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Some Reddit comments are being hidden by default as "potentially toxic content" (i.e. a swear filter)
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- Title
- "potentially toxic content"?
- Authors
- Ivashkin
- Word count
- 69 words
Admin reply says it was meant for chat threads and somehow ended up applying everywhere:
That seems like a questionable excuse to me. The chat system is completely separate from the site's comments, so I don't see how they could have accidentally applied this to comments in a way that just happens to collapse them and add a message explaining why.Edit: As pointed out, it was probably intended for the "chat view" threads they've been doing some small tests for, which do use the normal commenting system. That makes more sense.
It's adding the
.comment.collapsed-for-reasoncss class to the comments. Chat messages aren't collapsible, and don't have the.commentclass to begin with. So, yeah, pretty much no possible chance of that being the real story.edit: Someone pointed out the existence of live threads, and how this might be designed for those. I wrote this reply but they deleted their comment.
edit2: A user in the /r/modnews thread pointed out it's probably related to this feature:
https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/blvc68/we_are_ab_testing_a_chat_view_feature_on_some/
Ugh. No website that isnt explicitly for kids needs this. I wonder if this is part of their push to become more appealing to advertisers. Im glad I left.
I personally would welcome a machine learning algorithm that would hide comments with a high negativity score automatically. I don't mind having to uncollapse one if I really want to read it as part of a thread or something.
But I think everybody is underestimating how bad for their internal well being is reading unwarranted negativity.
I stay away as much as possible from twitter people that have, and attract, high energy contradictory discourse because those types of conversations inevitably devolve in something that can ruin my disposition.
The issue is that they didn't introduce an option for this, they just silently enabled it.
Like I said in an earlier comment. IMy personal belief is that the creators of a service have full discretion about implementing / removing features.
The users have then the discretion of leaving said service.
What I find a bit puzzling is the vehemence that such a minor technical change caused, and the vitriol thrown at reddit's developers, more so than reddit the company for adding it.
Sure they have the right to add and remove whatever features, but that doesn't make them immune to criticism. If people dont like something they can point it out.
I totally agree with this. However my impression on some of the posts from this thread and the reddit one is that it's less about criticism and more about venting outrage and blaming devs. I might be mistaken though, and I'm reading too much into what people are posting.
When you said toxic swear filter i was expecting things to be on the tier of goose stepping racism, not things like "suck", "punch" and "fuck".
It feels like we are going back in internet time. Piracy is on the comeback because content is being divided by so many providers, i'm searching out forums and now 1337 speak is back to get around chat filters.
"It's gonna 5ukz d0ne-k3y d3equk for sure."
-One of the comments in the thread.
Looks like they're rolling out another collapsing-based system today too: Announcing the Crowd Control Beta
Wow. Regardless of how long you've lurked, your comments won't be visible by default. That's quite demotivating for participation. How do you attract new users if they know their comments just aren't going to be visible by default for a while (some indeterminate and almost certainly undisclosed time)? What's the point of participating if you know that folks are going to have to spend more effort interacting with you (i.e. they won't)?
According to this admin response they're saying it only applies to new accounts, but they don't specify the criteria for what "new" means.
I signed r/FloridaMan up for it. I think it will be interesting to see how it goes. We don't have like, a vibrant community in the same sense that some subreddits do, it's a mixture of new and repeat users. Almost all of the negative comment comes from new users though. I think people make those comments seeking attention, and if you can rob them of that then they will find a new hobby quickly.
What would be really great is if you could just limit it to auto-collapsing users that have a lot of engagement in quarantined subreddits.
The Crowd Control tools are frightening... Already there are subs who censor dissenting opinions by hand, especially those that are radicalized in one way or another. This really seems like it'll mark a huge uptick in subs disallowing outside voices, only creating an echo chamber. I completely understand the thought that a sub might need it if it's getting brigaded, but if that's the case, why not make it time based or based of the rate of change of user interaction. I understand the intention of the tool, but I have absolutely no doubt the main use of this tool will be to censor users and discourage anything but the status quo of the sub.
That's the way reddit is already; you don't need the crowd control tool for that. All it takes is a comment questioning the party line (not even saying it's wrong, just questioning it) and you get downvoted well into the negatives without any responses or answers. I encounter this a lot because I have diverse interests (e.g. I'm into yoga but not at all any of the new age woo that sometimes comes along with it) and my questioning some of the more wooer claims hasn't been met well.
From the naive idealist POV, this is such a great idea…
The underlying assumption is that any new participant is a brigader/troll/spammer/bigot and the like. While there are rare cases described in the comments to the linked Reddit post (“the relevant local sub suddenly finds themselves the center of Reddit's collective attention”), most new participants are either good-minded users or just users wanting within rules to respond to what they find worth responding. Think about new Tildes users: how many of them turned out to be malicious?
