The issue with Reddit is why would anyone spend a couple hours writing thoughtful comments when there is some algorithm that just deletes them at random? The obvious answer is they wouldn't. And so by and large the people who used to contribute good content have already left.

I doubt this change will push the site into a death spiral, but in general when rules like this are created then it certainly signals that there probably weren't many obviously better options.

huh? i'm a very active redditor across many subs and i've never encountered anything like that. you're the first person i've ever seen even mention it. unless i'm not understanding what you mean?

It's not even mild disagreements. Most of the subreddits are run like cults. If you look at the mods of the major subreddits, most of them are run by a select few users. The same mods on every other subreddit.

Reddit is used as a propaganda tool now.

/r/skincareaddiction was caught red handed (with a price list, even) offering promotion services.

Those are the big ones I can think of - most of the suspicion comes from the fact that you find a lot of the same people moderating a lot of the same subreddits. It smacks of the cabal.

(Given communities with a few million subscribers, how is one supposed to do their job on a single one of these, let alone multiple?)

It's how we caught which manager was stealing from us and got the evidence that our accountant was funneling money out to herself (although it was noticing when she bought that new car and put her children into an expensive private school that created the suspicion).

Selected quotes:

>You will never be told exactly what will earn a shadowban, because telling you means telling the sociopaths, and then they will figure out a way to get around it, or worse, they will file shitty, frivolous lawsuits in bad faith for being shadowbanned while "not having done anything wrong"[...]Shadowbans are intentionally a grey area, an unknown, a nebulous and unrestricted tool that the administrators will use at their sole discretion in order to keep reddit running[.]

The first thoughts that come to my mind are "this isn't compatible with a culture of transparency" and "there has to be a better way" but I can appreciate how hard it must be to keep a site the size of Reddit running.

Of course, this only works well when the overlord behaves in a way that the subjects agree with. As soon as the overlord makes one too many bad calls, the subjects revolt.

It maybe worked for meatball wiki but they were i) small and ii) disciplined.

I doubt their approach would work anywhere else.

Now she won't tell you the rules because like every unprincipled person, she wants to be able to change the rules as it pleases her. That's the type of person she is.

The quotes make her sound like a tyrant. That's what leftists become when they're given any power. I'll watch Reddit go down from far away as I do not want to be in the same website as liar Ellen Pao - she might frivolously sue me.

That they are happening to users at all is evidence of either an unreported change in internal policy or high level vigilante modding. And as users, there is no way to find out how many are affected by this.

Another issue exists where after a person discovers their shadowban, they request its removal and are denied -- because there was no note left for why they were banned. What if it were placed by a Reddit mod and not a sub mod? How could anyone make a reasonable appeal in that case?

Their opaqueness is why shadowbans are effective, but mods treating user appeals like gag orders with top secret clearances is not in the spirit of their duties. After a user discovers their shadowban, it's no longer effective, so there is no reason not to disclose information to them about it during their appeal.

Opening the appeals process so users can see for themselves why they were banned, reversing appeals against noteless bans without contest, limiting the duration of all bans not made against spam/bots, a system of blind review, and increasing mod accountability would all serve to strengthen users' ability to stay active on the site without compromising the intended function of the shadowban.

It's actually an anti-spam measure, because when you post while being shadowbanned you see your posts, but nobody else does. That means you could be posting for a long time and not even know all of your posts are actually invisible.

That's not just telling someone to fuck off the site. That's actually erasing them from the site because they won't even make a new account - they'll keep posting and not even know they're invisible.

As what happened on Reddit last week: http://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/351buo/tifu_by_posting...

And it's something that - at the risk of repeating myself - Hacker News also does.

But we have no idea if it was "just criticism", or if it was worse.

    Buddy Fletcher, husband of Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, is being described as being the operator of Ponzi scheme

    ~144 million dollars of a pension fund was lost

    Ellen Pao is now accused of frivolous lawsuits to try and stay afloat and some other shit. Seeing as she is a CEO of a large company and has a fraudster for a husband I think it's safe to say we have a textbook ASPD/Sociopath on our hands

It's trivial to detect - literally as simple as seeing if the user page exists when logged out (or just not sending the login cookie).

It doesn't matter if it's reasonable or not as long as it isn't ultimately harmful to the person.

If you dox someone or follow them around for a length of time attacking them, you should be banned for it as it creates a hostile environment.

But that is a far cry from telling someone in no uncertain terms that you think their opinion is ridiculous.

Personally, I've been wanting a reddit alternative for a while, but everything out there sucks in some manner (don't get me started on hubski...). I would love for this to push enough people onto the other platforms for the content to be there. I doubt it will, but that doesn't stop me from wishing it would happen.

