
Reddit cracks down on abuse as CEO apologizes for trolling the trolls - emilong
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/when-your-ceo-is-a-troll-too/
======
volak
I don't really want to comment - but I'd just say to anyone (including the
writer of this article) to imagine someone artificially limiting the impact of
your favorite platform of free expression. Hell just turn the mental corner
and consider your arguments FOR net neutrality. Or try to recall your
disappointment every time you read about some site being banned in China or
Iran.

To China and Iran - facebook is a "disruptive community." To use reddit's
language.

Its a sad moment in history that the people calling themselves liberals don't
actually know what it means.

~~~
colechristensen
The subreddit in question manipulates the algorithm in bad faith and bans any
sort of dissent or disagreement.

They're not attacking free expression but trying to reign in abuse of their
platform.

Nobody really knows what "liberal" means because it's been used in several
very opposite ways in different times and places.

~~~
volak
I don't buy the argument that they are exploiting anything - but I do
recognize that their community is very overly active but I wouldn't call that
exploiting

~~~
colechristensen
The vote totals aren't anything like any other subreddit has been. They were
also using the pinning in a way no other subreddit did.

Just google – the_donald upvote script – to get an idea. Several tools were
released for users to upvote or downvote everything targeting a subreddit or
user. It's a sort of grassroots vote manipulation scheme.

~~~
volak
Well I could write a r/hillaryclinton upvote script and post on gists in a few
minutes - doesn't really prove anything. The only people who could have real
evidence of rule breaking would be the admins and from the little we know we
know the admins hate TD - if they are being botted they'd be gone already

~~~
colechristensen
You could; I'm not talking about the existence of such things but the
prevalence. There probably wasn't much blatant botting, but a lot of mild
botting which is much more difficult to detect and lives in a grey area.

------
minimaxir
Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao made a good comment on the controversy:
[https://reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_by_e...](https://reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_by_editing_some_comments_and_creating_an/damuzhb/?context=1)

~~~
boomzilla
That's very childish and lame for Steve Huffman to say "Ellen wasn't the first
Reddit engineer, so she probably lacked the expertise to do it, and even if
she did, she was smart enough to not".

I think this guy needs to grow up.

~~~
michaelvoz
Yeah, he is a child. I can't imagine a CEO of any company I have ever worked
at acting as such. I wonder how employees of reddit feel at the moment?

~~~
retrogradeorbit
I cannot understand how the board hasn't dismissed him over the comment
editing subterfuge. It's simply not how a CEO should behave. No matter what is
being said about him.

Basically, by not firing him, the board is sending a message. It is saying
that 1. The platform and it's comments cannot be trusted. and 2. That it's ok
for employees to surreptitiously edit comments. If the CEO did it and didn't
get fired, then how could they fire a lower level employee for doing it?

The CEO has set the standard through his own behaviour. And that is now the
culture of reddit. By not dismissing the CEO, the board has sent the message
that they accept this behaviour.

------
michaelvoz
I would hardly call this an apology. Also kind-of bold of him to use this as a
platform to implement new abusive rules. I don't like the subreddit, but
selective enforcement and targeting a single community is very toxic to what
little trust I had left in the reddit admins.

~~~
meritt
The problem is they aren't their own little community. They actively target,
brigade (large group upvoting/downvoting), and intentionally troll other
communities with their only goal being to fuck with people and overwhelmingly
push their rhetoric.

Reddit strives to have a positive community and when you let the trolls run
the system, you end up with an utter cesspool (e.g.
[https://voat.co/](https://voat.co/)), and that kills your company's value.

Reddit (nor Twitter) is under no obligation to be a platform for free speech,
and it's completely within their right to dictate who gets to participate and
what they're allowed to discuss.

~~~
SixSigma
> They actively target, brigade (large group upvoting/downvoting), and
> intentionally troll other communities with their only goal being to fuck
> with people and overwhelmingly push their rhetoric.

[citation needed]

I'm there every day and I don't know about that, quite the opposite.

We don't link outside the sub, heck we are not even allowed to mention
/r/politics in post titles under threat from Reddit admins. It is now know as
/r/[redacted] for that reason.

