I'll be interested in seeing how they address manipulation on national and local subreddits. /r/canada is extremely racist, xenophobic, and divisive. Part of that is homegrown, and part of that is...
I'll be interested in seeing how they address manipulation on national and local subreddits. /r/canada is extremely racist, xenophobic, and divisive. Part of that is homegrown, and part of that is mod drama related to the alt-right /r/metacanada, but I'd be surprised if there weren't people there acting in bad faith to cause harm, especially with the 2019 election on the horizon.
i am about 99% certain they won't, and 99% certain that my statement is true of everything this is intended to be. there is literally nothing about how reddit has handled anything related to...
I'll be interested in seeing how they address manipulation on national and local subreddits.
i am about 99% certain they won't, and 99% certain that my statement is true of everything this is intended to be. there is literally nothing about how reddit has handled anything related to security that leads me to believe this will be anything more than purely cosmetic PR-type bullshit that will be dropped quietly in a year or so.
Yeah, I'm not really expecting this is much of anything besides PR, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong. One surprising thing about all this is I hardly ever see anything about Reddit in the news...
Yeah, I'm not really expecting this is much of anything besides PR, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong. One surprising thing about all this is I hardly ever see anything about Reddit in the news when the subject of online manipulation comes up. Most of the conversation is about Twitter and Facebook, and sometimes I'll see Instagram mentioned, but for a site its size it seems strange that Reddit is mostly ignored. It feels like it's kept its reputation as an obscure nerd/tech site and that keeps people from taking it seriously.
/r/onguardforthee is the real subreddit for Canadian redditors now. The mods there are really awesome. Once, I even warned them of a suicide threat deep in one of the comments sections there and got an immediate response letting me know they were already on it and had a mod member who had suicide helpline experience. <3
A lot of the Canadian subs are hit hard by a group that's intertwined with or an offshoot of another. They're very visible. And these aren't run of the mill spammers / partisans; they're highly...
A lot of the Canadian subs are hit hard by a group that's intertwined with or an offshoot of another. They're very visible. And these aren't run of the mill spammers / partisans; they're highly organized and motivated, even aggressive.
Hang on, i'm really out of the loop on this and it sounds extremely interesting. Could you go more in depth about this whole situation? Where does it stem from? How did it come to be?
Hang on, i'm really out of the loop on this and it sounds extremely interesting. Could you go more in depth about this whole situation? Where does it stem from? How did it come to be?
Check the richochet article I linked in the comment directly above the one you responded to... it talks about all the metacanada mods that have taken over /r/Canada (and a few other Canadian...
Check the richochet article I linked in the comment directly above the one you responded to... it talks about all the metacanada mods that have taken over /r/Canada (and a few other Canadian subreddits) and the shenanigans they have been up to. And while it doesn't go into specific details on how exactly they managed to take over, I can answer that one:
It was entirely thanks to reddit Inc's hands-off policy and the shitty way that the subreddit moderator system works, which is a hierarchy of power with whoever created the subreddit on top followed by the order in which mods were appointed in descending order underneath them. This system allowed Lucky75 to essentially squat in his originally much lower position for many years until everyone higher than him retired from modding and/or left reddit entirely, eventually giving him top position (other than qgyh2, who is an absentee landlord) and carte blanche to appoint whoever he wished to mod with him (who all just so happened to be metacanada connected mods).
The problems are far more serious than what they alluded to with those reports of Russians / Iranians last year. I'd assume this new strategy is part of their "war room" that was mentioned in the...
The problems are far more serious than what they alluded to with those reports of Russians / Iranians last year. I'd assume this new strategy is part of their "war room" that was mentioned in the past, conveniently right when Facebook was getting grilled by Congress. It's good they're doing something, though, and being more forthright with the community in the process.
With the bizarre insertion of Jessica Ashooh as policy director last summer it seems to me that Reddit has solidified whatever relationship it may have already had with US intelligence apparatus...
