Yeah I mention r/science at 7:00 in the linked video.
> If the moderators agree with the study there is zero dissent tolerated. This subreddit has something like 1000+ moderators and they remove any comments that doesn't fit into Reddit's very narrowly defined overton window. Not just people being off-topic or taboo... but often anyone who questions the studies being posted.
I'm sure that's true. I haven't looked at the exact biases in that group too much. For awhile I was collecting examples of biased removals in certain groups, but that was just so I could come up with relatable stories to tell. I disagree with pretty much every secretive removal. Even in cases where someone is threatening violence I wonder whether we should keep such a removal secret from the author: an extremist in a given group, whose views went unchallenged, may perceive silence as agreement and therefore believe they're part of a team when in fact they're not.
> My only critique is that it doesn't work with Firefox. I have to pull up Chrome which I only use for work. Do you have a social media profile to follow/provide feedback to?
It does work on Firefox but you have to disable tracking protection [1]. The reason is because Reddit, to which Reveddit obviously must connect, appears on an arbitrary list of domains that Firefox's partner Disconnect.me considers to be "trackers" [2]. That list breaks tons of websites that are tracked and seemingly ignored in this 8 year old bug [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1101005]. The bug is updated with new sites almost every day. I'm not up to date on how browsers or standards are changing, but I'm guessing the Disconnect.me list is a hack until a better solution can be found.
I don't know of a better solution. I'm all ears if you have one provided it doesn't cost me more or hurt the site's operation by putting its logic on a server [3].
[1] https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq/#firefox
[2] https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protecti...
[3] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.privacy/...
I didn't say it was a bug, I said the list of websites broken by that feature are tracked in a bug.
No, that makes sense. I see you've added a modal that explains how to get it to work with FF. My bad, I think I used Unddit in the past which didn't say this. I'll use Reveddit instead.
Besides maybe a web extension that somehow bypasses those controls? (idk if that works).
> Yeah I mention r/science at 7:00 in the linked video.
Thanks I'll watch the video tomorrow. Appreciate your work.
No worries. I'll just share the differences with Unddit here for any interested. AFAIK Unddit only works with threads, whereas Reveddit works with nearly any type of Reddit page, including subreddits and domains. And last I checked, Unddit shows a limited number of comments up front, whereas Reveddit loads them all. So if a thread has more than 1,000 comments, and you visit an Unddit link, it might be missing some, and you won't know to check for more unless you know how the site works. In my opinion, that's unintuitive, so I choose to load everything up front. Also, Unddit shows user-deleted comments [1] while Reveddit does not [2].
The most distinguishing features of Reveddit IMO are that it works with user pages, can restore comments from user pages, has an extension that can notify you of removals when they occur [3], it has more filters, sort options, etc.
> Besides maybe a web extension that somehow bypasses those controls? (idk if that works).
Well that's basically what the modal describes. You can customize where you want to turn it off, no extension needed.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/qiwurl/what_happ...
What type of timeframe do you guys typically work with before it gets removed? Any ideas on how to improve the capture times?
Also are you looking for dev help with your project?
Current capture time is noted in the status on Reveddit.com/info [1]. That blue box will show up in threads when the capture time is delayed more than the standard, which I think is typically under a minute.
The content for [removed] comments in threads comes from another third party service called Pushshift. It isn't able to get many auto-removed comments (such as those removed by Automoderator), and that service sometimes goes down, may fail to ingest something, etc.
In an attempt to fill some of these gaps, Reveddit can restore some unarchived comments by searching the user pages of other commenters in the thread. And if you visit Reveddit via a direct link to a removed comment, such as from the button that is provided under such comments by the Reveddit Linker extension [2], then it will try to auto-load those comments this way. Otherwise you can click Restore to do it manually.
Almost all of the features on the site should be documented in either a bubble or the FAQ. If you see something that you think needs a help bubble, or a better description, let me know.
> Also are you looking for dev help with your project?