EDIT: downvotes are not citations

~~~
meritt
[http://gizmodo.com/reddit-is-tearing-itself-
apart-1789406294](http://gizmodo.com/reddit-is-tearing-itself-
apart-1789406294) has a decent summary of the problems over the past few
months.

> Centipede Central is the chat Reddit is referring to—a chat room within the
> Slack-like Discord program ... its users have encouraged the harassment of
> other moderators, artificially inflated the vote count on posts, rigged off-
> Reddit polls, and posted John Podesta’s personal Netflix login information
> for the chat’s 1000+ members to use at will.

~~~
SixSigma
There are 300k+ subscribers to T_D

I am one of those who have never even heard of that chat room, nor visited.
And I am on T_D all day long every day since February.

We have posts with 7k+ points and 56% upvoted.

[https://i.redditmedia.com/RbqqP0Cpfs-
o-B1DVWIwIqtUU8-dtxUahf...](https://i.redditmedia.com/RbqqP0Cpfs-
o-B1DVWIwIqtUU8-dtxUahf_uosOAKB0.png?w=848&s=d639846d2be5372531367f9a5e8073aa)

If anyone is under attack, it is us.

Even the famous Ellen Pao thinks Spez made a huge mistake and says "I would
have immiediately fired anyone did that [edited user posts]"

[https://i.redditmedia.com/-VmuoYhuKv-Uj-
Ild8_FAhGgQgXM68OsuN...](https://i.redditmedia.com/-VmuoYhuKv-Uj-
Ild8_FAhGgQgXM68OsuN_E-DYOxyc.jpg?w=1024&s=826da08b70c7409958d08b2b70b1209f)

/r/all is now a safe space for people who can't handle seeing certain text !!

And the stupidest part is : Reddit is a commercial enterprise.

300k t_d subscribers. Instead of embracing a customer base and working out how
to profit from it, he's pissed everybody off my repeatedly kicking the nest.
Either directly or by letting CTR take over r/politics. They should have had a
sales team focussing directly upon us and building an income stream. Instead
they've generated a whole bunch of people who actively boycott buying Reddit
Gold, will never click on your ads, even in other subreddits.

What would you give for 300k high energy cross demographic customers with a
tight focus on conservatism. I wouldn't be giving them annoyance and grief.

"Front Page of the Internet" is the greatest joke of all

------
watty
Calling people you disagree with "trolls" and dismissing censoring as just
"trolling" is a poor attempt at an apology. And that's coming from someone who
hates /r/the_donald.

~~~
kristianov
Calling part of their user base trolls is just dehumanization, making them
seem less than human and hence not worthy of fair treatment.

~~~
freehunter
Calling a troll a troll is not dehumanization. Especially when spez called
HIMSELF a troll and said he was trolling and was raised as a troll.

------
Mao_Zedang
This is how moderator/admin abuse is done now, selective enforcement of the
rules, even HN is guilty of this sometimes.

------
carsongross
I wonder how many comments per thread like this are typed and then abandoned
by people saying "It just isn't worth it."

------
8gbFg4MF8QzsuZa
Nothing new and nobody should be surprised. Over 5 years ago I moderated a
community that had extensive problems with a subset of very problematic users.
This lead to real world problems and ultimately intervention from local law
enforcement. It was during this time that I learned the admin team dealt with
these times of users by working, not dealing, with them. It became evident
that [a]dmins had been tipping off these users, keeping them one step ahead.
As these admins were called out they would fall silent and the cycle would
begin again.

------
perseusprime11
Isn't Reddit a platform for trolls? Even Quora these days has become crazy to
read through all the silly stuff.

------
MK999
Since #PizzaGate is the backdrop, I learned a few minutes ago about the
breitbart podesta tweet. Maybe it will interest someone
[https://twitter.com/AndrewBreitbart/status/33636278100561920](https://twitter.com/AndrewBreitbart/status/33636278100561920)

------
shagie
Short version:

* The steps to allow for censorship in the software and diminish the visibility of asshattery is a necessary thing. * It is unfortunate that it wasn't done before. * It is a pattern that has repeated itself many times over the decades. * Read A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. * Web 2.0 puts too much work on too few people.

Long version:

One of the talks that was passed around (I think it was Everything2 that
introduced me to it, but I could be wrong) is A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (
[http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html](http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html)
). This goes to the problems and some necessary designs for social software -
reddit is one such example.

