
Reddit downgrades technology community after censorship - richardwigley
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27100773
======
alrs
We lost USENET, and it has been replaced by a website owned by Conde Nast.

We had an open and decentralized discussion system that was globally
replicated. We had scores of NNTP clients to choose from.

Now it is 2014 and I am lamenting what was lost by editing a post on a
webpage. This is a catastrophe.

~~~
arbitrage
The death of USENET was uncontrollable spam, and that it was coopted into a
binary media distribution network. For a decentralized discussion forum, the
overhead was absolutely massive, and nobody wanted to pay for that and receive
no direct revenue.

Websites, while still spammable, are able to control it a bit better, and if
you can't figure out any other way to monetize your forum, you can always slap
some ads on it.

This stuff doesn't exist in a vacuum. Someone has to pay the bills,
unfortunately.

~~~
username223
You could avoid most of the binaries by not distributing some alt.* groups,
and use existing email filters for the spam. As for making a buck, ISPs could
just tack on a fee for running NNTP servers. Alas, we have shitty web forums
wrapped in ads instead.

------
bane
I think the real problem is that Reddit's core mod tools are pretty woeful and
age-old problems haven't been fixed.

/r/modhelp is basically full of the same problems and issues that mods have
been having for years.

Some examples:

* Want to run your sub without downvotes? Sorry (you can hide the button via css, but people can still hotkey it)

* Have a sockpuppet downvote brigade screwing up your sub? Message the reddit admins and hope they bother reading your message and doing anything about it. Because you have no idea who's doing it and can't really do anything about it. Current best advice is (this is not a joke) "wait for them to get bored".

* Somebody was granted admin access, kicked the rest of the mods off and has turned the sub to private (and the sub creator is incommunicado?) Tough luck.

* Want to delete a sub I created? Too bad.

* Fuzzed numbers, votes, subscribers, current people on the sub, etc. Some mods don't want it in their sub. Too bad.

* want to ban some URLs from your sub? try and use the spam filter, but good luck otherwise.

and on and on.

I think practically what the sub's admins wanted to do was to just push down
submissions on certain topics so a wider variety of things floated up, this
happens on here all the time. But Reddit's tool set to do the same is pretty
ham fisted. It's like changing the battery on a watch using a mallet.

Given the choice of using the mallet or not, they decided to go ahead and use
it, I disagree with this and they're suffering the consequences of it.

~~~
DanBC
The only times I had to contact the admins (sex pest approaching children; sub
linked to from other sub causing massive brigading) I got quick responses that
took action.

The sex pest was banned from Reddit; his sock puppets were banned. (I hope,
but do not know, that the admins reported him to one of the law enforcement
agencies. He was pretty clearly unpleasant and definitely breaking US laws).

I had worse experience when I tried to report stuff to Tinychat, who appear to
ignore their own TOS.

~~~
arbitrage
You got quick action because the admins faced a legal and monetary penalty for
not acting. And reddit has gotten massive bad press in the past for attracting
kiddy fiddlers.

If their necks aren't on the line, casual neglect and indifference seems to be
the overriding M.O. from the reddit admins.

------
minimaxir
Reddit had another moderator scandal that happened son after the /r/technology
incident: On Reddit, it was recently discovered that a moderator on
r/hearthstone was upvoting links to a certain Hearthstone fansite and flagging
all others (even when the other sites have better info). That site was owned
by gaming network Curse, and it was discovered that said moderator was
employed by Curse. It wasn't pretty. (more information here:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23cf60/blizz...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23cf60/blizzard_game_subreddits_are_run_by_curse_network/)
)

The "first-dibs" system of selecting moderator for subreddits may not be the
best system nowadays.

~~~
dublinben
What's the alternative?

~~~
minimaxir
There are a few alternatives:

1) Have each subreddit democractically elect/delect its moderators after N
period of time.

2) Make moderation log public to provide more accountability to moderator
actions

3) Pay the moderators, either from the Reddit business itself, profit-sharing
from ads on the subreddit, or through community donations.

All 3 would disincentivize the moderators from behaving badly. However, the
methods may not scale easily.

~~~
dublinben
I think moderator elections are a bad idea. First, participation will never be
very high. Second, there is no way to make the elections reliable.

Public moderation logs have been tried in the past, and nobody bothers to read
them. They're an important move towards transparency, but they are powerless
without user engagement.

Paying moderators might sound fair, but it would lead to all sorts of perverse
incentives. How would the revenue be split? What is to stop top moderators
from removing others in order to keep more money for themselves?

------
belorn
Do not HN also use a very similar list? I know they don't get deleted, but I
remember their position decaying faster compared to threads without those
keywords.

