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...

[2] https://archive.ph/O0GN8

[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.