit bans are small change. What really makes people move platforms is when the Reddit admins nuke entire subreddits for dubious reasons, including breaking poorly defined rules. And admins deleting posts that follow the rules of their subreddit and completely banning accounts for various reasons.
What sorts of subreddits have been nuked for dubious reasons? I know admins have been abusive of privilege in the past but it seems pretty small- to normal-sized-potatoes as forum admin ego tripping goes.
Those people never visited The_Donald and didn't see the racism and bigotry there. It was a cesspool had no other purpose than to circlejerk over Trump and malign, and attack his political opponents.
Well, many subs don't add a value to reddit. At least from my perspective and personal opinion. I don't understand why you cannot just unsub and don't read it.
The chance of being on the internet for an extended period and not running into a troll is 0%.
I can tell you as a former forum admin, that there is no way to avoid these people showing up. The rules don't matter, banning them doesn't matter, being a calm and relaxing place won't matter either.
What did matter is that the rules made sense and were followed indiscriminately by the mods and admins. It also helped to have a forum dedicated to spam and allowed for breaking of many rules (racism/harrassment and CP being excluded from the exception)
My banlist over a million users was 20 people long. I don't consider this sum to be hard to handle and at 1.2m registered users (without a need to register to read), I think maybe the problem is actually in the rules/application.
People hate feeling like they are being treated unfairly.
We would also enforce the rules when racism was targeting white people.
Hard agree. I deleted my reddit account over the fact that they kept letting T_D exist despite its obvious flouting of the rules around brigading (they arranged brigades on discord and took over other subreddits, repeatedly, after being warned) and how it was an increasingly obvious alt-right funnel full of some of the absolute worst people on the internet.
They ultimately closed the subreddit about a year later, but I had already deleted my account at that point. I was better off in the end though, as the entire site is now just a giant meme dump with no redeeming qualities (it felt like all subreddits eventually saturate with memes on their main page as a function of their popularity, and it gets tiresome and same-ey after a while.)
> they kept letting T_D exist despite its obvious flouting of the rules around brigading
Some like to claim that it's because high engagement means more advertising dollars, but I think it's more like they knew that banning T_D would cause a massive backlash as people claimed they were banned simply for having different political opinions.
YES it is. Reddit empowers fascist types to run their fiefdoms, UNTIL the liliputian leaders start running *too many* users away.
It's all about users per day engagement. If you harm that, the reddit admins show up and clean house. But in the interim, they'll let you think you own that subreddit.
And if you were a mod of a smaller forum that relied on ads to stay afloat, what exactly would happen if you started banning loads of people? It's the same thing, different name.
I forget the name of it now, but back when I was still in irc regularly, I used a client that would hilariously play an explosion sound effect whenever someone got kicked.
Made for amusing chuckles to hear it in the background whilst working and wondering “wonder who just got the hammer”
back then, a lot of those kind of apps allowed you to assign your own sounds. the infamous Monty Python arrow sound "message for you sir!", the whistle sound before the explosion, etc were all popular sfx when the apps granted that kind of customization.
now, we get ring tones and other "choose from our curated list". zzzzzz!
Yea, that is the part of the equation people forget. They see a ban and big platform and thing those things are only happening on big platforms owned by big corporate people in shiny offices. Nope, censorship can happen in small communities ran by Billy Bob down the street to. It comes down more to people. If someone wants an echo chamber, they will create an echo chamber regardless if it is a subreddit or a MyBB instance on a shared hosting plan.
Because you are not supposed to attack other redditors.
Reddit Content Policy - Rule 1
Remember the human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.
The wording in this rule is probably not great. There is a difference in promoting, "Be nice to everyone, but pay special attention where you may have a gap with marginalized folks experience" and how this rule reads. I'm not sure that there's a difference in outcomes though.