~~~
davidw
Yes, it does. This is to keep politics and other crap out of the site.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6120530](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6120530)

~~~
Zigurd
The "It's politics" thing is so very bogus.

Snowden's revelations set off a broad distrust of US tech products and
services and have a multi-tens-of-billions impact on the tech economy and
investing. Whoever can fix this will make a more valuable contribution to tech
than a smart watch or smart TV ever will.

Questioning whether Tim Cook is capable of running Apple is OK because he
didn't help start disastrous wars, but questioning the thudding tone-deafness
of putting Condi Rice on the DropBox board is "political?" Or is it
sensitivity over DropBox acquiring some YC companies?

Because the politics of it is so intractable, it is very likely that the
privacy issue will have a large technology component. That is, mass
surveillance will be reconsidered only when mass surveillance isn't valuable.

Overall, the biggest threats to tech and investing in the US are the
surveillance/security state, over-militarization, wars, and the things like
education they prevent being properly funded.

~~~
tptacek
The fact that you just started a pointed, partisan political subthread in an
otherwise boring metathread isn't at all evidence that HN should avoid
politics. No, I don't see how anyone could come to that conclusion.

~~~
Zigurd
Partisan? Which party do you think I registered for? You will almost certainly
get it wrong.

I am all for making money. I am not for wishing away problems, which many
people here seem to think will work: if we wish hard enough, we can make
believe we have privacy when we have none, so that we can continue to sell
both "security" and "forensics."

Pick one and go with it.

------
baby
I see this as a weird failure of reddit.

You have creators of a subreddit that want to move discussions in a certain
way. As I understood they didn't want "old news", "political" or "spammy"
topics.

They get a huge amount of posts in /new as they're now a default subreddit.
One of the efficient thing to do to narrow the job is to ban keywords.

I really don't blame them, some defaults subreddits don't get moderated at all
(looking at you /r/funny).

And as I said in another comments, the community that I find the most
interesting are the ones which are the most heavily moderated : /r/askscience,
/r/games and HN. Less trolls, less spam, less racism.

~~~
danford
Reddits designed to moderate its self. This has it's downfalls, but for the
most part things that aren't related to a subreddit don't make it to the top
unless the users want it to. IMO Snowden and the NSA is _heavily_ related to
technology and banning those terms was one of the dumbest moves they could
have made. The reason they get upvoted is because the community cares about
that kind of stuff. Plus the comments in a snowden thread on r/technology
actually discuss the technological aspects of it while r/politics commenters
focus on other aspects.

Isn't it kind of Orwellian to know your government is spying on you, yet go to
the biggest tech forum on the net and no one is even talking about it?

~~~
PavlovsCat
Grownups don't try to stifle the discussions other grownups are having. _waves
to HN_

------
mintplant
It was less the "censorship" and more the complete collapse of the mod team
that led to /r/technology's removal from the default set. See the
SubredditDrama recap [1] for more information about the situation there, and
the leaked notice from one of the reddit admins [2] which gives the reasoning
behind the action.

[1]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23dyes/recap...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23dyes/recap_the_failed_moderation_and_gaming_of/)

[2]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23aunv/rtech...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23aunv/rtechnology_removed_from_the_default_list_of_subs/cgv6dlx)

------
nikolak
Without better moderator tools to manage large subreddits they didn't really
have an option other than remove all threads seeing how majority of bitcoin,
tesla etc related stories was not really for /r/technology. Even for that they
had to use 3rd party tool.

Just because Tesla Motors is more tech oriented company than its competitors
that does not mean every mention of teslas should be posted in /r/technology -
and pretty much everything was posted. Same goes for bitcoin related stories.

It also depends on personal interpretation of word "technology", I'm sure that
pretty much _any_ topic can be somehow be tied to technology sector but that
does not, and should not, mean that every news article about a topic should be
posted in /r/technology.

On the other hand the vote brigading that happens from related subreddits is,
even though it is against reddit rules, ignored by reddit administrators...