With the bizarre insertion of Jessica Ashooh as policy director last summer it seems to me that Reddit has solidified whatever relationship it may have already had with US intelligence apparatus to an intimate and irreversible degree. Love and Light
The very very very least they could do for their site (takes 2 seconds to do type stuff) would include: Banning power moderators / advertising karma farmers (cough cough gallowboob). Implementing...
The very very very least they could do for their site (takes 2 seconds to do type stuff) would include:
Banning power moderators / advertising karma farmers (cough cough gallowboob).
Implementing a maximum limit on the amount of subs a user can mod.
Get rid of the new design completely.
Add a compulsory moderation log (ok, this one may take some time to make)
Stop banning things for being "un advertiser friendly"
Allow users to opt into all quarantined subs with a setting, just like you can with nsfw content.
Stop accepting money from censorship companies
Opening sourcing the site again
Make reddit gold not so similar to microtransations in a mobile game (revert to previous system)
Of course this will all never happen, but it would be so easy for them to do.
Banning the people posting and curating the content on the site for free? That would not end well. Subreddit number has almost no correlation to work required to maintain those subreddits. I mod a...
Banning power moderators / advertising karma farmers (cough cough gallowboob).
Banning the people posting and curating the content on the site for free? That would not end well.
Implementing a maximum limit on the amount of subs a user can mod.
Subreddit number has almost no correlation to work required to maintain those subreddits. I mod a dozen, yet only one requires 99% of my time. An arbitrary limit solves nothing. It does however create a great number of problems. Hope you didn't want to make a new sub to test those CSS changes.
Get rid of the new design completely.
Unlikely to happen. My subreddit stats show adoption is already about 50%, and you can pry dark mode from my cold dead hands.
Add a compulsory moderation log (ok, this one may take some time to make)
The issues involved have been addressed many times before.
Allow users to opt into all quarantined subs with a setting, just like you can with nsfw content.
That's reasonable.
Stop banning things for being "un advertiser friendly"
Stop accepting money from censorship companies
Make reddit gold not so similar to microtransations in a mobile game (revert to previous system)
The issue is that these power moderators do a really bad job. They remove posts across the site to allow their own posts to be more visible. They ban users who call them out or who they dont like...
Banning the people posting and curating the content on the site for free? That would not end well.
The issue is that these power moderators do a really bad job. They remove posts across the site to allow their own posts to be more visible. They ban users who call them out or who they dont like off what is essentially the whole site, meaning that while they cant delete your account, they can make it useless. Im not saying to ban all moderators, just the abusive ones.
Subreddit number has almost no correlation to work required to maintain those subreddits. I mod a dozen, yet only one requires 99% of my time. An arbitrary limit solves nothing. It does however create a great number of problems. Hope you didn't want to make a new sub to test those CSS changes.
Yeah fair enough. But something does need to be done about this. This was all I could think of
Unlikely to happen. My subreddit stats show adoption is already about 50%, and you can pry dark mode from my cold dead hands.
Adoption is so high because they force it onto every new and old account (plus logged out people). And they also keep "forgetting" peoples settings and reverting back to the redesign even when opted out. And as for dark mode, use res I guess. Notice how fast the old design loads comapred to the new one? Theres so much bloat.
And about gold (copy paste stopped working??). Iirc gold makes up a small percent of reddits income. And im not suggesting they get rid of it. Im just suggesting they use the previous system. Which still earns money.
Perfect example of selection Bias. I started to mod a few subs about 10 months ago, and i can tell you that 95% of the "powermods" genuinely care about their communities, especially if they have...
The issue is that these power moderators do a really bad job.
