[jtode]

I keep seeing this ubercynical take that "mods are all on a power trip" from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO. Normally this forum has a lot of nuanced thought but on this one I'm seeing a lot of VC groupthink happening.

No matter how you try to fashion your logic, Reddit was a community effort, done in good faith by many volunteers, and it really was the last of the platforms with any sort of legitimacy because of that, and that is now gone for good.

Do people learn the lesson about trusting capital? We'll see.

[codetrotter]

> I keep seeing this ubercynical take that "mods are all on a power trip" from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO

I think most of the people who are negative about Reddit mods are not because of any IPO.

My theory is that a significant amount of the people who are very negative of Reddit mods are people who have had negative experiences with mods from Reddit or mods in other communities, and who are generalising their experiences to apply to all mods.

[jtode]

I do agree with you, though if any of them are reading this, I have to also validate their experience, if not their conclusions; I was shadowbanned in r/Winnipeg, my hometown and nearest city, and not because I'm an alt-right troll, I just have a somewhat argumentative tone about things I care deeply about - it came down to my tone.

I know this because the sub is absolutely run, without acknowledgement, as a left-wing, anti-Tory space. As it happens, I am a left-wing, anti-Tory person who despises the people I am currently validating, so my opinions would never have run up against the mods' echo chamber policy. I definitely said and posted a few things which were highly opinionated, though, and which I don't particularly disavow, and which might have been less than constructive in how I said it. I'm pretty sure the post had to do with me talking about flipping the bird at someone who wasn't wearing a mask. It's not an anti-mask space.

In the spirit of disclosure, and because this is starting to feel like a postmortem of the site, and so you have an idea what I was shadowbanned for, here is an example of my worst Reddit behavior (I'm the same on here as I was on there basically): after I rumbled the shadowban and left r/Winnipeg, I briefly went over to r/Manitoba, which promotes itself as the "free speech alternative" to r/Winnipeg, and it does indeed have some more conservative voices in the mix, and that's fine.

That said, our current provincial gov is Tory and hostile to public service, so our roads and everything else have been steadily deteriorating everywhere. This government is highly bolstered by our local Mennonite Bible Belt, which is more or less everything South of Winnipeg. Anyways, there was flooding last spring and the roads were not fixed in a timely fashion. The only paved road to my town washed out last spring, and they JUST got started a couple months ago replacing it.

So anyways, someone posted a newspaper article about the residents of one of these Tory-voting strongholds being out protesting the state of the highways. I was momentarily incensed at the gall of these people who created the situation and were now howling about not being able to drive their F350s to the Tim Horton's for some tasty Private Equity sludge, and so I said something along the lines of "Enjoy the world you voted for, hicks!"

For my use of "hicks" in the "free speech alternative forum" I was not shadowbanned this time, but rather, the mods apparently kicked it up the ladder and I got a three-day ban for "promoting hate". I deleted my account about two minutes after getting the notification, and that was it for me and Reddit, about a year ago.

In the case of the actual three-day ban I can't really argue with it, it's a technicality as far as I'm concerned, and selectively applied, but that's neither here nor there, I said the word, I earned the wrist slap. But that was basically the period on a sentence that I had been writing ever since realizing the shadowban was in place.

If r/Winnipeg had given me a straight three-day ban and warned me about my tone, I would have accepted the rebuke actually. But shadowbans are sneaky and malicious, in my opinion, and there is no scenario where they are not; if you have a problem with someone, you say it to their face. If you kick someone out, you call the bouncer or you do it yourself, you don't send a robot to waste potentially years of their mental energy. That's being a shit human.

I don't sit and stew about the mods who did these things, but I also won't participate in a site that allows it. That's the other reason I'm holding off on joining Lemmy for now, I would like to see if any sites take a stance on having no shadowbans. I can accept a ban quite happily, it just means this is not one of the places for me. I cannot accept misdirection of my energy and time, even once.