~~~
danford
>they didn't really have an option other than remove all threads

Aw dang, really? No other options except to remove 100% of threads containing
the words "snowden" and "national security agency" and "tesla"?

It's too bad the community has no way of moderating it's self by somehow
giving submissions "scores" to rank them. Then only threads that a majority of
people like would make it to the top. If you think about it, a system like
this would allow for stories that only partly relate to technology, but are
still hot topics that tech enthusiasts want to talk about, to make it to the
top.

~~~
nikolak
> _Aw dang, really? No other options except to remove 100% of threads
> containing the words "snowden" and "national security agency" and "tesla"?_

No. Either allow the posts and remove them once the discussion start and then
deal with 100 "MUH FREEDOM OF SPEECH, !!CENSORSHIP!!, MY PRECIOUS KARMA!"
threads or remove them as soon as they're posted.

> _Then only threads that a majority of people like would make it to the top_

That's part of the problem. People want to see thread like this - you'd see
"NSA spying people" thread upvoted in EVERY SINGLE default subreddit if it was
posted and allowed by moderators.

Votes are horrible for determining what kind of content should or shouldn't be
allowed. Especially for default subreddits since majority of people vote from
frontpage and are not familiar with subreddit rules, or don't even notice
which subreddit it is.

People don't even read more than titles! You'll often see threads marked with
"false information" flair, or people pointing out in the comments how the
whole story is fake/wrong/etc. Those threads continue to gain upvotes after it
has been proved to be wrong information. Do you really think that people would
notice the subreddit and/or rules regarding that submission?

> _If you think about it, a system like this would allow for stories that only
> partly relate to technology, but are still hot topics that tech enthusiasts
> want to talk about, to make it to the top._

Nope, read above. It would allow for stories people like (upvote) to make it
to the top.

And plus you have threads linked in other subreddits, IRC etc. that skews up
votes too.

____

tl;dr: votes work in theory but fail miserably in practice, especially when
dealing with large amount of voters.

~~~
danford
Why not have system that allows one or two posts on the front page with
certain terms instead of blanket censorship?

    
    
        if (termCountOnFrontPage > 2) remove();
        else letItRide();

~~~
nikolak
If the 2 items on the frontpage are irrelevant for the subreddit that would
make it impossible to post threads which are actually relevant.

Relevance of the posts on frontpage is also affected by problems I described
above, meaning the thread that shouldn't be posted in /r/technology has
(almost) equal chance of being on frontpage as the one that's relevant.

I have no idea how to solve the issue, maybe a modqueue like page where
moderators can isolate specific threads until they're approved?

But just removing all threads if 2 (similar) already exist has too many
issues.

~~~
danford
It has less issues than removing all threads period imo.

------
juvoni
Joe Rogan recently had alexis ohanian (4.11) and then David Seaman (4.16) on
his podcast and David Seaman brought up the fact that the technology subreddit
was using a bot to censor certain keywords. With over a million listeners
listening to that podcast I think that may have had some influence in getting
more people aware and eventually leading to this decision.

[http://podcasts.joerogan.net/](http://podcasts.joerogan.net/)

------
Kiro
Did they revoke the filter? I would love a tech news site where all those
things are banned.

------
drzaiusapelord
This is great news. I was very surprised that the term "Tesla" was being
blocked. Later, submitters were using "Telsa" to beat the auto-deleting mod
script.

When pressed on this subject the mods claimed that Tesla wasn't technology
worthy and should go into a car subreddit, yet endless articles about how
wonderful the new iphone is don't get shoved into /r/apple.

It looks like a couple moderators decided that their pet fanboyism would
define the sub. Reddit had a choice of intervening and getting rid of those
mods or delisting them from the front page. I think delisting them was the
right move. If you want to have your own personal subreddit running on your
own personal bias, then go for it, but don't expect to be a default anymore.

I find the mandatory default system to be more than a little broken. Instead,
at account creation, show me all the defaults as checked checkboxes and the
most popular non-defaults below, unchecked, and let me choose.

~~~
bsdetector
And then Tesla fanboys voted up spam pages like this:

[http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-how-tesla-
pus...](http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-how-tesla-pushes-auto-
technology-20140321,0,7268712.story)

Which reinforce the notion that, maybe the moderators banned Tesla over the
quality of the submissions after all not some personal bias.

~~~
danford
Still not an excuse to ban the word 'tesla'.