Sure! The code is on Github. Feel free to brainstorm via issues, email, or submit PRs. My main focus now is raising awareness so it would be great to have backfill on keeping the code functional.
Clever
For example, you could reverse engineer automod configurations by scraping user pages with a headless browser, storing all of the auto-removed comments, and then looking for the most common n-grams in a given subreddit. Alternatively you could make the code work "server-side" so some sort of json is returnable, though that would take more work.
And I haven't even mentioned the history pages, which may indicate where users and moderators have disagreed the most:
https://www.reveddit.com/v/worldnews/history/
Plus, this is only one social media site. Every site does this, and there's probably a way to reveal the shenanigans going on in a lot more places.
For example, /r/CanadaPolitics - the moderator /u/_Minor_Annoyance (a username that fits into the category of "demon troll" nicknames that Jordan Peterson has defined) is heavily biased to the Liberal party of Canada/the establishment narrative, and anyone who questions or posts anything (truthful) that counters their narrative or makes the "Liberals" or Trudeau look bad gets deleted most commonly (even if highly detailed and very substantive) under the subreddit's "Rule 3 - Not substantive": "Keep submissions and comments substantive."
It's sickening [if you understand the consequences of it].
Or the subreddit has a very strict set of rules for posting top level comments which include:
> 3. Non-professional personal anecdotes will be removed
> 4. Criticism of published work should assume basic competence of the researchers and reviewers
> 5. Comments dismissing established findings and fields of science must provide evidence
Have you looked at any of the top threads on Reveddit/Unddit with 75% of the comments gone?
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how it goes way, way beyond those rules you just listed, into something that can only be described as a petty dictatorship - but with any hundred angry nerds who happened to show up playing the dictator.
Zero transparency, zero due process, no one cares.
This sort of excuse (blindly believing all that matters is "just don't be an asshole on the internet and you have nothing to worry about", "just follow the rules on the sidebar") is exactly how this sort of thing happens and no one bothers to look into it. If Reddit had a button to list the comments arbitrarily removed (like Google shows DMCA request removals) you can be sure the outrage would be 100x and those sidebar rules would seem meaningless besides maybe 20% of the time.
I chose r/science because that's a topic that typically prides itself on caring about finding the truth, not about satisfying the ideological whims of the gatekeepers.
You should hope that your views (or more accurately, their views) never stray from it and the information that a tiny group of people are controlling is good for the entire population.
You could say just use another subreddit. But this isn't limited to one.
It's hard for me to believe these are made up stories. And, it appears that such stories are currently only being told via conservative media. Please correct me if I am wrong.
This is of interest to me because the US holds that words are not equal to violence, with the only exception being the emergency principle. According to Nadine Strossen, President of the ACLU from 1991-2008, the emergency test says speech may be punishable "if, in context, it directly causes specific imminent serious harm." [6] If groups are successfully convincing people otherwise, then it may mean we are forgetting what free speech is. Free speech, the US version anyway, draws the line at violence, not words.
[1] https://archive.ph/1NeiV#selection-1513.7-1513.57
[2] https://corinnacohn.substack.com/p/the-world-should-not-need...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tQr6WZXHSQ
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdSKBVHrizo
[5] https://youtu.be/STE1pmCjULQ?t=2047
[6] https://books.google.com/books?&hl=en&id=whBQDwAAQBAJ&q=in+c...
It's another point of view on an issue that I'd only previously seen presented from one perspective. That's why I found it to be so interesting. I was shocked to hear it because I had no prior understanding that anything untoward was going on. Question for you, what do you think about Keira Bell's story?
Perfect for when you don't have the balls to directly call what the person is saying wrong or bad. Ad hominem 101.
More important than the content of speech in social media moderation is the behavior. You demonstrate bad behavior here.
No, this is only the second time I've discussed the gender/trans issue. My comments generally get moderated for containing links to Reveddit.
> More important than the content of speech in social media moderation is the behavior. You demonstrate bad behavior here.
What is the bad behavior to which you are referring?