[yonaguska]

Yep, I was also shadow banned from my local city subreddit shortly after being blanked banned from several other subreddits for simply participating in unrelated subreddits. Shadowbans are particularly problematic in city based subreddits where people are more likely to actually try and connect for something in meat space. Missing persons, lost pets, etc. We found a stray pet, but it took my wife creating an account, to finally connect with the owner via reddit despite me having had a 10 plus year old reddit account that was shadowbanned for our city.

[ravenstine]

> shadowbans are sneaky and malicious, in my opinion, and there is no scenario where they are not

I think they can be justified under select circumstances.

For instance, I think a shadowban is justified for accounts that exist merely to post spam or purposely derail every thread, and obviously aren't being used by a reasonable person. If an account represents a long-term existential threat to the quality of the community, then almost any legal means are justified to take action against it. Whether it's a bot or a human who just wants to watch the community burn, let them shout into the ether.

On the other hand, shadowbans against people who accidentally break the rules a couple times, or call someone a doodiehead, or have the wrong politics, or are subscribed to the wrong communities, are largely unethical. It's a form of disembodiment being imposed on an individual who has a reason for wanting to communicate with others, even if their communication is considered disagreeable.

Sadly, the latter is far more common on Reddit.

[jtode]

Even in the case of the incessant troll, the shadowban is just pretend. I identified after three posts with no engagement that something was afoot, and in order to see it, all I had to do was log out. It is incredibly petty, and even more ineffective.

[throw16180339]

You might be surprised. I've seen users who were shadow-banned by Reddit for months without figuring it out.

[codetrotter]

> shadowbans are sneaky and malicious, in my opinion, and there is no scenario where they are not; if you have a problem with someone, you say it to their face. If you kick someone out, you call the bouncer or you do it yourself, you don't send a robot to waste potentially years of their mental energy. That's being a shit human.

Yeah, shadowbans suck.

On the other hand, some people will just keep creating new accounts over and over every time they are told that their account has been banned.

It’s a difficult situation.

[cabalamat]

>Yeah, shadowbans suck. On the other hand, some people will just keep creating new accounts over and over every time they are told that their account has been banned.

Any online forum will just become full of crap without moderation. So moderation is a necessity. And shadowbans are a sometimes-efffective tool of moderation.

How then, to prevent abuse of power? One possibility would be to allow multiple competing groups of moderators on the same forum and everyone allowed to sign up fro whichever moderation group(s) they prefer. Then if the "official" moderators start behaving unreasonably, people will simply vote with their feet and use different ones.

[codetrotter]

> One possibility would be to allow multiple competing groups of moderators on the same forum and everyone allowed to sign up fro whichever moderation group(s) they prefer. Then if the "official" moderators start behaving unreasonably, people will simply vote with their feet and use different ones.

That’s pretty much what Reddit is like already. If you dislike the mods of one subreddit you can join another competing subreddit, or start your own.

Likewise, with Lemmy if the people on one instance are bad, leave the instance and join another or run an instance of your own.

[pseg134]

The people who would troll you like that already know what a shadow ban is and will just create more accounts anyway.

It’s not a difficult situation, you are being willfully ignorant.

[jtode]

I also got into a small argument in another thread about low effort sites.

Another constant criticism of fediverse sites I'm seeing here is equally weird, this idea that responsibility for finding the right instance is given - not forced upon, but gifted to - the user, and that is a problem.

It's a feature, it's the feature that makes the system invulnerable to the sort of enshittification that this forum's parent organization specializes in. therefore, in the minds of quite a lot of people here, it's a bug, and frankly, of course VC heads would think that way; never mind the petty dictatorship of the moderator, if there is no market capturing endgame where you can either cash out or seize a community and abuse it as your personal platform (Hi, Elon), that definitely is a bug, I suppose.

My thinking is that having a slight learning curve barrier to entry, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe having a zero effort onboarding process, maybe THAT is the bug. Because who does an easy onboarding process serve, if not the VChead who wants to capture as many eyeballs as possible and turn them into income? It certainly doesn't seem to help the mods who have to deal with people who can very easily create a new account once banned.