On a side note, isn't it a bit Orwellian to know for a fact that your
government is participating in mass spying, but the largest tech forum on the
internet isn't talking about it at all, and now you've come to find out that
key words relating to the spying scandal have been censored on said forum? Not
only that, but if you go and read the comments in the sticky over in
r/technology, it seems the main problem mods are still in power (at least
according to the community) and the mods that are being called out seem to
have no comments and have actually removed posts calling them out. I assume
the main mod accounts have been bought and sold over and over and the current
owners are trying desperately to pass it on to the highest bidder. Kind of
makes you wonder if banning terms like "National Security Agency" and
"Snowden" was an honest mistake (HA!) or if they're just trying to pass it off
as one now.

~~~
Phlarp
On a side note, isn't it a bit Orwellian to know for a fact that your
government is participating in mass spying, but the largest tech forum on the
internet isn't talking about it at all and now you've come to find out that
key words like "NSA" and "Snowden" have an automatic downvote penalty applied
to them on said forum? Not only that, but if you go and read the comments from
moderators on Hacker News, it seems the main problem is mods either ignore
criticism of this policy or spew boilerplate non-denials about automated rank
penalties for submissions with more comments than votes or a high number of
comments in a small period of time indicating flame wars.

~~~
Crito
PG has straight up admitted that there is classification of articles
(automated or manual) and that penalties are applied to certain
classifications, such as "political". There is no real denial.

> "So already for the past week TSA stories have had an automatic penalty
> applied. Or more precisly, they've been _autotagged_ as being _political,
> which entails a penalty_."

> "When anything gets over a certain number of flags, it shows up on a list
> that admins see. They decide either to kill it, _mark it as political or
> whatever_ , or do nothing."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934950)

~~~
Phlarp
Just because the mechanism for censorship is well meaning, excellently
engineered and transparently implemented does not change the end effect.

~~~
Crito
I'm not saying it's a good thing (for that matter, I'm not saying that it's
bad either). I'm just pointing out that HN has been open that this is going
on; it's not something that is denied or excused.

------
Pxtl
Funny how getting reddit to take action in their most toxic communities had
traditionally been a teeth-pulling affair, but censorship actually gets them
to move fast.

------
prezjordan
r/technology was an absolute disaster before this anyway.

------
ebbv
This is just one of basically countless examples of how the Reddit model of
moderation does not scale. Moderators are chosen by other moderators, and the
subs become fiefdoms.

------
giulianob
The mods of the default subreddits are basically handed millions of users but
can a lot of the times run the subreddits however they see fit. I would rather
let the site moderate itself instead of relying on automated mod scripts and
often highly biased people.

~~~
baby
> I would rather let the site moderate itself

This is how it moderate itself, by having admins moderating their communities.
What do you propose?

~~~
giulianob
Moderators should keep obvious spam, explicit behavior, vote manipulation,
etc... out but not to decide which content gets posted. Otherwise, let the
members of the community judge content I mean that's the whole point of the
site after all. You basically have to read an article before posting on a
subreddit because who knows what the moderators have decided is allowed on
that subreddit. For example, look at /r/games. They allow "quality" gaming
content only but the definition of that is extremely subjective and the list
of things you aren't allowed to post is huge (
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/wiki/rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/wiki/rules)
). Now maybe its possible to be less strict w/ non default subreddits and make
the default ones adhere to a global set of rules instead of letting each
default subreddit pick its own rules. They are handed millions of users so
they should be less subjective imo.

~~~
Houshalter
I agree with you, however /r/Games was explicitly created to be heavily
moderated. The original /r/gaming isn't moderated nearly as much and a lot of
people dislike it.

------
drcross
This is slightly off topic but I spend a lot of time on /r/bitcoin (I have
done for about two years now). Over the past 60 days there has been a
sustained attack by some group or entity, I am sure of this. The subtilty of
attack is really astonishing, I never thought that I would witness something
with coordination that seems on a scale of a nation state. These users are
employing advanced techniques to trip up and stall discussion, causing in-
fighting, promote other agendas (really gently) and just generally destroy the
group. In times like this we need heavy moderation to stop it in it's tracks
until everything clears up.

