
Reddit Transparency Report 2018 - chatmasta
https://www.redditinc.com/policies/transparency-report-2018
======
not_a_cop
I get the feeling if you really wanted a true transparency report, you would
discuss government requests, but also prevalence & detection & restriction of
bots, prevalence & detection & restriction of vote farming, true likelihood of
random submissions doing anything, acts of reddit censorship and the
underlying and reportable reasons for doing so, user tracking and sales &
mining of user information.

I don't see 95% of that there.

~~~
zjaffee
Traffic quality analysis is often far worse at a lot of these sorts of
companies than you'd expect. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't have an
accurate analysis on the full scope of bots on their network.

~~~
darkpuma
They're probably afraid of what they'd find.

~~~
atupis
Yeah but they should still do that. Bots and astroturfing does not generate
big revenue and they are pushing real users to other sites.

~~~
darkpuma
Consider that if they study the problem they may discover the problem is
severe and they can't fix it. Now they have an even more serious problem: If
they lie about the existence of the report, they're defrauding advertisers. If
they admit the contents of the report, advertisers and users will flee.

So it's rational for them to not look in the first place. If they don't know,
then they're not technically lying. This is good for them, but nobody else.

------
minimaxir
Related Reddit thread about the report where Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is
answering questions:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/aq9h0k/reddi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/aq9h0k/reddits_2018_transparency_report_and_maybe_other/)

Most questions are about the Tencent investment. Huffman's response:

> Our governance didn't change during this round, which means we didn't add
> anyone to the board, and our policies won't be changing either.

~~~
8ytecoder
China doesn't have anyone in the board of Hollywood production houses either
and yet I learnt right here from HN that there are no Chinese villains or bad
portrayal of China anymore. Irrespective of the money they received if they
plan to bring Reddit to China, Reddit will be washed clean to Chinese
specifications.

~~~
TheOperator
>I learnt right here from HN that there are no Chinese villains or bad
portrayal of China anymore.

That has more to do with the Chinese box office being a 9 billion a year
market than it does Chinese investors.

~~~
moorhosj
Does it? The US market is greater than $10 billion and there are plenty of
movies that portray Americans as bad guys. Seems more like the government of
China might not allow that movie to be released in the first place.

~~~
dx87
The difference is that it's an American movie with an American bad guy. Take a
look at the Chinese movie poster for "The Force Awakens", they minimized the
presence of the black character because they knew he wouldn't be popular with
Chinese audiences.

[https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/star-wars-
chi...](https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/star-wars-china-poster-
controversy.jpg)

~~~
azeotropic
Just curious -- Is Finn actually popular with any audiences? Aren't minor
villains from the original trilogy more popular than Finn?

~~~
basil-rash
Nobody knew that they didn't like Finn before the movie even came out though.
This is TFA, not TLJ.

~~~
azeotropic
The TFA release date for China was almost one month after the rest of the
world. Plenty of time to realize nobody really likes Finn,and adjust marketing
accordingly.

~~~
intertextuality
> Plenty of time to realize nobody really likes Finn

[Citation needed]

[Substantiation needed to show that marketing materials for films can be
changed that quickly]

~~~
azeotropic
Finn is consistently less popular than Grand Moff Tarkin and Boba Fett. I've
even seen him ranked below Darth Maul, who doesn't even really have a
personality at all.

It's a poster. You take it to a printing press and ask for a few thousand new
ones, it's NBD. If they didn't already have several alternate designs from
before they selected this one, it's like an hour of mucking around in adobe CS
to make Finn smaller and droids bigger, less if you have the original images
on hand.

------
hughes
Wow, emergency disclosure request compliance went from 10 in 2017 to 162 in
2018, with a near-tripling in the ratio of produced:total requests.

I wonder if their compliance policy changed, or if the requesting parties just
got better at making actionable requests, or something else?

~~~
gizmo385
My guess is that it's a combination of a larger user base attracting more
attention from law enforcement agencies. That relationship doesn't necessarily
need to be linear. Once you've gotten to a certain size, I imagine the number
of requests for content production/removal increases quite quickly.

------
JoblessWonder
I find it odd that they don't mention the data breach that happened in 2018.
[0] You would think this would be the place to disclose this and their
response in perpetuity as opposed to a reddit thread.

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/93qnm5/we_ha...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/93qnm5/we_had_a_security_incident_heres_what_you_need_to/)

~~~
fhood
"Every year, Reddit produces a Transparency Report to provide users with
information about the _types of requests that we receive from third parties
that want Reddit to disclose user data or remove content from the platform._ "

~~~
djohnston
well, it was a third party, they probably sent some sort of request to reddit,
and they certainly wanted some user data :)

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Moxdi
I liked Reddit but I think it's too big now, the format just doesn't work for
such a big website, I can't imagine the data they have though, I'm sure you
can make some crazy psychological profiles with some of the data in there.

~~~
ProAm
It's literally the worst parts of Twitter combined with the worst parts of
Facebook with comments from YouTube. I guess most aggregators are cesspools
after your cross a certain DAU threshold.

