TBH the platform itself doesn’t lend particularly well to free speech by penalizing unpopular opinions through karma. Ironically I think HN is worse in this regard by greying out posts once they get to -1, I often find out that sorting by controversial on many topics gives you the most interesting read on reddit.
I would actually love if both HN and Reddit allowed you to see a Karma graph for each post.
Any upvote/downvote concept on online content is flawed because it does not show the historical score of a post over time. Even here on HN I can post something during GMT business hours that gets scored based on the views of HN's readership at that time, but when the US wakes up the score can change dramatically. Essentially, the US west coast can have the 'final say' because of its timezone and probably larger user base. It's really interesting to observe.
Yes it’s interesting but it’s also more complicated than that.
I tend to start at the top and up/downvote some of what I encounter. By the time I get lower on the page, I have several reasons to care less about each comment:
1) fatigue
2) an expectation that these lower ranked comments may be less worthwhile to read
3) the fact that any reply I make to a lower ranked comment is unlikely to have any impact or even be read at all (so why bother).
Even voting for low ranked comments has little payoff, because the ranking setup virtually guarantees that they are only being read by a couple people.
You can verify this fact by posting a quality comment right as the west coast is waking up on a story that has already been up for say 8 hours, where comments in the story have already garnered a lot of votes. Your good / interesting comment will likely sit at 1 point forever.
This seems to be a blind spot in the design of most comment vote ranking systems. Including HN.
So in case it wasn’t clear, although I agree it’s interesting, the part I disagree with is that the west coast has the last word. Technically they are the last, but for some stories that have already been voted on by other time zones, the ranking is already cemented.
There are a lot of issues with the upvote/downvote concept:
1. It favors people who are more careless with their votes. If pro-Coke users only downvote poor comments and upvote well crafted ones regardless of beverage choice, and pro-Pepsi users downvote any pro-Coke comment and upvote any pro-Pepsi one, you're going to have pro-Pepsi comments at the top and pro-Coke comments at the bottom. The better behaved group is going to have less of an impact.
2. It favors people who skim and read carelessly. If you're reading the original article, if you're taking time to fully read someone's comments, if you're taking time to see who they are reply to and the context, your voting output is going to be less than someone who quickly skims things and carelessly throws out upvotes and downvotes.
3. It favors individuals that spend all their time online over ones that have a more balanced life. There is simply going to be more votes coming from terminally online people. This is particularly an issue in cases where you have to pass the filter of people who vote on new submissions in order to get to the front page.
4. It favors group think. There are a lot of people who think that a top comment must have some validity, and that a downvoted comment must have some problem with it.
5. It can give people a skewed idea of where the community stands. Even if everyone in the community had an equal impact on things, a 45%-55% split in the community could still leave someone with the impression that one view is completely supported in the community while another is almost universally rejected.
They don't. As the earlier points indicate, a small minority drives the conversation, and posting habits outside of the upvote/downvote system play a huge roll as well.
Not sure this is a studied problem, but I feel English-speaking forums/social media/conferences are extremely biased towards the views of US west coast tech. With some issues, the rest of the world has moved on, e.g., by not selling guns / not arming the police.
I find myself reading online articles in languages I don't command well, just to get a break from the one-and-only view.
Yes, it also on a wide scale leads to silos being formed where you only share content with people you know that will upvote it this is why reddit gets a subreddit on every subject and even then those communities tend to split over and over until they get their perfect echochamber.
Heck there are two primary subreddits for the Labour party in the UK - Labour and LabourUK.
A year ago someone asked what's the difference between Labour and LabourUK and this was pretty much the answer (I've quoted one comment but the same answer was repeated across that entire post):
>r/LabourUK is a Blairite echo chamber for bitter right wingers, and if you dare criticise Israel they'll call you an antisemite and ban you. You can call for the destruction of the left as much as you want over there but don't dare say anything against the Blairites, that's another bannable offense. Not sufficiently sucking up to the mods, also a ban.
>r/Labour is mainly frequented by supporters of the Labour Party and not by people who are praying for Labour to lose so they can replace Corbyn.
I think it was Jess Phillips (I could be wrong) who, in an interview during the last election, claimed something along the lines of 'Labour are winning the social media war'.
They really have no idea how social media works.