Particularly when there's some circumstantial evidence that Ghislaine Maxwell used to be one of those mods: https://old.reddit.com/r/TopMindsOfReddit/comments/rrldd9/to... (skeptical link, but even here you can see that it's plausible)
There are plenty of reasons why a subreddit like r/science is fine for people, not just the fact that they have a "very narrow Overton window". Maybe it's because we understand that this particular subreddit does not conform to the usual agora of discussion that reddit is known for and just shows a list of maybe interesting science papers/articles and clarifications on them from people in the domain. I may disagree with some of the ideas put forward but I can be an adult about it and not jump to the conclusion that there's a cabal of "big science" that is trying to brainwash me.
I didn't find what was written to be mean. Eleanor Roosevelt said,
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
If you feel sad, that's fine, I just want to point out that this is a choice we all make. Sometimes there is wide agreement on what constitutes offense, and we use this to justify the secret removal of other people's content. But offense is inherently subjective, and such secretive removals rob us of chances to sharpen our counter speech. Rather than trying to make perceived hateful conversations secretly disappear, I think we are better off allowing each other to prepare counter arguments to offensive speech.
Even more awesome to have this happen with a dormitory IP. /s
What it is not is a place where laymen like me and (probably you) can debate the veracity of said science. I don't give a toss about which science articles are posted there and if they agree with my world view as long as the curation and moderation is consistent with the principles described in the subreddit's rules. In my opinion is fine to not have an opinion or comment even if someone on the internet is wrong - present time excluded. :P
What this is saying is that even if egregious blunders are made it is against the rules to call that out - how can I point out incompetence if I have to assume competence?
I host a medical journal club - statistical incompetence in the life sciences is bountiful.
> Comments dismissing established findings
I’m sure defining established isn’t difficult to do/open for abuse. /s
Those aren’t “strict” rules - they are poorly defined rules open up to tremendous interpretation.
Reddit is a cesspool for honest intellectual debate.
It’s saying that criticism must “assume competence” - that’s very different - and as a moderator I can twist any kind of criticism into a violation of this rule. And why do I have to assume competence anyway - shouldn’t the work stand on its own merits?
And let’s get something straight - “being a moron” is not equivalent to being incompetent (in an area of expertise). One is just name calling the other is a specific legitimate criticism.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
That these rules are not enforced by deleting content but the comments largely disappearing from view (based on community voting) is not a hugely different outcome IMO. It’s also worth noting that you don’t have to participate in such a community if you don’t want to. Their space and their rules.
> Criticism of published work should assume basic competence
That rule for example would bar a commenter from critiquing the work for not taking into account a confounding factor, or for using a non-representative WEIRD [0] population sample to reach overly broad conclusions. Taking these issues into account can be argued to be "basic competence", but they are too often ignored in many the most headline-worthy social science papers that attract the most upvotes.
[0] western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnational_psychology#WEI...
Also, you shouldn't need credentials to demonstrate that you know something - the fact that you post something polite and useful should be enough to have your comment not be removed. It is a useful proxy for moderation at scale, though.
The moderators of the subreddit obviously disagree. From the sides I would say it works for them.
It is probably less being a moron or incompetent than having an agenda would be the likely complaint ... depending on the subject matter that is. I suspect this is much more of a problem is social sciences than, say, pure mathematics.
As an aside, most of the mods are toward the "soft" side of science (biology, medicine, social science), and likely do not understand statistics very well. Papers with glaring issues regularly make it to the top because their conclusions are cool, not because they are truly good/impactful works.
Ever once in a while I ponder how many people are unnecessarily stuck in jail because of that one subreddit then feel ill and have to stop thinking about it.
It's fairly well known at this point, I see multiple relevant threads on the first page of https://www.google.com/search?q=reddit+r%2Flegaladvice+moder...
For psychedelics, the effect might be more pronounced because there aren’t that many people casually interested and/or those who are are reading and not writing. (I’ve never taken any; what am I going to add to the discussion? If someone has and their comment is interesting, I’ll upvote it.)