And if you do not, you are welcome to turn your sub into a NIMBY echo chamber. How easy is it to amend RES-like tools with a functionality of automatically downvoting auto-collapsed comments? I bet it is straightforward, and then any new user not pre-approved by mods has no chance of being ever seen in the place.
While I always expand everything on Reddit (while really awful content does indeed occur, most of unpopular comments are just going against the momentary mood of the sub), I know I am an exception. The whole idea is: a new user leaves a comment of any nature → a few power users downvote → the new user is never visible again. BTW, this is how today's Voat works.
Scripting downvoting is against reddit's TOS, so don't do that. That is itself brigading.
Banning users for participation in other subs (even non-automatic) is also against Reddit's TOS, but…
And no, I am not developing any scripts for Reddit, and I do not downvote anything on Reddit. I use Reddit almost like Tildes: if I like it, I (up)vote; if I am indifferent to it, or if I dislike it, I skip.
I had no idea. What a mess reddit is. Think I'm going to limit my usage of the site to just low-effort, low-engagement images and the like.
I noticed a Reddit comment today that was hidden by default (in the same style as "comment score below threshold"), and found this discussion of it. It looks like it's triggered by certain words, so it's basically a swear filter.
There has been no announcement of this new feature yet, as far as I can tell. I'm curious what exactly this is.
It's to crack down on all those Pooh Bear posts about Xi Jinping.
(obviously a joke.)
Certainly, if we view this as an isolated incident, then by Hanlon's razor it was just a mistake.
However:
The built-in chat is a small part of Reddit, and I do not understand why they so specially care about it. There is hardly any difference between being sworn at in the chat and being sworn at in a regular comment reply.
This is not the first mistake on the censorship side. Back in September, it was discovered that NSFW subreddits had been given
noindex, nofollow, which was later reverted as a “mistake.”There have never been such mistakes on the other side, e.g. all quarantined subreddits have been unquarantined by mistake—no, anything like this has never happened recently.
I must add that I am not surprised at all.
I'm sorry, but how is collapsing a comment "censorship"? That happens already for comments with scores under a certain threshold. I view it as a perfect complement to that. Because even if negativity is popular sometimes is still negativity, and some people can benefit from not having it in their face by default.
I feel like there's a lot ado about nothing in this thread and more so in the reddit one.
I happen to swear a lot in regular conversation. It doesn't mean I'm being negative or insulting anyone. I can say "Holy shit, that's incredible, good job OP" but my comment gets buried because of the word "shit". Or, I could trying to be supportive and saying something along the lines of "That sucks, OP, I hope things get better" but my comment is buried because I said the word "sucks". Having your voice be silenced because of an algorithm is incredibly frustrating.
I'm pretty sure a good machine learning solution can see past curse words thrown as punctuation marks. What I was arguing in my previous comment, wasn't the reddit solution that got thrown off by such simple sutff, but an ideal machine that can actually detect more subtle context. I was pretty sure I had seen a demo like that a couple of years ago, but maybe I misinterpreted what that was.
While collapsing a comment is de jure not censorship, the vast majority of users do not bother to open most collapsed comments, and many do not open any collapsed comments.
You are mostly right that popular negativity is still negativity, but why is it Reddit as a whole (represented by its admins) who decides what negativity is?
Because it's their platform. I view that very strongly as being their house, their rules.
I expected this answer.
Indeed, a private firm can make decisions as it wants within the law.
Unless its market power becomes too high, and then anti-monopoly regulations start to apply.
I believe that the major Internet platforms (Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, possibly some others) are already on THAT side of the market power threshold.
Yet here we are on tildes...
I agree and refuse to believe that they make these kind of mistakes. Their credibility is so low anyways that they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
I think it’s funny the top comment says the upvote/downvote system helps with self-policing. Many of us came from reddit moderating and know just how untrue that is.
Twitter has been rolling out a similar feature recently and I absolutely do not understand what the point is. Do systems like these have a proven positive effect? Because if they did I feel like we would have seen it with things like Automoderator.
Or are they meant to 'clean up' the site for the sake of advertiser friendliness? That still seems like a bit of a stretch for a site which still houses ungodly amounts of porn and risqué content.
I feel really uncomfortable agreeing with the free speech crowd on anything but they're right in this case. It feels like a really weird oversight and even if they end up keeping it I'm sure they're going to continue passively supporting the site's resident neo-Nazis.
Undoubtedly part of the just announced Crowd Control beta: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/e8vl4d/announcing_the_crowd_control_beta/