(For non-UK, Jess Phillips is a Labour MP who went to see her party suffer one of the biggest defeats in their history)
Jess indeed said that, but also quite a few people pretty much lauded that Labour was so omnipresent on social media and that the response from the users was so overwhelmingly positive not realizing that Twitter and Facebook showing them what they want to see (and in some cases if the leaks to be believed factions in their own party targeted party politicians with their own ads).
Targeted ads and bespoke feed algorithms are bad enough, but when you combine it with political campaigns it's just a recipe for disaster.
And this isn't a problem that is easy to solve and honestly I don't know how and if it can be solved. Targeted ads are arguably the easy one but even then how you define targeting, as well as what is clearly a political ad (e.g. a corporation making an ad that exploits a given event such as BLM, OW or anything remotely political), the feed is oh boy... People want their feeds curated for them, at this point these platforms know their users better than the users know themselves they know what content keeps them engaged and what drives them away and that's the problem. The content that may be relevant for a given user isn't necessarily a content that would have a positive effect on that user and "what is good for X" is the tricky part because it's inherently political and manipulative and any way you look at it it is social engineering.
I don't know what you can do and if you can put the genie back into the bottle if 10 years ago someone told me that social media could escalate civil war and genocide I would looked at them weirdly at this point I'm honestly not going to discount the possibility of some sort of butlerian jihad against social media in a decade or two.
Silicon valley (et al.) is now trading in humans, at its core it's essentially a slave market in which companies sell your attention and most importantly your moldable perception of reality to the highest bidder. And at least I personally don't see a way out of it, regulating it to death might be worse since it would grant political institutions control over the same shit that is happening right now and for the most part I rather Coca Cola and Nike molding my beliefs than any given political party and I don't care if their values align with mine or not, at this point I see nice obedient corporate drones being the lesser evil in all this. Any business model that with outlaw the current practices likely won't be sustainable and would be near impossible to enforce, these companies are worth billions because they give anyone with a credit card and and idea the ability to shift what some people think and this isn't going to go away.
Shutting down completely well, I don't use social media other than reddit (and I rotate my reddit accounts) and HN, I don't have Facebook and I don't have a twitter account (I read tweets that are linked but don't log-in), nearly everyone around me uses 3-5 social media platforms daily.
Social media run amok combined with the overgrowing distrust and disillusion in democracy in the west really scares the shit out of me, especially in the US I really cannot rule out major civil disorder to a borderline civil war in some areas, and TBH Europe isn't much better it's just not as well armed. Civil wars don't have to be fought with guns and tanks to be deadly nations can be brought to a halt with enough small scale violence too (just look at France for example).
If you're asking this question, you don't understand the principles of freedom of speech. Read the Aaron Swartz essay linked above, and while you're at it, watch this, from Noam Chomsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-oV42OMQoE.
I think your opinion is extremely myopic and biased, I don't care much of shutting down subreddits to be honest, especially if you get extremists ready to act all up and angry together.
They're still very free to speak have no worry. Also if reddit didn't stop that, they'd be flagged as pro-racist. There was a need for a decision to be made, nothing else.
I strongly and vehemently disagree with your characterization. I think suppression of speech is something that must be pushed back against or it will be tacitly accepted.
Social media is the new public square, and Reddit tried to pretend it is a "platform", while it makes large-scale editorial decisions. /r/chapotraphouse was an extremely far-left, anti-racist subreddit banned in this latest spree. This was not about racism, it was about censorship.
I am a free speech absolutist, just like Aaron (stated as such in the linked article), and just like Noam Chomsky. This absolutism is a liberal viewpoint, and lies at the core of Western democratic civilization.
I have no problem disagreeing and indeed our views are worlds apart.
Social media means moot to me, I think internet has reached its limits long ago and better things are done without this.
Now that reddit is hypocritical about its motto.. very plausible, and I personally, consider reddit as a toy, not a tool, nothing more. And you stated it yourself, both subs you mentionned became too extreme, this was the sole reason behind the removal.
IIUC you're afraid that this is a precedent leading to more and more chatting place shutdowns and a new form of oppression ? Let me say this, we have obese levels of communication channels, the reality lies elsewhere, and if and when people will need to speak for serious matters, they'll have the means.
I am more against this because I believe it is emblematic of a broader societal sway towards the concept that speech can be violence, which is what I disagree with.
Reddit is simply one of many high-profile cases of this ideology finding root and with real effect.
It is the frequent brigading by the Donald sub that makes free speech argument sound hollow. That sub was not banned for supporting president or discussing politics, it was banned because it became nuisance too people who wanted to discuss their own things.