Sure people can be interested in using psychedelics themselves, but they want the discussion to focus on research
This leads to moderation fatigue. You have lots of stuff that should be summarily executed and takes up tons of your time. Then you have the minority of posts that require some thought on if it's just a controversial post, or that guy that just keeps making accounts and being an intentional malicious troll. But, you don't have any time to think on these post because another 3 crap posts ended up in the moderation queue in the 3 seconds you're looking at the first one. Eventually people get to the point that if a post ends up in the moderation queue it just gets blocked, which then trolls use to flag just about everything. It's a messy situation when you're asking volunteers to do this.
There seems to be zero ethical guidelines / pressure / consequences for any of this stuff.
Of course the problem is hard but I've seen tons of high quality, on-topic comments with 500+ upvotes get removed because the mods obviously disagreed with it. The commenter won't even know it's gone and 99% of visitors will not realize how thoroughly editorialized the entire conversation threads are.
I seriously recommend picking any even slightly controversial r/science post and look at the comments being removed. It's not just memes and trolling.
When the moderators of r/science particularly agree with a post or it is politically charged, almost any discussion of the actual science involved is purged (unless it is praise or an "explanation" that includes a lot of praise). When the mods don't agree, you can see some discussion of gaps in papers, but you must take the conclusion of the paper as 100% true, which is not how science works.
Problem is this: science is not democratic. Consensus plays a role, but not everyone getting to the point were you are equipped to peer review others often takes years of effort and study. That’s unavoidable, given that the easy questions have already been answered.
A single … “folkloric” comment is not problematic. When 60% or 75% of the comments are like that, the problem is that the subreddit isn’t science any more. It has become “wacky theory time”.
So at that time you have a choice: either you moderate, in order to keep the channel on-topic, or you accept everything, at which point the guys who benefit from science not being available to the general public have won.
Of course this moderation process isn’t going to be perfect and there will be false positives.
I have been on the receiving end of a campaign organized by a somewhat popular forum in order to fill up a direct democracy platform with as many memes and random shit as possible. The worst night I just had to hide everything that was posted, the signal to noise was too high. This meant that some legitimate proposals where lost. It wasn’t a perfect solution either, but it was the only one we had.
From my experience, I think without moderation r/science would become “aliens built the pyramids” in a week.
I strongly disagree, it's inherently democratic. The scientific method is all about making mistakes and trying again. Discourse is all about sharing knowledge. Open societies do this effectively.
Jonathan Rauch, in Kindly Inquisitors (1993) wrote,
> Authoritarian systems have their intellectual giants. What they lack is the capacity to organize and exploit their masses of middling thinkers.
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=uZUVAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA74...
> From my experience, I think without moderation r/science would become “aliens built the pyramids” in a week.
It might. What would happen then? I'd argue there'd be a lot of good discussion.
The reason people don't think it's possible to change people's minds over the last 7-8 years is because during this whole period you didn't know about shadow moderation.
Watch the linked talk, look at the examples. Deception is being crowdsourced and it is happening across every ideology, geography, and on every major platform.
Why bother though? There are thousands of places you can have that discussion, including on Reddit. You can set up, say, /r/scienceforall right now and establish the rules you want. The /r/science sub has decided that it’s a space which should have heavy moderation - a totally legitimate viewpoint with obvious benefits and costs. You might not agree with the balance, but the beauty is you don’t have to.
See 18:20 and 19:52 in the talk linked on this post. Nobody will visit r/scienceforall because r/science will remove references to it. Plus, forcing me to set up a group doesn't sound like a solution, it sounds like a shake down. To get an open discussion space I have to moderate it, and then have the social media site threaten removal of my mod powers if I fail to remove something they don't like within their desired time frame. That means I have to review every piece of user-submitted content. No thanks. Transparency and light-touch moderation would be more efficient.