That's your opinion on it. Reddit, it would appear, has a different opinion. As, I believe, would the admins of Hacker News.

Overall I believe a better solution would be to give users the ability to block people. Ideally via a digital fingerprint so people can't just use a fresh username. This would be more inline with an open community in control of its own destiny.

In theory, this only applies to subreddits where automoderator is installed, but in practice, automoderator is installed on every sub above a certain size simply because it does a lot of cool things.

In essence, a user can be "soft" shadowbanned this way.

the real challenge will be users attempting to use the system to shut down other subs or posters within. there are some seriously hate filled subs that people do try to get shut down with false claims of reddit rules violations; namely vote manipulation

given they also freely allow multiple accounts will they shut down all accounts they can prove are related? how do they handle multiple accounts on one IP where the users truly are distinct

All things must end. Reddit had its day in the sun and maybe it's time for something new to take its place.

I'll go elsewhere once Reddit crashes and burns. Away from the MRAs and SRS. Somewhere where the noise is squelched far from the signal.

SRS's stated goal is to highlight people on Reddit saying bad things (casual racism, stuff like that). Someone from the community finds a post somewhere on reddit they feel meets the criterion, and they post it there. Often immediately afterwards, the post, and the user who made it, begin losing karma at a rate that cannot be described as coincidental.

One of the rules in SRS is "don't touch the poop" - you're not supposed to participate in a thread that gets linked there. However, looking at the relation between post time on SRS, and karma over time, there's no other explanation for what happens to the scores of comments that get posted there.

Before you say "meh, racists, who cares?" - two problems. First, SRS's aegis has expanded to cover any criticism of the social justice movement, rather than actual hurtful comments. Second, what's happening is explicitly against the site rules regarding vote manipulation (vote brigading) - other subreddits who engaged in similar behavior had to institute rules that mandate either "no participation" links (a CSS hack that disables the voting buttons), or outright banning of intra-subreddit linking at the urging of site administration staff.

I'm reminded of the Robbers Cave Experiment, wherein all it took to create conflict between two groups of summer campers was the act of dividing them into groups. The subreddit system is genius for allowing one site to serve so many different communities, but it also sets the stage for subreddits to see other subreddits as the enemy.

(And if this comment was on Reddit, I imagine there would pretty quickly be a link to it from /r/badphilosophy talking about how badly I've misunderstood the experiment and how stupid I am, all while not actually educating me or any of the people reading my comment.)

One simple experiment is to look at the front page of the subreddit - each link description has, per the rules, the amount of comment karma it has when it was submitted. Look at relatively new posts, and look at the difference in karma at submission time and then as time goes on.

I tried this a few times months ago, and being linked from SRS led to a significant decline in scores on every post in the top 25.

>"A bunch of din du nuffins. But when these thugs get killed their mom will cry murder and say he was such a good boy." [+27] (reddit.com) >esiper 50 points 12 hours ago

>"It started with /r/jailbait, but I wasn't a ephebophile so I didn't speak up. Then they came for /r/thefappening, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't into fuzzy pictures of people I don't know. Then /r/gamergate, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a gamer. I'm speaking up now." [+28] (reddit.com) >[–][deleted] 194 points 22 hours ago*

It looks like there's an increase in karma score after it gets linked from SRS

It also appears that these are copypasted straight from the front page, you'd have to click through and look at the score on the linked subreddit.

(submitted 33 minutes ago by so_srs) "The modern view on gender: Acceptable: Female and spending most of your time on the celphone, reading literotica, and playing candy crush. Unacceptable: Male and spending most of your time on the computer, watching porn, and playing World of Warcraft." [+25] (reddit.com) -> (at 1:16 CST)[–]comosayllama 68 points an hour ago

(submitted 3 hours ago by cakevodka ) things Hitler did were terrible for sure, but, at the same time, it would be intellectually dishonest to not call him a great politician and orator. The fact that he tried to wipe out a couple races and nationalities does not make his achievements in politics and economics any less significant [+66] (reddit.com) -> (1:17 CST) [–]_Pornosonic_ 144 points 7 hours ago

Those combined with the 3 earlier comments I posted make up the last five submissions to /r/shitredditsays(with the exception of one where the original comment was deleted), the first part is the linked comment and the second is the comment score(now with timestamp!)

I can't actually find a single instance from the front page where the score goes down after being submitted. The opposite is usually the case, where the score increases after being posted to SRS

HN uses it too sometimes. Basically, a hellbanned user doesn’t know they’ve been banned: they can still comment, add submissions etc. The difference is that all their activity is hidden to normal users.