~~~
himlion
I think the subreddits are a nice solution for that though. There are a lot of
very nice and useful niche subreddits.

I agree the frontpage and r/all is a cesspool.

~~~
noir_lord
It’s the niche subreddits that keep me using it for now.

The trend is towards worse though with pretty much everything they do lately.

~~~
HNLurker2
Recommendaome subreddits, I won't ruin them :)

------
sodosopa
I wish they would list the requests by user and by sub. Would be good to see
which tend to draw the Government’s ire.

~~~
kevingrahl
I don’t think disclosing user names of requests would be in the interest of
those users.

~~~
sodosopa
I’m against it if it’s an active investigation. Otherwise obfuscate the
account name.

------
throwawaysea
Are they actually going to detail what content they banned or quarantined?
When Reddit previously went on a quarantine spree, I recall a lot of
reasonable content got the hammer as well, probably because it doesn't align
with the political groupthink of Reddit.

------
Nevermark
Oh man, you really hit some buttons with me via "Reddit" and "Transparency"!
Here is the rant that has been building in me:

The transparency I would like are three rules:

1) New policy statement: All subreddits must state moderation rules in their
side bar.

2) New technical consistency: Open moderation logs for all subreddits.

3) New feature: An open log of moderation complaints for each subreddit. Each
complaint costs the submitter $1 (or some reputation?) to avoid spam and most
thoughtless complaints.

This requires very little from Reddit:

Changes (2) and (3) only require technical changes, no personnel intervention.

Change (1) Is a policy change, but only requires manual work from Reddit after
high technical thresholds:

1a) When moderation complaint logs see a lot of submissions relative to
subreddit activity, a warning is automatically sent to the moderators whose
moderation is subject to complaints.

1b) Only when a moderator has received several warnings, will someone need to
review the complaints, the moderation log and decide if a moderator should be
removed, get a personal warning, given a clean slate with regard to past
complaints, or no action.

1c) If three or more moderators for the same subreddit have to be removed due
to consistent violation of the stated policy, then the subreddit can be
closed.

The point of all this is:

* Users no longer have to deal with deceptive moderation.

* Users do most of the oversight, Reddit takes on very little extra work.

* Subreddits that spend a lot of time trying to police moderators of related sites can stop. Either there was no problem, it will clear up, or it will be dealt with.

* Reddit becomes more useful to everyone except deceptive moderators.

~~~
seventhtiger
I disagree.

Subreddits are absolutely owned by the top mod, originally whoever created
them. It gets very political but I think your suggestions will just open up an
avenue for aggressive takeovers of subreddits.

If someone built a subreddit I think they should be free to do what they want
with it. It is authoritarian and causes drama, but not nearly as much drama as
if it was democratized and transparent. Bad faith actors can manufacture
crises constantly to take over a subreddit. It's happened already.

~~~
sridca
> It's happened already.

Where?

~~~
kkarakk
r/punchablefaces was one if i remember. some people got really riled in that
case

~~~
spiralx
The top mod of /r/punchablefaces decided that he was going to give it away and
offered it to the first person to accept it of two other mods, one from a
left-leaning sub, one from a right-leaning sub. The left-leaning one accepted
first, and got ownership.

------
zelon88
I believe an even better metric, and one that's completely overlooked, is what
data does Reddit collect about it's users from third parties that it holds and
could _potentially_ give to government entities.

I don't care about how many times the government requests data from Reddit, I
care about what Reddit keeps about me in the first place.

------
JamesSchriver
Something that is not at all addressed in any seriousness, even though it is
probably the most pertinent issue that faces Reddit in particular, especially
in something called a transparency report; is the clear abuse and misuse of
both removal of content and banning of user accounts to censor things, usually
for political reasons, but often also simply out of convenience or maybe due
to conflict of interest, or any other number or reasons. The whole premise of
Reddit was public discussion, and today the very notion of the self-moderation
and good ideas percolating up and bad ideas being deprioritized through voting
is utterly broken as moderators and administrators operate like little feudal
lords and wield their control in the most arbitrary manner with rather loose,
if any, serious adherence to even their own sub's rules.

There are some rather notable examples of that in the past even though they
somewhat escape my mind right now, but I believe there was a case of a
moderator using the power to mod in order to suppress mention of some rival
product, just as one example. I think there have also been quite notable
instances of whole threads just being "nuked" where pages and pages of
comments are simply deleted, sometimes due to corporate or even founder ego
reasons ... spez

I get that some things, especially illegal things and even things like doxing
or real spam need to be removed, but that does not mean that just because
something is removed by dictate of mods or admins, it should never ben seen
again or invisible to anyone. Make the unapproved thoughts that are not
illegal visible to users, maybe even classify them based on the reason for
mod/admin flagging, i.e., spam, wrongthink, etc. It would serve to keep mods
and admins ethical and accountable and... transparent.