> The /r/science sub has decided that it’s a space which should have heavy moderation - a totally legitimate viewpoint with obvious benefits and costs. You might not agree with the balance, but the beauty is you don’t have to.
My issue is with the system, not moderators. Legally speaking, shadow moderation may be in the clear, but it's still harmful for society while we have just a few major platforms. We should all know and share what's going on.
I linked the point in the talk where I discuss this, but I can share an example here too. r/LibertarianUncensored is 2,000 members and stickied this post [1] explaining shadow removals occurring on r/Libertarian which has 500,000 members.
If you bring this up on r/Libertarian your commentary will be removed and you'll either be banned or shadow banned. Both make it impossible for you to share what's going on with users in r/Libertarian. Meanwhile, moderators there publicly deny that anything untoward is happening [2].
Maybe some day r/LibertarianUncensored can overcome its userbase deficit of half a percent, but it's obvious that shadow moderation is helping to maintain r/Libertarian's domination.
Other groups that skew younger, for example r/Overwatch, may already be familiar with Reveddit and thus have a better chance at challenging mod biases [3].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LibertarianUncensored/comments/uotv...
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/ye16uv/this_subr...
But what you have ended up saying here is “all moderation in all communities must be to my own standards and any others are wrong”. And I don’t think that’s reasonable - individual communities, like on Reddit, should have the freedom to enforce the rules of those communities as they see fit. Reddit is full of terrible, mostly unmoderated cesspits; it’s also full of heavily- and lightly-moderated subs.
I would tend to agree that moderation in general should be on the lighter side and in particular there should be approaches to tackle the abuse of power that’s pretty common (such as auto-banning links to alternative subs you mention). But I have seen so many spaces ruined by lack of moderation over the years that it’s hard to get enthusiastic about it as a cause.
Could be. They kind of go together. Shadow moderation often leads to heavy handed moderation. But yes it's entirely possible I'm muddling things together.
> But what you have ended up saying here is “all moderation in all communities must be to my own standards and any others are wrong”.
You lost me. How did you come to that conclusion? My gripe is with shadow moderation, and even in that case I think it should be up to the platforms to decide whether or not they want to implement it. Without further understanding of the law, I don't support government intervention. So I don't see how I've removed choice from either platforms or moderators here.
> But I have seen so many spaces ruined by lack of moderation over the years that it’s hard to get enthusiastic about it as a cause.
I see a lot get ruined by secretive moderation. And, getting rid of secretive moderation does not mean getting rid of moderation altogether.
Remember, your ideological opponents have access to the same tools, and they don't have your moral safeguards. So they are inherently better at abusing whatever tool you provide to grow their following. What you want is to divide powers so that your worst enemy cannot abuse the things you have access to in order to do things to you that you would not do to them. Comprende?
In theory this is a viable solution. In all likelihood, this won’t succeed and there are probably a dozen offshoots already that no one knows about. I suspect two things would happen. The most likely thing is the subreddit languishes and never gets any traction. But if it somehow does, it is likely to get targeted as a disinformation subreddit or the admins will install their own powermods - as they typically do once subreddits become big enough.
Given what we know about how Reddit chooses to display content and run its moderation team, I don’t think any alternative science subreddit would be allowed to successfully exist and be of any real competition to r/science.
No, it really is not.
You might as well state that truth is decided by committee and that individuals cannot or should not decide what is true for themselves.
Democracy is a tool, not an inherent virtue. If science was inherently democratic, The Science would be "settled"; such is a state of things that has been demonstrated time and again to discredit consent. Just because a bunch of people, no matter the number or expertise, decide that something is a fact doesn't make it so. Conclusions on science are opinions, and always will be.
By the way, nothing about the scientific method involves review by committee. Science is just having a hypothesis, doing tests, and reporting observations. Everything else is overloading the term "science."
Forgive me, I live in Taiwan and in this region "democracy" can sometimes be colloquially equated with "free speech", perhaps because the two concepts seem distant to some stricter regimes.