Depends on the context that it's brought up in. If you're just interjecting that fact, then yeah, I could see that being perceived as islamaphobia. That view is consistent, when a person from gender x is expressing their experience, and gender y comes along to add on that "gender x does it too" the outcome is similar, and vice versa. These are new-ish social standards, but I think reasonable if you're trying to create a space where everyone has the opportunity to share while staying topic focused in a thread. I can also see why it's potentially confusing for unknowing participants.
Edit: just noticed your reply includes the term "rainbow allies" so I think we're done here.
Edit: I am truly shocked I have greyed text while the person I'm replying to has fully blackened text.
ehhh, that's not what I said, and I find it a bit odd that you immediately reached for calling me a "groomer". Let me try to be a little more clear:
If you're showing up to a conversation that has no relation to the issue you described other than the fact that people are discussing Islam and you interject that so as to throw a topic off track, yes I can understand why they see it that way.
If you're showing up to a conversation regarding religion and child sexual exploitation and you mention that, then no I cannot understand why they see it that way.
That's a, generally, new-ish social standard so I was trying to give you, and them, some benefit of the doubt, but I think at this point I kind of get why you were banned.
it is not a standard. a minority is trying extremely hard to make it so, mostly by throwing the complete list of accusations at anyone who doesnt obey. Most people dont want a confrontation, so bends the knee. Most people go along with all sorts of crap. Just look at all of the large atrocities done throughout history. How could they happen? The masses went along.
In time, if people do not oppose, it may well become a standard, but right now, it is not. It may well be viewed as such in the extreme bubbles of tech workers, but in the general population? not even a tiny tiny bit.
Ban away. If you can't stand people posting things that PG's posted himself, viz. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html then it's not a site I want to be on.
>I do it because it's good for the brain. To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that's in the habit of going where it's not supposed to.
Having learned HN moderation from him, I can tell you that PG would have banned your account long ago.
It seems to me that you're underestimating the (vast) amounts of repetition and bile in the style of flamewar comment that you're practicing. That has nothing whatsoever with that essay, nor any of the other values PG wanted to see practiced on HN. This is supposed to be a site for curious conversation, not smiting and tarring enemies.
I love how they changed the original first rule of Reddit:
>Remember the human. When you communicate online, all you see is a computer screen. When talking to someone you might want to ask yourself "Would I say it to the person's face?" or "Would I get jumped if I said this to a buddy?"
The new rule is there to allow two minutes hate against anyone who is against the current thing.
So it is unacceptable now to merely insult other users?
You can act coy about the meaning of this, but the usage of such language is obvious. It is trying to compare a voluntary public exchange between anonymous internet users to acts of physical violence.
The usage of that word there is essentially an underhanded attempt at justifying future censorship through its ambiguous meaning. When moderators agree with the "attacked" the message becomes a bannable offense, but when moderators agree with the "attacker" the message becomes "fair criticism".
Whose platform is it? It's the users that make the forum valuable. Anyone can administrate a web forum. The individuals and communities should decide what speech is acceptable for them, not some unaccountable bureaucrats.
I think there is a time and place for insults and flamewars. Maybe not everywhere all the time, but what you are seeing on the web today is selective enforcement of "politeness" and "civility" rules to benefit whatever side of the "flamewar" that the moderators approve of.
HN is a good forum insofar as the users think that admins enforce reasonable rules and users agree to abide by those rules and not evade bans. On HN, moderation is rather sophisticated and neutral. When that changes I'll leave.
Insults are perfectly acceptable here so long as they're directed at people espousing locally unpopular opinions and dressed up with enough filler wordage to have a modicum of plausible deniability.
While the US was in the "everyone is a Russian agent"-craze I talked to 1 person on the internet that was actually a Russian. There are many Russians that speak English but the language barrier is still quite high, most of them have higher education and are pretty critical of politics and information of course. Much to the contrary to the average redditor.
What was obvious about it? In my experience, a lot of people seem to think that anyone with a different opinion than their own must be a russian operative.