And for the record, there are extremely easy ways for anyone, not just a troll, to tell if they're shadowbanned. Shadowbanning is Security Through Obscurity, like changing the ssh port on your firewall to 54804 and thinking you can then leave password login enabled. It's pretend. Once I noticed three posts with zero engagement all I had to do was log out in order to check. The only thing it offers is conflict avoidance in the moment, and will only make people deeply angry, and in some cases, more determined than ever. Me, once I see I'm not wanted I'm gone on my own steam, generally.

(edit: thinking about it, though, I had nothing good to say about r/Winnipeg in the days after the shadowban, and I did speak about it in other places as a factual thing that I could demonstrate to be true. As such, their action along with my reaction was ultimately corrosive to the legitimacy of the subreddit. But at this point we've moved on to discussing the legitimacy of the whole site, and in my mind, it lost its legitimacy when it enabled shadowbans...)

But, I can see why reddit moderators have to resort to it: they do not have the ability to ban IPs, and Reddit is not incentivized to ban IPs or IP blocks, because that runs contrary to their primary purpose, to capture and monetize eyeballs.

Compare to an operator of an individual Instance: of a sub is having issues with a persistent individual troll, they can appeal to the sysop (I just decided I'm calling them sysops and I don't give a shit what anyone else does) and have that individual's IP banned. If other instances allow him to return through them, well, we have defederation for instances that don't keep their houses clean.

Moreover, the sysop has zero motivation to build up as many users as possible, and that is going to do more than anything else to ensure that the only instances which tolerate trolls are going to be the ones setup specifically for that purpose, and that problem is already more or less sorted [edit: on the fediverse, anyways...].

Bottom line, the problem you're describing arises from the attempt to make content moderation compatible with scale, and that's just never gonna work, and without scale, you have no capitalism.

[throw16180339]

> And for the record, there are extremely easy ways for anyone, not just a troll, to tell if they're shadowbanned. Shadowbanning is Security Through Obscurity, like changing the ssh port on your firewall to 54804 and thinking you can then leave password login enabled. It's pretend. Once I noticed three posts with zero engagement all I had to do was log out in order to check. The only thing it offers is conflict avoidance in the moment, and will only make people deeply angry, and in some cases, more determined than ever. Me, once I see I'm not wanted I'm gone on my own steam, generally.

If the user doesn't post, then shadow banning is much harder to detect. I regularly see comments from users who were shadow-banned by Reddit; it can take months for them to figure it out. We use shadow-banning only on spammers and trolls. Our process requires peer approval and evidence; there's also an audit trail. We used to ban these accounts, but shadow-banning them instead substantially reduced the amount of harassment we receive. Conflict is inevitable when moderating a subreddit, and we'd rather spend our effort on users who participate in good faith.

[jtode]

And that's one reason the platform has no legitimacy. You say YOU only use it on a certain type, but it got used on me. Have a look at my comments here, I'm far from perfect but I'm neither of those things.

I outlined in a different conversation in this thread that I can see why you have to resort to this: Reddit is not incentivized to ban IPs, and I assume you are likewise not empowered to.

Reddit needs as many eyeballs as they can get, and that is why if you simply ban an account they are able to create a new one; the problem for you, the cog, is unfortunate, but from their perspective they get a new user on their balance sheet every time.

Reddit is incentivized to make your task a struggle that never ends. So it's not that I judge you for it, I judge Reddit's conflict of interest and complete unsuitability as a public square.

That said, I still see what you do as fundamentally cowardly.

Edit: It is intended to be a process with no appeal as a feature. Would you sign up to have your relationship with a community forum severed, secretly and capriciously, and with no appeal or review intended to be possible, at the whim of someone you have never met? And even if you had an attack of integrity, it will never not be a Reddit feature for the reasons outlined above, so your only course of action would not be to stop shadowbanning, but rather, to simply leave the forum for a better one. If Reddit survives as a place where Geographical locations keep their community forums, that will be a horrible fate for us.

[themoonisachees]

To be entirely fair, it was already common on reddit to accuse mods of being on power trips. /U/awkwardtheturtle and other powermods have been a known issue for a while (see also: the /r/GME moderator kerfuffle). I agree that most moderator work was airline quality (few incidents but "televized" heavily for its failures), but most incidents get you going "well why was anyone allowed this kind of unchecked power in the first place?".