You're right though, and now I can't edit the comment. If I could, I would rewrite it to say,
> Science may not be "democratic", however it does depend on the ability to conduct civil discourse, which depends on free speech and is central to the US implementation of democracy.
I agree with what you wrote. I think the rest of my comment illustrates that, but saying "science is inherently democratic" is clearly wrong outside of the colloquial definition I've given here which probably nobody else on this board uses. facepalm
Just to clarify: I think science MUST be open for anyone and I think divulging it is critical.
Are you saying that anyone publicly discussing science on the internet should be subjected to secretive removals because publishing groundbreaking science is complex stuff? If so I strongly disagree and I find it hard to square that with your following statement,
> Just to clarify: I think science MUST be open for anyone and I think divulging it is critical.
Those two paragraphs are in direct conflict. You're saying science should be open but not everyone should be able to discuss it online without having their commentary secretly removed.???
Nobody is born a heart surgeon or karate expert. Every single one of today's experts got there by beginning somewhere near the bottom and working their way up. Some may have found their way easier than others, but that doesn't change where they began, or the general direction they had to take. Left foot, right foot, we all march, and those who had a harder time of it may be better off for making it through that (not that I want this to happen, I'm just saying it can be a result of enduring hardship).
Not to mention, science is meant to be disseminated. If you just put it up to be read rather than discussed, nobody is going to understand it. It's okay if people misinterpret things, that is part of how we learn.
Here's the thing. You won't show us the content of those 60% comments. You will only describe your perception of them. You're here saying 60% of comments are "folkloric", which I assume means you consider them to be useless, but the nature of secretive censorship means two things:
(i) the authors are not able to defend themselves, since they are unaware of the removals, and
(ii) the victimization you present here, that such comments disrupt your conversations, means that you are unwilling to be transparent about what was actually removed, since sharing the comments would give them the publicity that in your view they don't deserve. And in that case, nobody here can evaluate the truth of what you say. You might then say "checkmate", but I think the reality is it's checkmate for the people because they can see this happening. The more you remove, the more obvious the source of the problem becomes.
The problem is the unauditable censorship. This is especially important on political forums but it also becomes relevant on science forums when scientific issues are starting to be politicized.
Of course, Reddit can be whatever it wants, but as it stands, you can only treat it as a propaganda outlet, as you have no way of knowing what gets removed.
The way we can make moderation trustworthy is the same way we make software trustworthy: By putting it out in the open so anyone can scrutinize it and raise a stink when they discover something suspicious, and can't be silenced.
There is almost zero legitimate reason to completely scrub any comment, hiding them by default would work just fine. The only reason to really delete a comment would be if it directly puts a person in danger, such as by containing personally identifying information.
Hard censorship must be a rare enough event that it becomes a scandal and everybody hears about it. The normalization of censorship allows moderators to do basically anything they want, because comments being removed is just expected and doesn't raise any eyebrows anymore. "Oh yeah, those 75% removed comments were just memes and hate speech."
The other side of the coin is that flooding forums with memes, hate speech, and inane nonsense is a quick and easy way to drown out meaningful discussion and actual information, so soft censorship is necessary.
They are two different attack vectors, and we need a defense against both of them. To prevent infiltration of the mod team, speech that we accept to be censored completely must require actual effort so mods can't plausibly claim it was "just memes" when comments get removed on a daily basis. To prevent exterior soft censorship by flooding, we ironically need moderation with power to implement soft censorship, but one that we can trust.
We also cannot accept "hate speech" (or any other combination of words) that requires zero effort to produce to be a reason to force moderators to implement hard censorship. That allows anyone to censor any platform they like or at a minimum to force its moderators to destroy the trust the platform's users can objectively have in them.
Of course, this isn't completely implementable due to unreasonable laws in pretty much every country in the world, but a trustworthy platform would at least try to approximate it as closely as possible under the laws they're bound by. Reddit certainly isn't one, at least it hasn't been since Aaron Swartz was bullied out a long time ago.