~~~
FroshKiller
This sounds really paranoid. Do you have some concrete evidence? What does
"coordination on a scale of a nation state" even look like with respect to a
subreddit?

~~~
drcross
I agree on the surface it seems paranoid, here are my data points-

I'm a reasonable person of sound body and mind and very well socialised (I'm
certain that I don't have a mental illness). I've been on the sub since there
were 20k users, there are now 120k I've helped countless newbies and formed
relationships with other long term users of the sub who also have a high
reputation. I've made many high quality posts on bitcoin data analysis (and a
few crappy memes along the way).

Something is definitely different in the past few months, and a lot of the
other old timers would agree with me, the subject matter is not normal. I have
loads of anecdotal "Wait a minute, that not the way things are meant to work"
situations, where some comments are being downvoted and upvoted abnormally.
Some comments are meant to only confuse you or deride the conversation and
bring it off topic. Some threads are calling into question the Mods and their
motives. Some comments on threads are pushing the traditional banking system
benefits. There has been an influx of 0 day users who seem to speak on
authority about financial instruments. These are not trolls. Some users will
reply with what seems like a positive post and then flip completely 180
degrees by the end of their reply.

What I'm trying to say is that the human neural network pattern matching
machine is incredibly good at finding inconsistencies, my alarm bells are
ringing, there is some organisation at work in the sub.

I would like to start gathering data on the extend of this by comparing users
account age, their topic of conversation and the techniques they use. I'll
need some help from my trusted friends on /r/bitcoin and I'm still coming up
with the process on the best way to collect information to prove or disprove
my hypothesis.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Are you sure this isn't just the result of a 6x growth? As Bitcoin and the
subreddit becomes more popular, wouldn't you expect more people of various
backgrounds and with various goals to join?

It also doesn't take a small nationstate to stir shit up, it just takes a
vocal determined minority; or a bunch of noobs; or a bunch of trolls. (And
when I say "bunch", I mean a number that's in the double-digits.)

~~~
danford
>It also doesn't take a small nationstate to stir shit up, it just takes a
vocal determined minority

Very true. It doesn't really take many upvotes to make it to the front page of
a sub-reddit, just a high up-to-down ratio. Reddit would be an easy target for
manipulation by a small group if they really wanted to.

My idea: have a default post sorting algorithm, but create an add-on that
allows users to create their own sorting algorithm. Most likely users will
find the best algorithm, share it, and spread it, but their would also be many
algorithms in use, so you have multiple systems you would have to game.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Would that scale to the Reddit userbase? Worst case scenario is one algorithm
per user, 120k algorithms on /r/bitcoin alone.

~~~
Houshalter
They could have it done locally.

------
ThrustVectoring
That headline is a good example of a garden path sentence. I thought reddit
was making a technical change to their website for a few seconds.

------
cratermoon
What does that mean, 'censorship'?

[http://xkcd.com/1357/](http://xkcd.com/1357/)

------
dvcc
Censorship or decent moderation?

~~~
RickS
Lazy moderation. An auto-delete filter for major news keywords is a poor way
to run a news subreddit. They're throwing the baby out with the bath water.

~~~
baby
You have no idea how hard it is to moderate a subreddit that is a default one.
This is not "lazy" moderation. This is to avoid all the spam in /new

~~~
sillysaurus3
Deleting all stories containing the word "Tesla" is lazy moderation. That
policy was in place for at least some period of time.

~~~
baby
I think that spending a day trying to moderate /r/technology would make a lot
of people understand "why".

Tesla got relevant suddenly with the apple news, then with the texas law, but
then it was just spams to get the interest around Tesla going on.

Technology moves quickly and I can see why moderators wanted the discussion
not to focus on ONE thing for too long.

~~~
sillysaurus3
I mean, you can sympathize with their bad behavior, but ultimately they were
de-listed for it. Their bad behavior was a mistake.

~~~
SSLy
They were also unlisted for having (as you can see) too small moderation team.
This is said to be fault of /u/maxwellhill and /u/anutensil. (They are one of
the oldest mods -- they have whole power).

------
ZenPro
This makes me realise now why my AMA was denied and trolled into oblivion.

I had started a successful AMA (being former Military Intelligence/Palantir)
regarding the realities of the role.

Regardless of ID, Letters of Service Commendation and scanned evidence of
having served in Afghanistan/Iraq the mods would not have it and refused to
respond to my emails.

Within an hour it was trolled to obscurity.

Almost all of the terms on the filter list published in this article were
contained in my AMA.

Ha, you live and learn.

