
Let's talk content. AMA - ssclafani
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_talk_content_ama/
======
thisisdallas
From the comments:

Q: In Ellen Pao's op-ed in the Washington Post today, she said "But to attract
more mainstream audiences and bring in the big-budget advertisers, you must
hide or remove the ugly."

How much of the push toward removing "ugly" elements of Reddit comes from the
motivation to monetize Reddit?

A: Zero.

_____________________

His reply currently has -1022 points. The censorship of Reddit for
advertisement purposes has been a topic of discussion in a select few
subreddits for quite awhile. It looks like the rest of reddit is finally
realizing what is going on.

I don't have anything against it, people have to make money and with free
services like reddit, the users are the product that is sold to advertisers.

What I don't understand is, why not just admit it? From my ~20 years of
internet usage, I have learned the one constant is you never lie to the
internet.

Also, from the list of prohibited content:

>Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people

This sounds like a rule that some teenager made up for guild forums. How in
the world does Huffman think using something so vague as an actual punishable
rule will turn out well?

Anyway, good luck to Huffman he is going to need it. I feel like voat.co is
going to see a very huge increase in numbers during the next few months.

~~~
mindslight
> _What I don 't understand is, why not just admit it [users are the product
> that is sold to advertisers]._

Because reddit's popularity is built on the illusion of being the complete
opposite! One of the first large influxes of users came from Digg, who had
their own revolt over censoring a 16 byte number.

Centralized sites have been given a pass for way too long. Let us hope the
pendulum swings back the other way hard. Restricting communication, no matter
how repulsive one finds the content, does _not_ make the "world ... a better
place".

~~~
tptacek
That's a worldview that does not accept any circumstance in which speech is
also an action. But posting non-consensual pornography is more than speech;
it's also a deliberate and disastrous violation of someone else's privacy.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Is publishing any private fact a person wishes to hide "more than speech", or
is it only publishing information about their genitals? I.e., what principle
(if any) distinguishes between publishing a picture of Donald Trump's penis
and publishing a (hypothetical) private racist conversation of his?

~~~
interesting_att
Honestly seems like people trump the word "privacy" and "free speech" when it
fits their agenda/world-views.

------
briholt
This doesn't solve the problem. Banning "[a]nything that harasses, bullies, or
abuses an individual or group of people" is so open-ended that it could
include minor criticism or it could exclude flagrant bigotry, depending on the
interpreter. They've replaced the de facto policy of arbitrarily banning
things they don't like with an official policy of arbitrarily banning things
they don't like.

~~~
gooeyblob
When was reddit arbitrarily banning things they don't like?

~~~
leereeves
Reddit still lacks an objective definition for "harassment". (So does the
world, I think.)

> When was reddit arbitrarily banning things they don't like?

When they banned five subreddits (actually quite a few more than that, but
five were announced), without a clear policy that could be fairly enforced on
all subs.

~~~
DanBC
That banning was consistant with existing reddit rules at the time and was not
out of the blue. FPH especially had been warned several times about vote
brigading; many of the FPH users got shadow bans for vote brigading.

~~~
EdiX
And yet ShitRedditSays is allowed to vote brigade as much as it wants.

~~~
DanBC
No, they're not.

Point out vote brigades to the admins and they shadow ban users and the sub
risks being banned.

Reddit should just release some charts of brigades from FPH and SRS.

------
nl
Prohibited: _Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group
of people (these behaviors intimidate others into silence)_

About time.

~~~
ttrashh
I consider your comment harassment. I think it should be removed.

Slippery slope don't you think?

~~~
zorpner
One my favorite things about the anti-SJW movement is how they fundamentally
_don 't understand_ what they're opposing. They see people using words like
"harassment" and achieving results, so they go full cargo cult and start
spewing those same words in the belief that they'll be able to achieve
something as well. It reminds me of the sovereign citizen movement, a belief
that there's some set of magic words that gets results, rather than actually
interacting with society.

~~~
meowface
I don't know, in an Internet context "harassment" can be very ambiguous. In
real life situations it's usually pretty clear, but some people may consider
certain Internet activities harassment while others may strongly disagree.

------
pervycreeper
>Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people

This is incredibly ambiguous. I think it is important to specify what exactly
harassment _isn 't_, and explicitly permit that.

Most people claiming 'harassment' are simply using it as a tool to silence and
persecute people who dare to hold opinions that differ from their own. For
example, the Twitter harassment trial that just finished yesterday in Toronto.
[1] Merely saying that one 'feels harassed' should not count for anything.

Furthermore there is a problem with labelling certain communities as being
problematic, or whatever word they are searching for. This makes uncommon or
novel viewpoints vulnerable to further marginalization if their opponents
succeed in giving them that label.

[1] [http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-
blatchfor...](http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchford-
ruling-in-twitter-harassment-trial-could-have-enormous-fallout-for-free-
speech)