Perfect example of selection Bias. I started to mod a few subs about 10 months ago, and i can tell you that 95% of the "powermods" genuinely care about their communities, especially if they have grown them for many years and put in many thousands hours. Sure, their are bad apples, but the reason why mods tend to step in for one another is that most have experienced how bad many people threat moderators. And even those "bad" moderators are mods, because they are doing a lot of work. Moderating is 1% banning people or being involved in some kind of drama and 99% doing repetitive work, like removing the 15th repost of something that is on the frontpage or explaining people that the reason why something was removed was not, because it was against some secret powermod agenda, but just spam or rule breaking or harassment.
see, at least how you phrase it this to me would suggest it's a systematic issue--not necessarily in how frequently it happens, because power mods abusing their abilities really isn't that common...
The issue is that these power moderators do a really bad job. They remove posts across the site to allow their own posts to be more visible. They ban users who call them out or who they dont like off what is essentially the whole site, meaning that while they cant delete your account, they can make it useless. Im not saying to ban all moderators, just the abusive ones.
see, at least how you phrase it this to me would suggest it's a systematic issue--not necessarily in how frequently it happens, because power mods abusing their abilities really isn't that common to my knowledge, but in that theoretically anybody with enough reddit capital could do what you describe--at which point, reforming the system probably trumps banning people because if you just ban people, the issue still exists and people can still do it, whereas if you reform you can in theory mitigate the problem entirely without having to knock off a bunch of people who likely use reddit extensively.
that said, this is all sort of a moot argument because neither banning nor reform is likely to happen, and reddit would need to basically overhaul their entire site structure to really solve some of its underlying issues anyways, which is just not something they're going to pull the trigger on.
I never said these would be good for them business wise, I know many of them are bad. About the power mods, I guess you are right, but even if you just get the really well known ones that are on...
I never said these would be good for them business wise, I know many of them are bad.
About the power mods, I guess you are right, but even if you just get the really well known ones that are on the front page every single day it would be an improvement.
As for power mods making more accounts, I guess they will make more accounts, but its better than nothing and I cant think of a better idea.
About the redesign, of course they arent going to throw it away, but I can dream dammit.
About tencent, I guess it just seems like something that couldnt possibly be good for reddit. I dont think tencent would invest 150m and then not expect anything from reddit.
About opening sourcing, yup didnt think that one through. And it would create competition from people cloning their site. But I would still like it.
And finally gold. Yeah I dont know how it would work. All im trying to say there is that the old system was better.
E: oh and about advertiser friendliness. Not just that anime thing, also enoughinternet, nomorals, sanctionedsuicide and a few other subs I forget.
Not really. Reddit as it was had a separation between private and public code. Everything already public is safe, so then a git diff would drastically minimize the amount of effort needed. I'd...
Opening sourcing the site again
As much as I would like this too, this is an insane task for them because they'd basically have to comb through their entire source code making sure there's nothing private, for each individual component in the entire infrastructure... That would at this point take months if not years.
Not really.
Reddit as it was had a separation between private and public code. Everything already public is safe, so then a git diff would drastically minimize the amount of effort needed.
I'd even argue it would take one month tops (3 weeks for manual analysis, 1 week for review).
i agree in general with your point, but: fullcommunism is notorious for being a haven of tankies who like to LARP as stalinist executors and gulag commissioners so, it's neither a surprise that...
Also, quarantining t_d and other hate subreddits while un-quarantining random harmless meme subreddits they quarantined (such as /r/fullcommunism).
i agree in general with your point, but: fullcommunism is notorious for being a haven of tankies who like to LARP as stalinist executors and gulag commissioners so, it's neither a surprise that they got quarantined nor do i think they should be unquarantined, personally. it costs zero dollars to not advocate for mass murder of state opponents and class enemies and every other leftist subreddit manages just fine to go without it.
I'll be interested in seeing how they address manipulation on national and local subreddits. /r/canada is extremely racist, xenophobic, and divisive. Part of that is homegrown, and part of that is mod drama related to the alt-right /r/metacanada, but I'd be surprised if there weren't people there acting in bad faith to cause harm, especially with the 2019 election on the horizon.
i am about 99% certain they won't, and 99% certain that my statement is true of everything this is intended to be. there is literally nothing about how reddit has handled anything related to security that leads me to believe this will be anything more than purely cosmetic PR-type bullshit that will be dropped quietly in a year or so.
