Daily Tildes discussion - go forth and multiply
Alright, not so much a particular "discussion" today, but there are already a couple of other good ones going on in ~tildes as well.
As I'm sure many of you have noticed, I've started actively promoting the site around some reddit places today, and I'm sure it'll probably spread some more from there too. In support of that, I've given all the current users 5 invite codes that you can give to others if you'd like to invite anyone. You can get to these on the invite page, which is linked from the sidebar on your user page.
Also, in case you missed it, I fixed the invite process the other day so that you can have multiple active codes now, so you don't still need to invite only one person at a time.
As always, let me know if you need more invite codes or have a particular suggestion for ways you'd like to invite more people. Hopefully we can keep some momentum going for a bit now and get the activity to a self-sustaining level.
None of us wants to be the first to post about ~ on reddit in a major subreddit and step on your toes. So...
when u do?
And yes I know I'm a broken record but I am desperate to be able to talk about ~ in the open! :P
I don't even know what major subreddit to post to, it doesn't seem like it would fit in most of them. /r/self? Maybe I could get an /r/InternetIsBeautiful mod to... actually let a post through, since that subreddit gets almost zero posts? I may do an AMA eventually, but I still feel a bit weird about that idea.
Hey, RUDE.
I'll have you know that 99% of what we get gets nuked by automod and the other 1% sits in the modqueue for weeks until someone checks modqueue and removes it for being a link aggregator.
Which technically this is, so it would probably have to be removed by our rules anyways.
Anyways, you'd have to wait until the actual release to general public because we don't allow stuff you need a key/invite to access.
Yeah, I hadn't actually looked at /r/InternetIsBeautiful before making that comment, and then when I looked I saw that the very first thing in "things NOT to post" is "aggregators".
We could probably allow an exception. That's just a catch-all for the garbage Reddit knockoffs that basically just are a different theme on top of the Reddit API.
But as I said in my other comment it'd have to be public.
Ya I heard those iib mods are strict as hell.
Ikr, what assholes.
It doesn't necessarily have to be you that posts it to a major subreddit. You could just post to /r/redditalternatives, /r/theoryofreddit (if the mods there will allow it), or take @brian up on his offer to do an AMA. Once you make that first post then other people can do the rest and if it organically pops up in major subreddits so be it... but until that first step is taken by you everyone is hesitant to do anything because you haven't really given the blessing yet, so to speak. ;)
Most of them aren't major, but a lot of the left-wing subs would be more than happy to advertise a hate-speech-free forum. I bet you'd have more luck with the major subs if you could drum up some media attention to go with it. I'm sure someone at Gizmodo or ArsTechnica would be happy to post a "Former Reddit Developer makes hate-speech-free reddit" article.
The only worry I have with that is biasing the site too much toward left-wing reactionaries... even the perception of that can be a problem IMO. raddle.me is such a site that was made around the same time as voat and it's just as bad as voat but on the opposite end of the political spectrum.
Ideally ~ wants to attract people across the entire political spectrum, if possible, so long as they can remain civil and respectful of each other. This is why having some /r/neutralpolitics and /r/changemyview mods on here already, providing feedback and suggestions is so awesome as they have somehow managed to carve that niche out in reddit despite how polarized it is there.
I'm torn about this since I definitely think Tildes shouldn't care about screaming alt-righters, while, on the other hand, the alt-right successfully managed to brand all content moderation as "censorship", a view that even swaps out of its circles. It's an ugly spin, but a very effective one.
I think, ideally, it would be best to not get dragged into this and maintain a line that's not necessarily "neutral" (as that implies being neutral towards things like hate speech and bigotry) but certainly determined and down-to-earth. "We appreciate your concerns, but this is what we believe is best for discussion", while repeatedly linking to the page that explains the motivations rather than getting into petty arguments. I'm partly going through this for myself, since I often find myself naive enough to get dragged into fights like that.
Also, generally, I think the ideal should be basing discussion on facts, sources and arguments, not necessarily to have a perfect 50/50 balance on anything. I don't think the ideal is to have 50% pro- and 50% anti-Trump news. We should rather care about the correctness of the sources posted.
I just want good PEOPLE here. And most of the good people I know are very left, because they want like, equal rights and stuff.
Definitely. There aren't two sides to every issue, and that's a classic technique to muddy the waters. Stick to the facts, and on top of that, intelligent discussion, informed opinions, and open debate.
Part of the idea here is that we're going to end up with truly massive mod teams... somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000-5000 for a community the size of a 'default' on reddit. When there are that many moderators, accusations of bias and censorship are far less credible. It's one thing to believe you can take over with a team of ten people, quite another to believe you can successfully compel several thousand people.
I think reddit itself greatly exacerbates these issues by allowing opposing hate groups to form in separate communities, then spend their time stalking and attacking each other all over the site. Community creation here isn't going to be available to everyone ever, and for a long time, it's going to be admin-only, so we can control for that. We don't want to have a liberal bastion and a conservative bastion living in two different communities attacking each other. We need them to live in the same community and learn to get along.