~~~
braythwayt
Spez quoted the existing harassment policy. It is not as simple as “feeling
harassed:”

 _Systematic and /or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way
that would make a reasonable person (1) conclude that reddit is not a safe
platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation, or (2)
fear for their safety or the safety of those around them._

The key phrases to me are “systemic and/or continued” and “a reasonable
person."

~~~
pervycreeper
I'm sure what they have in mind is pretty well-considered, however, the
pitfalls I outlined above still remain. For instance, different people have
different ideas of what a `reasonable person' is. Generally, one which is
pretty close to themselves! Also, ``systemic and/or continued'' also means
different things to different people. For instance, the opponents of Gamer-
Gate claimed (and perhaps genuinely believed) themselves to be targets of a
`harassment campaign', when in fact, they were receiving disagreement and
mockery from many different sources, each only communicating once or a handful
of times. [1]

So, that wording of the policy still leaves plenty of leeway for the sort of
abuse I described above.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-
group_homogeneity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity)

~~~
braythwayt
That’s the way laws work: They can’t be applied by algorithm, you need
judgment. If you don’t trust the judges, you can’t work around that by writing
laws so explicit that they can’t be misapplied. Doesn’t work.

If the issue here is that you don’t trust Reddit, we should debate that. I’d
say that’s a much bigger problem than not trusting the way that policy is
worded.

~~~
EdiX
The problem with censorship rules is that it's very hard to trust anyone with
them because the act of enforcing the rule removes all evidence of rule
violation from public scrutiny.

------
comrh
> Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people
> (these behaviors intimidate others into silence)

> /r/coontown will be reclassified. The content there is offensive to many,
> but does not violate our current rules for banning.

Seriously? /r/coontown isn't harassing, bulling, or abusing a group of people?
This AMA didn't clarify anything at all, these were always the vague,
sometimes enforced, rules.

~~~
lazzlazzlazz
Having hateful beliefs is not in itself harassing, bullying, or abusing
individuals.

~~~
comrh
Doesn't it abuse "groups of people" then?

~~~
leereeves
By that vague definition, doesn't /r/politics "abuse" Republicans?

~~~
nl
I just took a look at the /r/politics front page. I don't think there is
anything there a reasonable person would think was harassment, bullying or
abuse. The closest is a claim that "right wing extremists have no qualms
destroying people's lives", but I don't think that would pass the reasonable
person test.

~~~
leereeves
I agree. /r/politics shouldn't be banned for harassment, bullying, or abuse,
but it could qualify under some definitions.

For example, check out the comments on
[https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/3di5ty/ben_carson...](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/3di5ty/ben_carson_will_attend_iowa_religious_liberties/)

~~~
nl
Can you point to a specific comment?

There is one where he is called a religious nut, but that seems as bad as it
gets. I don't see any problem.

It isn't useful presenting hypothetical situations. If there is a problem on
/r/politics then point to it.

~~~
leereeves
Well, we have the usual insults about Republicans: racist, crazy, bigots,
stupid.

> The GOP can't run a black guy. The rift between voting Republican and
> maintaining baseless hatred for minorities would cause too many voters'
> heads to explode.

> You're talking as though the republican electorate has a memory.

> Can you all just admit that the entire republican party represents the
> ideals that this guy embraces (hating gay people) and what Donald Trump
> continues to spew (hating immigrants and hispanics).

The specific baseless suggestion for this post: Ben Carson wants to kill gays
(because he accepted an invitation).

> Ben "Compassionate Execution" Carson

> i.e. gays are like insects? Wait, best not to give Carson any ideas...

A random suggestion that Ben Carson is a drug abuser:

> I can't comprehend how a Doctor that graduated from John Hopkins and Yale
> turned out the way he did.

> ...

> unfettered access to the best drugs?

Some random insults:

> Bobby "Stupid Party" Jindal, Tom "Tehran" Cotton, James "Senator Snowball"
> Inhofe, Bobby "the exorcist" Jindal

> Alas, it is true...Ben Carson does not have a neocortex.

All fairly typical for a political discussion, I know. Still disgusting.
(Speaking as a liberal-leaning independent.)

~~~
nl
None of these are anything like what harassment laws target. Additionally, a
much higher bar is set when talking about a public figure. It's fine to call a
politician stupid, and no reasonable person would consider that harassment.

~~~
leereeves
Were we talking about harassment laws?