I think people blaming moderators for this don't get that this is people losing what is ultimately their hobby and not some kind of powertrip by 2k+ people all at the same time.

[rchaud]

> from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO.

It's not that, it's about siding with power and revelling in watching the uppity peasants get their due. I saw the same thing on HN during the Twitter and other tech company layoffs. Little sympathy for the workers, but lots of HR quarterbacking about "bullshit jobs".

[bnralt]

I highly doubt any of the comments here are from people who want to invest in the IPO and think badmouthing mods will help them.

Honestly, most of the dislike for the way that mods run Reddit is from simply running into the types of things mods on Reddit do. A few examples off the top of my head:

- The current blackout, where for most subs (all the subs I've visited, and every one I've checked), the decision to shut down the subs was made completely by the mods and not the users.

- /r/boardgaming had a bunch of mods that wanted to go into users history and ban them from /r/boardgaming if they didn't like their politics. The head mod objected, the other mods went on strike, then the head mod relented and let them do what they wanted.

- Recently saw a post on /r/centrist where half the posts where a mod disagreeing with people, and when the mod got downvoted they stickied a "you all are wrong and this is why we can't have good things" comment and then removed the whole thread.

- City subs banned any discussion of crime for a while, even when polls showed it the top concern for residents in a city.

- Mods of a large sub saying that users need to spend more time outside, so only mods would be allowed to make submissions over the summer.

- The whole drama with /r/workreform, where it was just created by a normal user after /r/antiwork fell apart. When it suddenly got huge, the user who created it was pushed out and it was taken over by powermods.

- /r/startrek mods banned people who didn't like new Star Trek show, then when those people started their own sub at /r/star_trek, they had the admins threaten to shut down the new sub if any user many any mention of the old sub (despite there being subs like /r/subredditdrama devoted to trashing other subs). Then they later got the entire sub shutdown for spurious reasons.

I could go on, but it's worth pointing out that the latter two are about how powerful mods work in conjunction with admins (many of who were previous mods) to shape things the platform the way they want. This is honestly a much bigger problem for the average use than the API stuff, since dissenting opinion is often hunted down and banned, and any somewhat large community gets pushed to be under the thumb of a small group of (frankly, rather unhinged) individuals.

[mandmandam]

You're absolutely right about all of that - and yet, I'm still on the mods side for this one.

Huffman is and always has been an absolute tool; in fact he's a big factor for much of what you're talking about.

And this is an awful policy, that make giant steps toward a level of enshittification that I won't tolerate.

[jtode]

Suffice to say, there's a lot to unpack in there, and I have a long list of yard tasks to get done. A lot of what you're describing is gonna happen everywhere, it happened on usenet, it happened in web forums, it has always happened.

Now I come from a different viewpoint than you, and I have had a certain kind of view about what you're discussing here as it relates to the internet since way before Reddit existed. One historical example for me was the Seymour Duncan (guitar pickup company) web forum. In theory, electric-guitar focused and the official rules said no politics. That said, it was a nest of late 90s internet right wingers, including the legendary Lord Valve, who you can look up and watch an interview where he's wearing a confederate hat, so.

I spoke up once or twice and got told no politics, while others were ranting about commies.

So might suggest that if you see this is a reddit-specific issue, that might indicate that you have been living in a different sort of bubble.

[easyThrowaway]

"No Politics" is always a shorthand for "No Politics I don't agree with".

[bnralt]

> So might suggest that if you see this is a reddit-specific issue, that might indicate that you have been living in a different sort of bubble.

I never said it was a Reddit specific issue, so I'm not sure why you're reading that into the comment. The discussion here is about Reddit though, and there have been numerous posts here wondering why people are upset with Reddit mods, and saying that mods just keep the place clean, so I listed some examples off the top of my head about why people might not like many of the mods. In the past, when the topic has been broader, I’ve discussed this as an internet wide issue (the people who have the time to live online don’t tend to be the best socialized individuals).