Yeah, I'm not really expecting this is much of anything besides PR, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong. One surprising thing about all this is I hardly ever see anything about Reddit in the news when the subject of online manipulation comes up. Most of the conversation is about Twitter and Facebook, and sometimes I'll see Instagram mentioned, but for a site its size it seems strange that Reddit is mostly ignored. It feels like it's kept its reputation as an obscure nerd/tech site and that keeps people from taking it seriously.
Yeah, /r/canada has been a shithole for a long while now but was made even worse after the racist /r/metacanada fucks took it over:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/7z1i0d/rcanada_mods_defend_themselves_after_leaked/
https://ricochet.media/en/2385/canadas-largest-subreddit-accused-of-harbouring-white-nationalists
/r/onguardforthee is the real subreddit for Canadian redditors now. The mods there are really awesome. Once, I even warned them of a suicide threat deep in one of the comments sections there and got an immediate response letting me know they were already on it and had a mod member who had suicide helpline experience. <3
A lot of the Canadian subs are hit hard by a group that's intertwined with or an offshoot of another. They're very visible. And these aren't run of the mill spammers / partisans; they're highly organized and motivated, even aggressive.
Hang on, i'm really out of the loop on this and it sounds extremely interesting. Could you go more in depth about this whole situation? Where does it stem from? How did it come to be?
Check the richochet article I linked in the comment directly above the one you responded to... it talks about all the metacanada mods that have taken over /r/Canada (and a few other Canadian subreddits) and the shenanigans they have been up to. And while it doesn't go into specific details on how exactly they managed to take over, I can answer that one:
It was entirely thanks to reddit Inc's hands-off policy and the shitty way that the subreddit moderator system works, which is a hierarchy of power with whoever created the subreddit on top followed by the order in which mods were appointed in descending order underneath them. This system allowed Lucky75 to essentially squat in his originally much lower position for many years until everyone higher than him retired from modding and/or left reddit entirely, eventually giving him top position (other than qgyh2, who is an absentee landlord) and carte blanche to appoint whoever he wished to mod with him (who all just so happened to be metacanada connected mods).
And there were also some screenshots leaked of their private slack in which one of the mods appointed by Lucky (perma, who still holds their mod position) admitted to "slowly becoming [a white nationalist]", which is what the subredditdrama post talks about. For more on that see:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/7z1i0d/rcanada_mods_defend_themselves_after_leaked/
https://www.canadalandshow.com/podcast/need-talk-reddit/
The problems are far more serious than what they alluded to with those reports of Russians / Iranians last year. I'd assume this new strategy is part of their "war room" that was mentioned in the past, conveniently right when Facebook was getting grilled by Congress. It's good they're doing something, though, and being more forthright with the community in the process.
With the bizarre insertion of Jessica Ashooh as policy director last summer it seems to me that Reddit has solidified whatever relationship it may have already had with US intelligence apparatus to an intimate and irreversible degree. Love and Light
The very very very least they could do for their site (takes 2 seconds to do type stuff) would include:
Banning power moderators / advertising karma farmers (cough cough gallowboob).
Implementing a maximum limit on the amount of subs a user can mod.
Get rid of the new design completely.
Add a compulsory moderation log (ok, this one may take some time to make)
Stop banning things for being "un advertiser friendly"
Allow users to opt into all quarantined subs with a setting, just like you can with nsfw content.
Stop accepting money from censorship companies
Opening sourcing the site again
Make reddit gold not so similar to microtransations in a mobile game (revert to previous system)
Of course this will all never happen, but it would be so easy for them to do.
Banning the people posting and curating the content on the site for free? That would not end well.