I thought we were talking about a much wider definition of harassment, wider
even than reddit policies - one which might include /r/coontown (and perhaps
also /r/politics).

~~~
irishcoffee
You were, until the debate was lost.

------
slg
TL;DR - We will still allow almost all the same hateful stuff we have
previously allowed, but we will do our best to hide it so people will stop
complaining.

------
tptacek
They're going to require a login to see the "indecent" subreddits. I wonder,
are they going to take any other measures to make them difficult to reach
from, e.g., search engines?

Will they run advertisements on "indecent" subreddits?

~~~
kevinmchugh
Turning racist subreddits into cost centers feels like a good alignment of
incentives, but it's weird to give toxic users an ad-free experience because
they're toxic.

~~~
munchbunny
That's an interesting point, but my read on Huffman's original comment is that
it's more for market reasons.

I work in the ad tech industry, and my read is that this is Huffman trying to
assure brands that Reddit is a reputable venue for advertising. For example,
most major brands are VERY skittish about going anywhere near family
unfriendly content because they don't want to be associated with a
questionable site.

From this perspective, accidentally giving toxic users an ad-free experience
(a small thing) is a worthwhile tradeoff if it means you can attract the big
advertisers (a huge thing).

~~~
davidgerard
Unfortunately, it will remain a true statement that "Reddit hosts the largest
white-nationalist forum on the Internet" (just /r/coontown alone already has
nearly the pageviews of Stormfront). It is literally true that every
advertising dollar will be supporting Nazis. That's not going to be an easy
sell.

------
oldmanjay
It strikes me that nearly every problem Reddit faces is a result of
centralization and scale. The right answer is for users to go back to a self-
hosted model, which will never happen because people follow crowds
instinctively.

~~~
kelseydh
Almost reminds me of the Silk Road, and the move towards decentralized
markets. Someone needs to make a decentralized reddit where anyone can go
wherever they wish easily, and no one is tasked with serious governance issues
-- let each subreddit govern themselves.

~~~
spc476
A network where the users are in control of what they see and hear. A ... user
net of some sort. You could probably call it usenet. Yeah, that has a nice
ring to it.

~~~
oldmanjay
You could call it usenet, but someone would have to give it a better interface
than the thing we call usenet now. People in general are not going to give up
the modern comforts of the web for freedom.

------
ars
> “We need people whose stupidity clashes against our values.”

No. We don't. Those people are a detriment with no redeeming qualities.

You can clash against values without being stupid.

But in any case clashing against the hivemind on reddit is quite hard, and boy
oh boy the hivemind can be stupid.

If reddit actually want to make things better they can get rid of the downvote
option.

~~~
Retra
Removing down-votes doesn't help unless you've got a fairly sparse sub to
begin with. Facebook doesn't have down-votes, and I consider that one of its
poorer features.

------
smegel
Not exactly the change people were anticipating.

In fact, I'm not sure there is a change.

~~~
waterlesscloud
The biggest change is making subs that violate "common decency" opt-in.

I predict they'll find a new phrase for that criteria as "common decency"
pretty obviously would re-classify subs that are not what they're really
after.

~~~
ForHackernews
"Unpalatable to advertisers"

~~~
res0nat0r
What's wrong with that honestly? I'm totally fine with them removing
subs/content that exists only because assholes on the internet are anonymous.
This whole nerd rage is from nothing in my opinion, they are telling the
idiots to take it somewhere else, and the majority of the rest of us can read
content on our subs and the staff doesn't have to waste time with the back and
forth or lawyers that comes with questionable content.

~~~
ForHackernews
I didn't say there was anything wrong with it. I totally agree that they
should ban racist/sexist/bigoted garbage.

I do think it's kind of pathetic how transparently Reddit's owners only ever
respond when they get bad press from the mainstream media, instead of showing
some spine and real moral leadership.

It's sad that Coke's ad buying team is what passes for a conscience today.

~~~
res0nat0r
Spez is hosting an AMA right now with 15k comments, and 2k new ones since I
last refreshed, I'd hardly call that only responding in mainstream media.

~~~
ForHackernews
I'm sorry, my phrasing was ambiguous (now edited). I mean that the only time
Reddit's leaders show any concern over the horrible content on their site is
when that horrible content shows up on the frontpage of CNN.com.

------
kelseydh
Reddit is in dire need of a UI/UX improvement. The site is unuseable without
the Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) browser extension.

Honestly it feels like developers have not made a significant change to Reddit
in years. Screw advertising revenue, Reddit needs to begin making improvements
gradually to its user interface or else it risks becoming a dinosaur.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
_The site is unuseable without the Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) browser
extension._

Not much of a Redditor, but could you elaborate as to why the vanilla Reddit
UI is "unuseable"?

~~~
theseatoms
Yeah, I hear this often, but I've never used RES and the site seems fine.
Maybe I have some form of Stockholm Syndrome..

