Yes it is. HN's moderation is run by HN. The rules are applied consistently because there are are no third party mods or rules. People know what to expect and that builds community better.
You don't have to wonder if some edgelord mod is going to get home from school and delete your post based on their mood.
> HN's moderation is run by HN
No, it's run by a few humans.
> The rules are applied consistently
Yes, because those humans are awesome and consistent.
> because there are are no third party mods or rules.
That's not why reddit is different. It's because a lot of the humans that run the subreddits are inconsistent.
But some run their subreddits just like HN.
If you think of HN as a well run subreddit it makes more sense.
Dang is employed by HN.
>That's not why reddit is different. It's because a lot of the humans that run the subreddits are inconsistent.
You're disagreeing and then saying something that isn't appreciably different.
Dang has a direct relationship with the owners of the site and responsibility to them, that relationship doesn't exist in any way on reddit. The mods run amok.
Suggesting HN is effectively just another subreddit dismisses several important differences.
People unfamiliar with the setup here tend to think about YC first when they think about its management, but they should think about Dan first. My understanding is that things are pretty hands-off; even the perks that YC companies get here are, I believe, pretty much things Dan decided to give them.
I'm sorry but this is absurd. If dang had a mental break and decided only cat picture posts were allowed going forward, there would definitely be a conversation. It being hands-off so far means that YC and dang have current consensus and trust exists.
>That interest would change, obviously, if Dan was raptured. But discussing the possibility of Dan's rapturing is not interesting, curious, or productive: we're not talking about the failure modes of moderation when moderators are incapacitated, we're talking about moderatorial discretion.
Wild monologue, I'm not sure it serves the conversation to express your tangents and then criticize them as if they were mine.
I saw the conversation as one about the structure of moderation. Paying a mod that you meet with every week to sync up with is very different from someone making some small sub themselves and enaccting any rules that don't break the sitewide rules. Likewise, a mod has no vested interest in the site nor its policies.
That mod-admin relationship is special on reddit, in a mostly bad way since admins ignore many mod issues. Dang is more like a moderator and an admin rolled into one.
If a user or mod noticed them breaking those guidelines over time, and they continued doing so after being repeatedly warned, then they absolutely would have been banned for their ideology.
Otherwise, I don’t think anyone really cares how disagreeable their viewpoint is, so long as they’re courteous and contributing while expressing it (and it’s not derogatory, hate speech, etc).
it's why I still end up browsing here even if I decide to delete multiple reddit accounts. People on reddit seem to have fallen into Poe's law of that Big Lewboski quote:
>"you're not wrong, Walter you're just an asshole!" >"Okay then"
Another forum gives some leeway for discarding courteousness if the post is truly dangerous to heed and absolutely needs to be smacked down as an example of what not to do. But reddit presses that button for every situation. pet being outside, car doing something that may be legal in their state but illegal in the commenter's state, one-sided relationship drama, video games. It's all just flooded with insults and in-fighting over inane stuff.
But this is the very point of contention, and is not actually known.
I think this is why we won't have great transparency around banning, shadowbanning, or a check on the censorious power of flagging.
Lobsters [1] has mod logs, but it also has a much smaller community, and it's invite-only so there's less need for moderation in the first place.
But for something like Reddit when there is more mods the anonymity basically means impunity to any judgement; nobody but mods themselves can say whether a certain bias in actions can be attributed to few mods or to everyone in the mod team.
And frankly if you can't handle a critique of your actions you shouldn't be moderating actions of others in the first place
And those humans work for HN. Hence, content moderation is run by HN.
there's a great reddit bot that explains that "payed" is a sort of nautical term.
Perhaps you haven't had as much moderator interaction as I have, but this is not the case whatsoever. Some subs will have 30 mods and each will apply the rules differently.
Point being, comparing HN to Reddit is a category error; HN is in the same class as subreddits. This is less about HN and more about Reddit itself: Reddit is not a community, it's a network of communities on a common platform. Each subreddit is its own reality.
I don't know if dang is the only HN moderator, but even if he's not I've never seen any evidence of anyone in that role here just capriciously remove or lock discussions in a way that's absolutely commonplace on Reddit.
There are subs on Reddit that I simply no longer engage with because I'm sick of dimwit edgelord mods locking discussions whilst I'm typing out a contribution even though there's nothing wrong with either the original post or the discussion. There's no sense of consistency in the way the sub rules are applied in each of those subs.
A few weeks ago on the CasualUK subreddit one of the mods went off the deep end and started hurling insults left, right, and centre, and banning people simply for politely calling out their poor behaviour. That mod's conduct absolutely violated the rules of both the sub and Reddit as a whole. It's not OK and, again, it wouldn't happen here.