Subreddit number has almost no correlation to work required to maintain those subreddits. I mod a dozen, yet only one requires 99% of my time. An arbitrary limit solves nothing. It does however create a great number of problems. Hope you didn't want to make a new sub to test those CSS changes.
Unlikely to happen. My subreddit stats show adoption is already about 50%, and you can pry dark mode from my cold dead hands.
The issues involved have been addressed many times before.
That's reasonable.
How is reddit supposed to make money, exactly?
The issue is that these power moderators do a really bad job. They remove posts across the site to allow their own posts to be more visible. They ban users who call them out or who they dont like off what is essentially the whole site, meaning that while they cant delete your account, they can make it useless. Im not saying to ban all moderators, just the abusive ones.
Yeah fair enough. But something does need to be done about this. This was all I could think of
Adoption is so high because they force it onto every new and old account (plus logged out people). And they also keep "forgetting" peoples settings and reverting back to the redesign even when opted out. And as for dark mode, use res I guess. Notice how fast the old design loads comapred to the new one? Theres so much bloat.
And about gold (copy paste stopped working??). Iirc gold makes up a small percent of reddits income. And im not suggesting they get rid of it. Im just suggesting they use the previous system. Which still earns money.
Perfect example of selection Bias. I started to mod a few subs about 10 months ago, and i can tell you that 95% of the "powermods" genuinely care about their communities, especially if they have grown them for many years and put in many thousands hours. Sure, their are bad apples, but the reason why mods tend to step in for one another is that most have experienced how bad many people threat moderators. And even those "bad" moderators are mods, because they are doing a lot of work. Moderating is 1% banning people or being involved in some kind of drama and 99% doing repetitive work, like removing the 15th repost of something that is on the frontpage or explaining people that the reason why something was removed was not, because it was against some secret powermod agenda, but just spam or rule breaking or harassment.
see, at least how you phrase it this to me would suggest it's a systematic issue--not necessarily in how frequently it happens, because power mods abusing their abilities really isn't that common to my knowledge, but in that theoretically anybody with enough reddit capital could do what you describe--at which point, reforming the system probably trumps banning people because if you just ban people, the issue still exists and people can still do it, whereas if you reform you can in theory mitigate the problem entirely without having to knock off a bunch of people who likely use reddit extensively.
that said, this is all sort of a moot argument because neither banning nor reform is likely to happen, and reddit would need to basically overhaul their entire site structure to really solve some of its underlying issues anyways, which is just not something they're going to pull the trigger on.
I never said these would be good for them business wise, I know many of them are bad.
About the power mods, I guess you are right, but even if you just get the really well known ones that are on the front page every single day it would be an improvement.
As for power mods making more accounts, I guess they will make more accounts, but its better than nothing and I cant think of a better idea.
About the redesign, of course they arent going to throw it away, but I can dream dammit.
About tencent, I guess it just seems like something that couldnt possibly be good for reddit. I dont think tencent would invest 150m and then not expect anything from reddit.
About opening sourcing, yup didnt think that one through. And it would create competition from people cloning their site. But I would still like it.
And finally gold. Yeah I dont know how it would work. All im trying to say there is that the old system was better.
E: oh and about advertiser friendliness. Not just that anime thing, also enoughinternet, nomorals, sanctionedsuicide and a few other subs I forget.
Not really.
Reddit as it was had a separation between private and public code. Everything already public is safe, so then a git diff would drastically minimize the amount of effort needed.
I'd even argue it would take one month tops (3 weeks for manual analysis, 1 week for review).
i agree in general with your point, but: fullcommunism is notorious for being a haven of tankies who like to LARP as stalinist executors and gulag commissioners so, it's neither a surprise that they got quarantined nor do i think they should be unquarantined, personally. it costs zero dollars to not advocate for mass murder of state opponents and class enemies and every other leftist subreddit manages just fine to go without it.