The fact that bad behavior is common on the internet doesn’t mean bad behavior is not an issue.

[jtode]

An issue that has no relevance to the discussion of silos vs fediverse. If anything, the fedi is probably going to allow for slightly more actual free speech in the end; nobody is gonna kick Trump off truth.social, for instance, and people who are into that sort of thing still get to have a community, whatever mainline Mastodon might think about that. I doubt r/the_donald is ever coming back.

[jacquesm]

> Normally this forum has a lot of nuanced thought but on this one I'm seeing a lot of VC groupthink happening.

This usually translates into: "I thought HN was great as long as I agreed with the general sentiment, but now that we disagree the VC groupthink is too much for me".

If you thought HN normally does a lot of nuanced thought then maybe that's still the case today and it's you that lost the nuance.

[jtode]

Maybe you need to read my statement more closely, specifically the words "on this one".

I said in a comment to someone else a few days ago, I had no idea who ran this forum until about a week or two ago - I could see that there were a lot of people who spend their lives in tech, but I did not know any actual names in the VC space or the reason for the forum's existence. I could also see that there were a lot of people who I don't agree with, but that for the most part, everyone stays civil.

Make no mistake, this place is a marvel. There are factions here which I disagree with at an extremely fundamental level, but the worst that happens to me is I occasionally get some downvotes if I cuss. I got like twenty more fake internet points this morning. This place is great, period.

That said, there are a lot of folks who hang out here that look to me like they are terminally infected with The Mindset.

[jacquesm]

I know a fair number of HN participants in person, and a much larger number online but out-of-band. As a rule they're pretty knowledgeable within their field, and nice people in line with their HN persona. I've seen all kinds of beautiful stuff here, projects that get off the ground friendships, altruism and extreme effort to clarify things sometimes in the face of unreasonable assumptions and worse. HN really is special. But it is also very fragile and the degree to which this is the case is probably not much appreciated.

It would be good if people realized that HN can't go the way of Reddit because it doesn't have a financial goal other than to attract the best in the industry to generate the next batch of founders. But if HN were a profit motivated institution, if it had to compete for funding and if it had to do ad sales, broaden the offering and maintain a thousand and one relationships with other businesses I have absolutely no doubt the character would be destroyed before the week is out and you'd have another Reddit on your hand the week after.

Doing this as a niche site is relatively easy and relatively efficient on a manpower level. To operate the #18 website in the world (which is where Reddit is) whilst everybody is second guessing your every move isn't easy. I've ran a large forum myself (1M+ users) and it was always a balancing act, groups of users that hate each other, power trips by individuals who believe the site is about them and so on. I've seen all of that and then some, so I don't envy the people running Reddit.

[mandmandam]

This forum does have nuanced thought, from some users, some of the time.

But I wouldn't say that's the case for the majority of comments on complex, charged, and/or politicized issues. Most of us are morons about most things; and most of the time we don't even know it.

And it's the two paid, full-time mods here who keep things here less toxic than Reddit and the like.

This issue is very clear - Huffman is 100% in the wrong. He's been caught lying about some very serious issues, like utterly falsely claiming blackmail - and then doubled and tripled down it. He has made his character known over the years, un-personing Swartz, editing users comments for giggles, letting bots and advertisers swarm the site, etc.

Most mods AND communities on Reddit are against these changes, strongly, and have made that abundantly clear.

[jacquesm]

> And it's the two paid, full-time mods here who keep things here less toxic than Reddit and the like.

Afaik that is just one and the community helps out as well.

[jml78]

Exactly, I don’t think people would remotely feel the same if Wikipedia did something to alienate all the experienced moderators in such a way a mass exodus occurred. Wikipedia would go to shit as inexperienced mods took over

Yes there will be inexperienced people willing to step up as mod in the short term because they probably have zero clue what it entails. It will go poorly and the subreddits will be overrun by shit.

[capr]

Wikipedia went to shit long time ago. I only trust it with plants and animals.

[kodah]

There's a good number of Reddit mods that also run IRC chatrooms. There's a venn diagram there and it doesn't have an IPO slice.