They're referring to the 10% guideline that many subreddits follow:
You should submit from a variety of sources (a general rule of thumb is that 10% or less of your posting and conversation should link to your own content), talk to people in the comments (and not just on your own links), and generally be a good member of the community.
https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion/#wiki_here_are_som...
In fact the whole premise of the article (comparing moderation policy differences between different subreddits) - would suggest they totally understand that reddit moderators aren't all pulled from one homogeneous pool of employees.
I think the "site wide" bit was actually brought up by the moderator - referring to the fact that the /r/moviedetails moderation checks your full post history across all of reddit (not just your behavior on /r/moviedetails) and bans you from their subreddit based on that.
Sure they do. They're just unpaid idiots who don't know it.
I hope the supreme court takes away section 230 from these people. They have abused their power so much by permanently banning people who simply have an opinion that is not the same as theirs, that they deserve to lose it.
Get a blog.
It goes beyond just controlling the speech or opinions of people who disagree with you such as I am doing here, there is also money involved such as in controlling which links get published. Those links drive traffic to specific sites which host ads. Surely you do not believe that all the links to specific sites over and over is simply because they are "fast to publish" or something do you?
All aspects of a capitalist socioeconomic system exist on the people's, via Congress', sufferance. The very land on which you stand is - at the end of the day - the territory of some government (unless you live in international waters, in space, or in Bir Tawil), and said government carves off subsets of that land for its people to use as they see fit.
Fortunately, we the people here in the US have already long decided that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Those rights are not conditional on whether an entity is an individual person or a limited-liability corporation or an anarcho-syndicalist commune or what have you.
To me the big glaring central point here is that everyone uses big tech platforms. It’s just a fact of life. If you tell people, sorry, I don’t use Facebook, I use some wonky alternative instead, can you add me there? you’ll get weird looks. I think it’s insane to just ignore that elephant and continue studiously down the path of, well, they’re a private company and therefore are entitled to publish whatever they want.
When we established the precedent that private entities can say what they want, we clearly didn’t have Facebook in mind. Like there is just intuitively an obvious difference between a private journal deciding what to write about and a huge platform everyone uses deciding what to pass through or not. The state of the law doesn’t currently reflect this but that doesn’t mean the difference doesn’t exist.
The actual right you have is spelled out in the Constitution: that Congress shall make no law abridging your freedom of speech. That's all you get. Thankfully, the framers did not add a law granting you the right to force me to amplify your speech with my own resources.
Get a blog! The very worst people on Earth have managed to keep blogs running.
This really seems like a case where the existing categories in the law created hundreds of years ago are no longer adequate to capture present realities, similar to how they didn't have AR-15s in mind when they wrote 2A. If you ask whether Reddit is a public or private company, sure, it's private. But if you look at what intuitions back then were around "public" and "private", and for that matter around what "speech" was, it seems like the real answer is that (in regards to this debate) Reddit is a third type of thing that doesn't have a name yet.
> Get a blog! The very worst people on Earth have managed to keep blogs running.
This might illustrate my point better. I assume you don't support people getting banned straight off the internet. Is it simply because no one owns the internet, but Reddit is owned by Reddit (the company)? Maybe it's time for that boundary to be reexamined.
If the thing we're discussing is how much control over content these platforms should have, there is a calculus to be made about what answer to that question would best serve the interests of society. It might be that despite all the things I listed above, the result of that calculus remains the same, but it is not immediately obvious that that is the case, as your "private sites can do what they want" formulation would have one believe.
Not really. The only substantial change is that getting thrown out of such a large and all-encompassing diner is a lot less convenient. The fundamental reality is still there: no website (maybe unless it's owned by your government, and even then) no matter how large is obligated to carry your message, and it is increasingly affordable and trivial to start your own website if other websites exercise their inherent rights of refusal to carry your message.
> Couldn't you use this formulation to say that anti-discrimination laws make it so that, simply by dint of providing a service, you take on an obligation to provide that service to everyone?
The obligation is to not make membership in a protected class or lack thereof a condition of providing a service. Bob can't throw you out of his diner on the basis of you being some race he doesn't like; he can nonetheless throw you out if you're shouting advertisements at everyone else in the diner. Same deal for a website. There is no implication there of any obligation to serve everyone: only an explication of constraints on the reasons someone can refuse to serve someone.
Marketers are, in short, not a protected class.
I’m arguing the “ought” rather than the “is” here. I’m arguing against the philosophical position that simply because Reddit is a private website, they are entitled to control the content as they want. In general, we regulate private enterprise when it has negative externalities on society, and I think there is a discussion to be had about what those externalities are here. Considering the historically unique position big tech companies are in, I don’t think “private companies can do whatever they want” is a sharp enough tool to use to dissect this issue.