~~~
ars
The most useful thing in it is the ability to load an image or video inline in
the page. A single click and the image is there, and resizeable by dragging
the mouse.

It does other things too, but the images is the most important IMO.

Without it you have to keep clicking back and forth from page to image.

~~~
wingerlang
I've used RES for years, just turned it off yesterday. The only thing I
noticed was the inline things and 'ctrl + b' not working when bolding
something. Autoload on scroll as well but that was even annoying at times.

------
andrewstuart2
> The reason we’re careful to restrict speech is because people have more open
> and authentic discussions when they aren't worried about the speech police
> knocking down their door.

Am I reading this right? As in, we restrict speech because people speak more
freely when they're not free to speak?

~~~
mwfunk
You may be reading it wrong. It sounds like they don't want an environment in
which people aren't sure what is allowed or not allowed. "Careful to restrict
speech" in the sense that you don't want to go overboard with rules and
moderation because you end up trading one problem (bad behavior from bad
citizens) for another (an overly sanitized and controlled environment).

OTOH, even your interpretation makes some degree of sense to me. When a
community turns toxic, the bad behavior from the bad citizens drives away all
of the good citizens who are positive contributors. It's just like mailing
lists or discussion sites like HN. Personal attacks beget more personal
attacks, and eventually so much of the comments are malicious or stupid that
people who actually have something to contribute go elsewhere.

An extreme example would be YouTube comments. If you see a bunch of terrible
comments that barely parse as human language, you are that much more unlikely
to leave a well-written comment because why bother? It'd be pearls before
swine (if all the comments are terrible, then the people who bother reading
the comments are likely also terrible).

It sounds like Reddit is just trying to avoid the downward spiral that almost
every electronic community goes through eventually, but are aware that taking
this too far could have a chilling effect on the larger, more constructive
community that they want to retain.

------
Pyxl101
This Reddit comment (from the thread being linked to but not easy to see, at
the time I write this) catalogs the various public statements that staff have
made over time about Reddit being a place for free speech on the web:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_talk_content_ama/ct5r0ch)

It's interesting to see what was said in the past and how it compares to the
narrative today.

------
jewbacca
For very many habitual users of Reddit, the way in which it is probably most
valuable is as the canonical general discussion forum of the web. An important
part of the infrastructure of their perception and interpretation of the world
around them, for pretty much any domain beyond the most incommunicably
personal.

To read Reddit can be, in a surprisingly real way, like participating in a
collective consciousness -- with all the addictive dependence [I say that in a
non-judgemental way, not being able to come up with a less negative way to
characterize it at the moment] that the type of speculative fiction which
imagines such living arrangements usually predicts.

The practical side of this is that, for any given news event, cultural
phenomenon, popularly-circulating idea, whatever: for these users it is
instinctive to consult the reddit threads on the topic, as a deeply-ingrained
part of their process for digesting and interpreting it. That those reddit
threads will exist and have an active discussion on any given topic is a
given. Even if the local source of a news piece has a forum/thread of its own,
it is fundamentally not the same thing.

It's been, in a hazy golden age that may have never actually existed,
something close a total function for processing the events of the world, big
and small.

One day, there was an event, a dumb internet drama event, but one for which
the primary Reddit discussion thread was displaying a count of 20 thousand
comments -- but on inspection, every single last one of those was showing up
as [deleted]. That was the start of it for most users. Many have fixated on
the specific topic of that initial drama as the source of the problem with
Reddit, and many others have fixated on this fixation as the source of the
problem with Reddit.

But there is a general sense that this is growing, spreading, and mutating,
and seems to be cropping up in places that are not strictly predictable.

For example, there are persistent rumours that several of the more popular
subreddits for which the news would be directly and explicitly on-topic, are
systematically removing discussions about various global trade agreements
currently being negotiated. Is it true? Maybe, maybe not, but the trust is
broken.

\----

The main thing is (the perception that):

Now there is a partial function where before there was a total function. That
is disastrous damage in an information processing system.

\----

To these users, this is a very profound and frightening piece of damage,
having extended a part of their cognition into this machinery that now seems
to be failing. Panic sets in, which obviously means wild flailing at anything
that pops its head up and can be in any way seen as responsible for the
damage.

Hence, the reaction to Ellen Pao (and what would have been the reaction to
Steve Huffman here, had he unilaterally taken a more extreme stance than he
has here). Especially after she made public statements of purpose that were
easily interpretable by these users to the effect of "whatever else might be
the source of the damage to your extended cognition, we intend to start
deliberately doing some more damage to areas we don't consider important".