It is so hard to find good people to moderate. How will we support teams of 5000 when it comes to subgroup policy?
An excellent question. We talked about having mod teams vote on a quorum basis to take big mod actions - we'll need a solid democratic voting/polling mechanism for that and lots of other things. I'd push for Condorcet voting support built right into the site. Also what would a 'Roberts Rules of Order' bot or forum mode look like, I wonder? Something parliamentary but evolved to fit an online forum.
First thing is just be honest with them and listen to their ideas. Second is get them some training, something reddit has never even attempted to do. There's a certain mindset that helps do the job and we can give that perspective to people. We've also got people here who mod all kinds of communities and I think we all agree, we don't want to do it like reddit did. It's gotta be organic, with lots and lots of mods (like /r/science on reddit, over a thousand mods, and it runs itself very well even for reddit).
Moderating on reddit will burn you out to the bone, it's a thankless shitty job. We can also make sure that doesn't happen here, and make moderation rewarding. We were just talking about gamification of the trust system (which is the gate to mod access) today. We'll be having a daily tildes discussion on that in the near future, I'd bring up your questions and concerns there too, should get a lot of participation (like the last one did).
I well know the struggle. I mod a couple large subs on reddit. I just also know that its' really really hard to find trustworthy people. Which I hope will be easier here.
Reddit won't even make the attempt to build tools to do that job. We can.
I would like that very much.
I don't really worry much about who falls where on the political spectrum. I can speak a politically nuanced language that is difficult to cast as reactionary in any sense. Earlier today I wrote up a comment basically admitting to being mostly okay if Net Neutrality rules are finally walked back because it's a complex issue with big and small players benefiting and being harmed by the ruling. You lot can keep being scared that the world is ending, the sky is falling, and that democracy is dead forever. I'm just going to do my thing anyway and chuckle as history proves again that these things ebb and flow.
What matters to me is that we train people that our expectations demand a level of civility. It's okay to tell someone they're wrong. It's probably not okay to go off spewing a bunch of racial epithets at someone for disagreeing with you.
Carve being the operative word there - surgical removal of shit content all day every day.
The tech media does love an opportunity to take the piss out of reddit.
I'd try for Ars, they tend to be pretty good.
Molly Wood and Kai Rysdall from Marketplace have a podcast Make Me Smart that would also be a good fit as well I think. They do lots of segments on the intersection of technology / society and the economy, and I think they'd be interested in the "engineering a new type of discussion board to improve the way people communicate online" aspect; e.g., their latest episode has a section on ethics for data scientists. Would provide a different audience as well
Second the vote for Ars. That'd be a good crowd to get in here early.
That makes it sound too much like Imzy though.
Maybe something about "decentralized moderation" and toss in a comparison to "blockchain" and "cryptocurrency" as a buzzword.
I think if you start throwing the word "blockchain" around, you're going to get the entirely wrong type of techbro in here.
We even talked about using a blockchain currency as part of the site (and tip bots, and all kinds of crap). Not a single one of us could figure out anything it would be good at in an online forum. Maybe if we were trying to get people paid to submit content or moderate - but that brings a host of problems and bad behavior with it that we'd rather not deal with.
Some of the more idealist subreddits that grew out of trying to fix reddit's problems with stricter moderation and less public communities? It's been a while that I bothered to track those down so I don't know what's hip at the moment, but something like /r/TrueReddit?
Post to /r/V2Blast. It's a very happening subreddit where all the cool kids hang out.
Hi there
I like the pieces you are taking from /., usenet and reddit, it feels like a good balance in theory to me.
Apologies if this has been asked already, but what do you think about metamoderation, /. style? Could it be a good way to prevent people gaming the system?
I think Slashdot's metamoderation was a good idea that they maybe didn't implement very well. I don't know if you've seen it yet, but the "Future Mechanics" page on the docs site talks about the "trust" system, which is kind of what I hope to base the moderation mechanics around.
So with that system, we'd probably have a form of meta-moderation where people can express something like "this person is using a mechanic improperly" (for example, maybe they're tagging comments as "joke" when they're not). That could be used as a signal that we should trust that person's tagging less, and even eventually completely take away their ability to tag.
Does that make sense and seem reasonable? Is there anything else about Slashdot's meta-moderation that you think worked particularly well or badly?
No, I think that captures the essence of meta-moderation well. What I liked is while it provided "cleanup" on the site, it also rewarded participation.
I think caps on "abilities" would prevent the power users you call out as a potential problem, though an issue I always found with /. was having so few moderation points you felt like you couldn't spare them much. Though it is not worth overstating the effective low-end moderation that all users do on most reddit subs by downvoting stuff into oblivion before the mods can even get to it - on many threads this is the primary defense against brigading.
We had a giant discussion about that a little while ago. Definitely give it a read, and you might want to grab a cup of coffee first, it's long. ;)
Thanks!
Might be a decent idea to throw Ellen Pao a tweet? Technically she was your boss and her ideas about Reddit should do with a lot of the unwanted subreddits align with yours a little bit.
Brb sending invites to spez and kn0thing