Comment by A_D_E_P_T

And according to TFA, the AI slop results are also from Reddit!

Still preferable to the disinformation in that cesspit.

> It’s highly unusual to have some sort of judicial process.

Every forum I ever used prior to Reddit had a ban appeal process, as did most game servers. For a few games reading the ban appeals could be more fun than playing the actual game. This was usually moderators making executive decisions based on a user-submitted form, but it was better than nothing.

Most older forums had an element of self-selection... people don't hang out where they're not wanted. But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics) so you're either there or nowhere. This forces to some extent people who would gravitate away from each other, and personalities go overboard. There's more need of a judicial process there, than there would be elsewhere. And that was before everything became politically polarized. Now that you could be perfectly happy talking to someone about X, you still end up hating their guts because they love/hate Trump/Obama and it slips out (over a long enough timespan).

People do not scale.

Dang and the other moderators here are incredibly scrupulous. If you browse with show dead on, and find an account that is posting regularly but banned, and go back through their history, you'll almost always find multiple warnings and a public statement about their banning.

HN has problems but moderation being arbitrary isn't really one of them.

It's the anonymity and odd changes in who is moderating that makes it feel different. Standard setup to me would be consistently opinionated person, or team with some central directive (and hopefully oversight).

I was banned from /r/comics for saying a comic wasn't funny. Hacker news doesn't ban anyone for such stupid reasons.

I think it would be better if Reddit took more ownership. In other words, instead of hosting a platform where anyone can claim a subreddit as their little domain, and then it’s theirs forever, Reddit could say that the subreddits belong to the people that use them. For example, perhaps they could institute some sort of system where members of a subreddit could vote out moderators who abuse their power.

There are some big wins that they've never taken care of, despite spez talking big about fixing them, e.g.: stop allowing mods to pre-emptively ban you. I don't know anyone who uses Reddit that isn't banned from r/pics simply because they posted somewhere else on Reddit. The list of subs they ban for is huge.

Reddit does have global rules about deceptive content manipulation (e.g. voting rings, bot farms etc.)

If this guy had disclosed his conflict of interest, he would just have been an obsessed crank and even as a moderator, that's his right. But when he didn't, I'd say it was large-scale manipulation, and it's clearly in Reddit's interest to not allow this sort of thing (especially now that they're selling all their data to AI companies).

I think the reason it feels offensive is that subreddits of common names feel like they should be more democratically managed or held to a high standard. Instead it’s a bunch of fiefdoms and if you create an alternate subreddit with a poor name it just won’t get readers. Codebootcamp2 or whatever is doomed from the start because of the importance of names.

Sure, but there are really NO RULES. And frankly they can do whatever they want as long as they use only a UUID for the forum name.

If one is squatting on a valuable forum name, then the moderators should be themselves subject to a standard enforced by Reddit.

That's $3M down but what's the likely upside? Is it a net gain?

Comment and post history is still trivial to find through a basic google query.

All that hiding them on Reddit does is pissing other users off because it breaks establish site's norms and expectations.

I think you're both correct and I think your analogy about Reddit being a minefield is perfected if we imagine that it's a minefield in a beautiful place.

Great experience with one step and blown to bits with one small step in a different direction.

Agreed. Every now and then I search the name of my employer on Reddit, which pulls up a bunch of plausible looking comments that recommend a variety of tools. Then if you look at the comment closely, it doesn't make any sense. And if you look at the account, they only makes comments that mention an assortment of companies + one specific one that they're really shilling.

There's a variety of these marketing spambots on Reddit, and I'm sure like the toupee effect, there are more subtle ones that I'm not noticing. I think this is existential in the long run for Reddit as a platform, but maybe the owners/employees are happy to milk all the value out and walk away from the husk.

So you’re going to be able to tell me what _is_ the most reliable place to get a general crowd-sourced opinion then?

Reddit was knowingly ruined by google. Once google pushed reddit to the top of search results, they created massive incentives to game reddit and fill it with disguised advertising and/or slop.

There are plenty of non political conversations on Reddit, it's a really big site.

Why on earth would you crowd-source your political views?

If by leftwing you mean neoliberal, maybe. The bans ive gotten over the years for posting leftwing views and ideals tells me it isn't leftwing at all.

Reddit is not left-wing. Could you define left-wing?

[flagged]

>EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.

I personally found it off topic, the conversation was about using Reddit as a source of truth for product opinions/reviews and it’s unlikely that the absence of a right wing majority is relevant when purchasing a dishwasher.

The issue you're gesturing at is that "left" positions tend to be in touch with reality and coherent with each other. Whereas conservative positions tend to be out of touch with reality and often contradict each other.

This gives the appearance to people that hold positions that are out of touch with reality that the coherent narratives are an all-encompassing hegemonic echo chamber that covers the whole site. The incoherent conservative narratives fail to take root among a wider audience since they fall apart when scrutinized. The karma system om reddit's encourages this behavior among neutral subreddit to dunk on people when they say things that are nonsense.

So that's why you only see them being held in specific ideological echo chambers like /r/Conservative where you have mods that censor discussion that debunks or merely calls into doubt the narrative asserted by the moderation team.

Did the mod stop when she went to prison?

This is like the Linux discussion. (No its not the year of Linux no matter how much Windows 11 pisses you off)

"Old fashioned forums" absolutely suck for discoverability. You have to waste time digging through posts, most of which are unrelated or just filler. No upvote/downvote and usually a mediocre threading mechanism. While we are on this topic, Discord is the same. IRC like applications are not an easy way to get to the point for the same reasons.

The authenticity of old fashioned forums is often outweighed by their poor UX and in general terrible ergonomics. It's no wonder that so few people want to use them anymore. Reddit's "nested, collapsible comments sorted by upvotes" format is simply superior.

20 years after Reddit started, the best that the forums can offer is perhaps discourse.org, which is barely any better than traditional forums – sleeker UI for sure, but it's still fundamentally the same unworkable linear format. It's like sticking to magnetic tapes in the age of SSDs.

Even Facebook, one of the dumbest discussion platforms, has nested comments. Terribly implemented of course, but how does the platform designed for the lowest-common-denominator kind of user have more advanced discussion features than forums made for discussion connoisseurs? It is utterly baffling.

But you could.

And you wouldn't even need a reason.

In fact, you could ban AND make the whole conversation disappear. And nobody would ever know.

That's a problem.