\----

\----

Also important to understanding this:

To the users I'm talking about, the "cognitive value" of Reddit is not
entirely about directly being fed opinions to take up as one's own.

Many of these users find great value to being exposed to, they deliberately
seek out for their own enrichment: idiocy, malice, counterfactuals, cognitive
dissonance, debate (honest and otherwise), the whole range of perceptions and
opinions. To them, being exposed to these things is just as much of the value
of Reddit as the "good stuff". And that seems to be the aspect of Reddit most
strongly and immediately under threat.

Anyone who does not value this kind of experience (which seems to be a very
large proportion of the people participating in this conversation at the most
visible levels) is going to see any attempt to frame this type of content as
valuable in any way as totally incomprehensible, evil, and malicious itself.
So this part of things is pretty close to an impossible conversation to have
in public.

\----

\----

(reposting a comment that I've made before, in a thread that was apparently
soft-killed on HN)

~~~
jewbacca
Here is a similarly-aligned sentiment from the OP thread here, beautifully-
stated by somebody with potentially more credibility on the subject (let's be
honest here) than me (though do note that she rightly does not claim to be
speaking for anybody but herself):

\----

> I have been a redditor for a very long time, and I've been part of a range
> of kinds of communities that vary fairly significantly.

> I am also a female who was raped, and this is something I have been opened
> about talking fairly frequently on reddit.

> I disagree with the ban of the aforementioned sub, because I feel that it
> sets a precedent depending on what the society deems appropriate to think
> about, and what it does not.

> Please note, that I can not and do not pretend to speak for any woman who
> was raped besides myself.

> What I am concerned with is this distinct drawing of a line between the
> people who own the site, and the people who create the content on the site.
> Reddit appealed to me because it was the closest thing to a speaking
> democracy I could find in my entire existence, utilizing technology in a way
> that is almost impossible to recreate across large populations of people
> otherwise.

> This sequence of events marks this as a departure from that construct. From
> today onwards, I know that I am not seeing clusters of people with every
> aspect of their humanity shown, as ugly as it may be sometimes. I feel that
> it is not the subreddit that causes subs like /r/rapingwomen to exist, but
> this stems from a larger cultural problem. Hiding it or sweeping it under a
> rug from the masses is not what solves the problem; I have already lived
> under those rules and I have seen them to be ineffective at best and
> traumatizing / mentally warping at worst.

> People's minds should not be ruled over by the minds of other people, and
> that is what I feel this has become. Internet content is thought content,
> idea content. It is not the act of violence - these are two very separate
> things. You can construct a society that appears to value and cherish
> women's rights in the highest regard, and yet the truth can be the furthest
> thing from it.

> I really would hope that you would reconsider your position. To take away
> the right of being able to know with certainty that one can speak freely
> without fear, I don't have many words to offer that fully express my sadness
> at that.

> The problem is not the banning of specifics. The problem is how it affects
> how people reason afterwards about their expectations of the site and their
> interactions with others. It sets up new social constructs and new social
> rules, and will alter things significantly, even fractions of things you
> would not expect. It is like a butterfly effect across the mind, to believe
> you can speak freely, and to have that taken away.

\-- /u/abcabcdeabc, responding directly to Steve Huffman

[https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_t...](https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_talk_content_ama/ct5si6q?context=1)

------
interesting_att
Am I the only one who didn't see anything of value in this AMA from /u/spez?

------
cag_ii
Seems completely reasonable, maybe just a bit vague...

The only surprising thing to me about this announcement is that they didn't
already have such a policy in place.

------
xacaxulu
Pao has whatever the opposite of the Midas touch is.

------
Fuzzwah
> Anything illegal

Illegal where?

~~~
y-satellite
The US, since that is where reddit is based.

~~~
Fuzzwah
CA laws specifically then?

------
em3rgent0rdr
"Anything illegal"

That's a pretty broad catch-all.

------
boards2x
Hilarious. Spam is strictly prohibited, while hate-speech is tolerated, unless
inciting. spam must be lethal. Anywho, I've never liked Reddit and like it
even less seeing what's going in there.

>> These types of content are prohibited [1]: >> Spam

~~~
mrkurt
Spam is easy to recognize. Hate-speech isn't, there's a tremendous range of
speech that may-or-may not be hate speech.

~~~
bluecalm
Yeah but... racism is well established as a harmful thing by now. If you host
subs dedicated to it you are making the world a worse place. It might be a
tough call with other things but this one is as clear-cut as it gets.