Notice that I ain't mentioning corporations or individuals here, because that piece fundamentally does not matter; an individual could create a website used by billions, and a corporation could create a website used by a single person (not to mention that there are countless organizational structures beyond just corporations - especially once you go beyond the constraint of what's legally recognized). What matters is the size of the audience, and "you have such and such rights unless you're popular enough to have any tangible influence on society at which point the State will dictate what you're allowed to say or not say" doesn't sit well with me.
I disagree on a philosophical level. the rules and users may be frustrating, but in the grand scheme of things, reddit isn't breaking the law nor spreading hate (well, no more hate than your average internet user. We're not talking about Infowars here). I see no reason for government interference on basis of their moderation and curation, like this thread is suggesting.
>In general, we regulate private enterprise when it has negative externalities on society, and I think there is a discussion to be had about what those externalities are here.
Sure, but I honestly can't think of any societal effects that wouldn't be felt from regular old physical analogs that is "people talking and arguing with each other".
- You can talk about groupthink, but that happens IRL and can be taken to an extreme with cults. Cults aren't illegal until they break other laws. - You can talk about restricting artistic freedoms, but said freedoms aren't really that protected in the world at large. - you can talk about freedom of speech and fall into the same conservative trapping as other groups. Convinently forgetting that those freedom of speech is meant to protect government from censoring your speech, not other individuals. - there are privacy concerns which are already being addressed. That's one of the few analogs not easily transferrable to the physical world. - Then there is the anonymity aspect of reddit, which has its share of issues caused ever since the days of "bathroom writings". There are plenty of ways to be offensive without yelling it in someone's face.
I just don't see an angle here that would justify a need to "anti-trust" the site as some public good and force all posts to remain up, nor clamp down and enforce civility in a website.
What I am in favor of is recognizing, as a society, the value of free speech, not just as a constitutional technicality but as a principle. I believe we ought to value it as a good. And I think that as a society, we should stop and be like, hey, wait a minute, online communication is now dominated by a handful of sites, doesn't it violate the spirit of free speech if, in practice, all those sites enforce roughly the same overton window, and your options are to (a) get in line or (b) not use the 5-7 sites that everyone else uses?
In fact, I think the conversation about the constitutional limits of 1A, or governmental rights, or whatever, is a distraction. I'm not suggesting the government step in. I'm just saying we clearly have a situation where the principle of free speech is being violated — where people are not able to share certain ideas on the platforms that everyone else uses. I'm aware we don't have a law protecting that. I'm making a prescriptive argument that society ought to view this as a bad, dangerous thing.
So in terms of a practical agenda, I dunno, I would like to see a stronger shared appreciation of free speech, and bottom-up pressure for the big communication platforms to stop enforcing their own capricious filters. From this perspective — not the 1A perspective — I think the argument that "private enterprises can do whatever they want" is pretty weak and irrelevant. The actual question is what externalities it has on society when the platforms used by everyone decide what you can say on them. I think the answer to that is not obviously "nothing," and probably "something."
they don't work for reddit, it's even worse than that. They are very profitable for reddit despite not being employed so admins look the other way. That work they do may or may not be monetized in other such ways.
>I hope the supreme court takes away section 230 from these people
that's slashing your face to spite the zit. There are undoubtedly unfair moderation practives, but the implications of 230 go far beyond that.
Also, even if I agreed with 230, the issue of international boundaries will make it hard to enforce. No one's going to extradite some kid in brazil because they banned an American user on r/Art over an accusation that the American's art was AI. And that's even before going into how hard it is to win a Libel case in the US.
People just can’t read or won’t read the rules. One thing I hate most is that YouTubers high jacking or spamming without even engaging the community or in the comments. It’s so frustrating to keep removing it.
On that sub, their rules don't allow people who mostly post links to their own site. It's up to you if agree with their rule, but those are the rules they have chosen.
The common response is "if you don't like the rules make your own subreddit". Unfortunately that doesn't scale very well, especially if you're trying to replace a popular subreddit.
Of course the simple workaround here is that OP shouldn't be posting their own content anyway. The should send it to a friend who can post it if they think it's interesting.
Posting your own content if you aren't already an engaged member of the community is like walking into a room and shouting "hey everyone I have something you might like!". That's why there is leniency for active members of a subreddit to post their own things.
For people who are saying "thankfully HN is different!", it really isn't. It's basically the same as a subreddit run by the mods here. I personally like the way the mods run things here, which is why I participate here more. But at the end of the day it's just a different set of humans with a different set of rules (and a little bit more control since they can do things on the server that reddit mods can't). And on this "subreddit" they allow people to post their own content if it's relevant, similar to a lot of other subreddits that aren't /r/moviedetails.