The story in that talk that this current episode reminds me of is that of
Communitree:

\----

> Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue.
> "Communitree" \-- the name just says "California in the Seventies." And the
> notion was, effectively, throw off structure and new and beautiful patterns
> will arise.

> And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were
> previously disconnected has seen, that does happen. Incredible things
> happen. The early days of Echo, the early days of usenet, the early days of
> Lucasfilms Habitat, over and over again, you see all this incredible
> upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in ways they weren't before.

> And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the
> difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that
> got hold of some modems was a high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out
> in the room with the computer and the modems in it, but the boys of that
> high school. And the boys weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult
> conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in
> salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter
> words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.

> And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by
> these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open
> access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own
> users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They
> had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of free speech we meant."

> But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being
> overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn't have,
> and as a result, they simply shut the site down.

\----

To me, Reddit is facing this exact same problem. It wants to be a place for
free speech, but the right type of free speech. It also hasn't designed the
necessary infrastructure of code to allow the community of not t_d to defend
itself and maintain the type of content that that core community wants.

And thus, backchannel slack channels to try to get people to tone it down a
bit - because the software didn't support the necessary structures to prevent
it from happening.

That passage quoted above goes on:

> Now you could ask whether or not the founders' inability to defend
> themselves from this onslaught, from being overrun, was a technical or a
> social problem. Did the software not allow the problem to be solved? Or was
> it the social configuration of the group that founded it, where they simply
> couldn't stomach the idea of adding censorship to protect their system. But
> in a way, it doesn't matter, because technical and social issues are deeply
> intertwined. There's no way to completely separate them.

> What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context
> they'd set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it
> from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters.
> Communitree wasn't shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flood the
> server. It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which is what the
> system was designed to allow. The technological pattern of normal use and
> attack were identical at the machine level, so there was no way to specify
> technologically what should and shouldn't happen. Some of the users wanted
> the system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion. And
> other of the users, the high school boys, either didn't care or were
> actively inimical. And the system provided no way for the former group to
> defend itself from the latter.

> Now, this story has been written many times. It's actually frustrating to
> see how many times it's been written. You'd hope that at some point that
> someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn't happen
> is other people don't read it.

\----

I believe that the failing of Web 2.0 is that most people don't care. User
moderated content is a great thing - when its moderated. Without that
moderation (which often falls disproportionately on a very, very, small group)
you end up with doing tech support for people who are either asses to the
world or intentionally trying to make your job suck in a very hostile way.

Back channels and trying to appeal to individuals doesn't scale. The software
needs to support the necessary tools of moderation (which include censorship
and banning).

------
colechristensen
Does anyone else not care?

------
luzia19
that is so meta...

------
walrus01
reddit does not owe alt-right assholes a zero-dollar platform to have a free
forum.

If alt right people want to run their own web forum they are more than welcome
to find sufficient technical clue to rent a $250/mo dedicated server and
install some http/https based forum software on it.

people cry "censorship", but it's a private company, and if you're paying $0
they don't owe you anything. Set up your own system if you don't like what
their management is doing. You'd think that ultra right wingers, of all
people, would appreciate the irony of depending on somebody else's free forum
because they're too lazy, incompetent or feckless to do it themselves.

~~~
watty
This isn't about left or right, it's about a CEO censoring opinions that he
doesn't agree with. If it helps you understand, pretend he censored Hillary or
Bernie supporters.

~~~
walrus01
It's not a CEO censoring anything, it's a subreddit of people who troll for
the lulz having a minuscule example of their own tactics turned around upon
them, for the fleeting amusement of somebody with admin access on the servers.

------
meira
"Trolling the trolls" is a very stupid euphemism. The mainstream media is
losing all credibility built in the past decades and seems to not be able to
figure out how to halt the proccess (while changing nothing about the "values"
[and people] they protect).

~~~
tossaway1
"Trolling the trolls" was language spez used. What does this have to do with
the mainstream media?

~~~
meira
Top down narrative. Reddit CEO didn't troll the trolls, it was a huge mistake
that can put in check the entire company. TechCrunch could write 99 better
stories about this issue than this piece of propaganda.

It also reminds me Hillary campaign (and their MSM friends) calling half of US
voters deplorable.

~~~
MBCook
He changed statements against him by trolls of the_donald to say the_donald so
it appeared they were insulting themselves.

Seems like a (mild) form of trolling to me.