It's not even that. The biggest problem is more basic, that authors themselves are shown their removed content as if it's not removed! You can see that in action here [1]. It's happening everywhere, on every issue, on every side, in every geography and on every major platform.
Start there. We don't even need to ask to see everything that gets removed yet. Asking for users to be able to know when their content gets removed is enough. And as I said elsewhere [1], this transparency must be citizen provided by raising awareness and through newly built Reveddit-like technology for other social media sites. Expecting the government do achieve this for us will only delay the inevitable realization that we must build these systems ourselves. As I mention in the talk linked on this post at 26:10, don't ask someone to fix it for you– that's handing power over to authorities. You fix it.
The problem with this; who gets to decide what's right? The institution of science has had this issue before, and decided no one group is capable of always doing that. Hence it is decided using consensus and the scientific method. It's easy to say 'only allow professionals' but there ARE professionals with controversial opinions that will still get mobbed.
It is still the best system we have, and it is definitely better than “opening the gates and letting everyone in”. If you want that, try MTV.
Letting users discover when their content is removed is not "letting everyone in".
You can have both moderation and transparency. They're not mutually exclusive, and many people will alter their behavior in a group after being told their content was removed. They're less likely to change when they're not told. For those who persist, consider what Jonathan Rauch says about speaking in a public forum,
> The person you're talking to isn't the person you're directly talking to. You're not going to be able to persuade that hardcore LGBT left-wing activist that your point of view is correct. The person you're talking to is [the one overhearing your conversation]... They're seeing you sound reasonable, and the other person sound dogmatic and censorious... [1]
In other words, don't compromise your values to deal with a minority of very persistent people with whom most people don't find alignment anyway. When you do compromise your values, that person will shift to attack you on the basis of censorship, and you've just given them the very platform they needed to gain followers. At that point you're no longer the open discussion forum to whatever degree you claimed.
So you can't convince everyone of your viewpoint. So what? Leave it at that. Accepting that someone may not agree with you right away, or possibly ever, is the grown up thing to do. After all, in some cases it may be your mind that gets changed. To the extent you don't do this, you are your own worst enemy. And when you can see it through, you will have become your best advocate.
If we did that on HN our posts would be flagged here too. We do need to separate out how much 'garbage' gets filtered from the ideas that are controversial opinions.
The dispute here is secret moderation, not what content gets removed.
If moderation were transparent, users would also be part of the decision making process. Currently they are not part of the process because their removed content is shown to them as if it is publicly possible.
I'm curious what platform you are referring to here?
It was built on Ruby on Rails. There’s an Open Source white label platform generator project called Consul. I came up with that name (it comes from “consulta ciudadana”, not from an ancient Roman politician).
My last involvement with the project was 6 years ago. My understanding is that the site took a downward dive with regards to code quality after me and other founding members left the project, and with the change in government.
> So at that time you have a choice: either you moderate, in order to keep the channel on-topic, or you accept everything, at which point the guys who benefit from science not being available to the general public have won.
There is another way to view this. I think there is a message in all of that hate speech you see. I'll paraphrase how I perceive it: "I don't see why this is wrong, and I'm frustrated that nobody will debate me about this issue from where I stand, so I'll get angrier and angrier until I get someone's attention."
We could debate over whether this is reasonable, but personally I find it harder and harder to see the merits in the secretive removal of any content. We do need mods to curate according to group rules and the law. I also think the removals should be reviewable at least by the author of the content.
That's a myth. Discourse tells me when my content is moderated. Plenty of forums have worked this way by default without being overwhelmed by spam.
The widespread use of secret removals is unique to the social media era. It may have even helped create today's social media monopolies.
There is another harmful effect. The more you secretly remove toxic users' commentary from view, the less signal they get that their views are not approved. In fact, removing them from view makes society worse off since you're also taking away agency from other users who could be preparing counter arguments. Then, when these two disconnected groups meet in the real world, there's a shouting match (or worse) because they never had to deal with those arguments before. What's more, extremists in otherwise upstanding groups won't realize they're being censored. They may, as a result, think they're of the same mind since their extreme viewpoints were not challenged (as they would be in the real world). By the time they act in the real world, they're far removed from reality.