I think it is a rather significant and overlooked issue. Sure you don't want,
e.g., one political group being able to spam another, but that doesn't mean
that retaining such an event and the comments, just alone for their scientific
and historical reasons, is not rather valuable.

There is also another even more significant reason, the pareto effect, which
would indicate that it is far more likely that the one outlier solution is
snuffed out because the conventional thinking deemed it as an unacceptable
outlier and snuffed the account or user out. Think of those who opposed the
Iraq war or even the Afghan war, or warned about the tech or housing bubbles,
or any number of people who warned about the things that were obvious in
hindsight, but the conventional thought persecuted before it became painfully
obvious.

When you start digging into the details of this phenomenon, it is quite
unsettling actually just how likely it is that the spark of genius we are all
hoping for regarding any particular matter under consideration, may have been
snuffed because it or the person that could have provided the solution was
declared an personal non grata and were essentially put in a digital
concentration camp or buried in a digital mass grave of accounts, executed by
some fanatic moderator or administrator that did not tolerate wrongthink or
free speech as ever broader rubrics of language are falling under ever harsher
persecution.

Just think of all the outliers that have produced essentially most major
discoveries, now imagine if they had been making their controversial points
today in a forum. They would have been shunned and immediately shadow banned,
fully banned, or summarily had their voice snuffed out in any number of ways,
maybe even just by one moderator or administrator with a dictatorial chip on
their shoulder with far more control and power than any one person should have
over another person's voice and speech ... no matter how much you are self-
convinced that they are wrong and you are right and therefor no one else
should be able to hear what you don't approve of.

That applies to this forum too by the way. I know, this is the dominion of the
technocratic elite demigods and wrongthink will not be tolerated from mere
inferiors, but just think about it all for a second ... if you even get to see
this point being made and some mod hasn't deemed it unacceptable for others to
see. But you wouldn't have ever known that it was even made, because there
would be no trace of it, on orders of the mod executioner.

~~~
sctb
On this site you can enable 'showdead' in your profile.

------
master-litty
Spez is answering questions in the related announcements thread and,
remarkably, responded to a question about reddit's historic free speech
stance. [0]

Completely dodged the question and pulled the "Think Of The Children" card,
framing the asker as a CP supporter.

Game over for free speech on reddit. It's so blatant it's insulting.

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/aq9h0k/reddi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/aq9h0k/reddits_2018_transparency_report_and_maybe_other/egedlhh/)

------
scottbartell
Does anyone know what kind of growth Reddit has seen over the past few years?
I'm curious if the trend in number of disclosure requests over time looks any
different when normalized for some sort of growth metric.

------
aboutruby
> In 2018, Reddit received 28 requests for the production of user account
> information from foreign governmental authorities (excluding emergency
> requests). Reddit did not comply with any of these requests.

------
lawnchair_larry
Apparently nobody in this thread understands what a transparency report is.
Also, the level of entitlement in these comments is off the charts.

It’s a report on government/law enforcement requests. This concept wasn’t
started by reddit, but by Google and Microsoft.

Reddit is a private company and owes you nothing. Deal with it or visit
another site. It’s one thing to suggest changes, but don’t start thinking they
or any other company owes it to you to produce whatever documentation and
reporting you happen to be curious about.

------
wnevets
I wonder how many of those request are related to the 2016 election.

------
mscasts
I feel like reddit nowadays needs a transparency report for their own actions.
I don't know what happened to reddit, but it isn't so transparent anymore.

------
tlynchpin
I saw this earlier today scrolling through in card view mode, except what I
saw was an image macro with text about how I'm using an ad blocker. I was
amused, the irony of a transparency report being blocked because of an ad
blocker. I was using Brave. I didn't click through, yep I'm just gonna scroll
by without updoot because the Great Thing About Reddit is it (mostly) works
great with no account. At least so far.

------
lwansbrough
Wow, we Canadians sure do love our takedown requests (section 3). Wonder what
the reason is for our disproportionately high number of requests.

------
sdinsn
They didn't include how many posts were removed as "spam". It seems like an
important thing to include.

~~~
Deimorz
That has nothing to do with the purpose of the transparency report, which is
specifically about third-party requests:

> Every year, Reddit produces a Transparency Report to provide users with
> information about the types of requests that we receive from third parties
> that want Reddit to disclose user data or remove content from the platform.

~~~
Rebelgecko
They make a point of showing that Reddit admins delete less content than the
various subreddit moderators do. I would guess that 90% of the stuff being
removed by mods (or AutoMod) is spam, making it a bit of an apples to oranges
comparison

~~~
SaltySolomon
As I read it they didn't include what they remove automatically as spam, just
what they as humans remove.

------
kevinSuttle
I must be looking at this incorrectly. I don’t see ‘Requests from Reddit
Investors’ listed anywhere.

------
x80
Ironic that they're actively censoring critical comments in the transparency
report post.

------
pylus
reddit is much a manipulated site. It’s terrible than Facebook but slightly
better than Twitter.