Secretly removing commentary is different from just ignoring someone in the real world. IRL if you ignore someone, they know you've ignored them. Online if you "ignore" them by secretly removing their comments, they don't know they've been ignored, and thousands or millions of other users don't know that that line of argument even existed as a thought in someone else's mind. It's incomprehensible to them.
It's sad that hundreds of thousands of online moderators think they're helping society by secretly removing such commentary, while in doing so they may actually be creating the environment they seek to avoid. Everyone is trying to create pristine corners online, and it ends up covering the whole map. Meanwhile the real world goes down the drain. Many of us spend too much time using systems whose operations we aren't reviewing. Every day more people are becoming aware of the importance of transparency, and I think at this point the only question is when and to what degree it comes about.
And related: the more secrecy about removals, the less signal that favored users get that their opinions were published because the mods approved of them. If you mod away 75% of posts:
a) the remaining 25% see the 75% as opinions nobody has, and the debate looks like a reasonable 15% vs a radical 5% on one side and another radical 5% on the other side. The vigorous debate among a small minority gives the illusion of a free space, even if it's e.g. people debating how much should be spent on the King's new crown, while the people saying that there shouldn't be a King, or even that the King shouldn't have a new crown have been modded away. And
b) the 25%, seeing the vigorous debate about the cost of the King's new crown (and not the debate about the King or the crown themselves), don't understand why having the King as a mod could have a chilling effect on speech.
That's deep. I hadn't thought about what happens to the ego of users whose content is approved. One lie in the chain really does screw up everything.
> b) the 25%, seeing the vigorous debate about the cost of the King's new crown (and not the debate about the King or the crown themselves), don't understand why having the King as a mod could have a chilling effect on speech.
You're right, it's like a newly manufactured Overton window that can be adjusted on a per-group basis. A simpler term is brainwashing but I think you do need to spell it out as you do here. This is good stuff, I can use these principles to tell stories using real examples and make what's happening more relatable. Or you or anyone else could too.
This is a very succinct and insightful way of putting it. It's fine to refuse to engage with people who are refusing to engage with you in good faith (i.e. they won't respond to the arguments you're making with anything but a repetition of their own arguments.) However, assuming bad faith of everyone who has a different opinion than you, even an obviously bad opinion, just hardens their belief in that opinion. It also makes you the one who is refusing to engage (in good faith or bad.)
People know from their daily lives that when people refuse to engage, it's either because they're afraid their answer will anger you, or because they're afraid that they won't be able to defend it. When you refuse to engage with a bleach-drinker, and you're clearly not worried about angering them, they reasonably assume that you can't confidently tell them why they shouldn't drink bleach.
For example, the reply to me in this thread [1] is not the author that I originally replied to, and their comments are nonsensical, so I just considered them a troll and went to check for other replies.
I'll give someone a chance to make their case more clearly, but if they don't make any attempt at reading and responding to what I wrote, it's not worth it.
Inevitable result: Over time, the mod pool consists more and more of people who get something in return for the act of moderating itself. Either they get to push an agenda, they get to be petty tyrants, or both.
This could explain the pattern where for any given topic, you'll often see discussion of that topic splinter into several diametrically opposed subreddits which are constantly trying to dunk on each other. No one wants to moderate a sub which attempts to synthesize all the perspectives, but there is a supply of mods available for a sub that dunks on "the bad guys".
If the moderators agree with the study there is zero dissent tolerated. This subreddit has something like 1000+ moderators and they remove any comments that doesn't fit into Reddit's very narrowly defined overton window. Not just people being off-topic or taboo... but often anyone who questions the studies being posted.
My only critique is that it doesn't work with Firefox. I have to pull up Chrome which I only use for work. Do you have a social media profile to follow/provide feedback to?