https://www.reddit.com/r/deleigh/comments/gwzcwq/what_would_i_do/
created by deleigh on 05/06/2020 at 06:36 UTC*
123 upvotes, 14 top-level comments (showing 14)
The following is in regard to this post[1] I made.
A question was posed: What would I do to address reddit's inability to acknowledge bigotry on its platform? This is my response.
The short version: read the bolded and italicized paragraphs.
Embrace diversity. The simple fact is that reddit suffers terribly from a lack of diversity. Not just racial and gender diversity, but ideological diversity. The Reddit Way is informed by the minds of Bay Area white men with tech backgrounds. Allow me to preempt criticism by stating that under no circumstance are these perspectives not valid. They are. But they are not sufficient to understand and foster a global audience.
There is a mindset—I call it a disease of ego—among technology-minded people that there is no problem that cannot be solved with technology. I will cede the point that technology can improve many things, but technology will never be able to replicate human thought and emotion. Artificial intelligence, for all its worth, is exactly that: artificial. It's pattern recognition that does its best to emulate how something *should* behave. If you gave an AI system *The Very Hungry Caterpillar,* it could not, in a trillion years, write *Hamlet*.
Technology's fatal flaw is that it is not self-sufficient. Either by physical engineering or technological parameters, technology will never be able to do more than what humans allow it to do. You can program an 8GB SD card to think it's a 64GB SD card, but it'll always only be able to hold 8GB of data. Humans can create, technology can only interpret.
Human emotion and logic, though, is not a series of ones and zeroes, it is not lines of code, it's a series of complex chemical reactions that not even the brightest minds known to humankind can truly understand. I honestly believe that we will invent faster-than-light travel before we can figure out how our brain decides what we dream.
All of this is to say reddit needs to find people with more relevant experience to handle problems that lie outside the realms of technology. What would I do? Admit I don't know what I'm doing and hire someone who does. It's as simple as that.
Comment by deleigh at 05/06/2020 at 07:17 UTC*
1 upvotes, 3 direct replies
As it relates to implementing change, here are some ideas that I would like for the admins to consider:
1. Communicate! This is so simple and it baffles me that reddit cannot do this after being a web site for 15 years. Features are added that impact communities with zero input from moderators or community members. Why is this so hard to figure out? Solicit input from moderators and community members **before** implementing features. For example, basically all of these New Reddit features are deployed with a "one size fits all" approach with zero foresight. Stop doing it. Even Doordash employees get more respect from their employer.
2. Dramatically improve the response time when harassment and bigotry are brought to their attention. This has been a problem for years. If you receive death threats or harassment, the chances of that user being suspended or even approached by admins is less than 5%. If something is reported, it needs to be addressed within hours, not days. If no action is taken, this must be communicated to users with a reason why. Hire more people if this cannot be done in a timely fashion.
3. Quarantine should be a temporary measure for rule-breaking communities. If quarantined communities cannot change their behavior within 30 days, they need to be banned and their moderators suspended. Most sane people care more about users making harassing and bigoted content more than they care about users downvoting posts in communities they aren't subscribed to. Joke and meme subs are two of the most effective venues of radicalization on reddit. It's so easy to see people "it's just a meme" genuinely believing the stuff they claim isn't serious.
4. Stop failing to deliver on promises made to the community. If you say you're going to do something, do it. If you decide you don't want to do it, explain why. If you want to change something, discuss it.
5. Adopt a precise, meaningful, and easy to understand Code of Conduct that is proactively enforceable. It's not moderators' job to make sure reddit isn't a bigoted dump. If it is, pay them like you would an employee.
Comment by kazarnowicz at 05/06/2020 at 07:01 UTC
30 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I wholeheartedly agree. I’m a mod in a moderately sized subreddit where I’ve been actively working on creating fertile ground for meaningful conversations. I’ve had to ban many people, and most of those frequent subs that are “T_D light”. You cannot escape that correlation. You cannot *not* do anything about these users, because a few rotten apples spoil the whole bunch.
But the good news? Once the community flourishes, it deals with trolls and instigators in a mature way. There’s less to do for me as a mod at 20K subscribers, than it was at 15K. What you do as a mod (or admin) is not to provide a technical platform, you are fostering a culture. You are not a carpenter, you are a gardener. Unfortunately, engineering will always be carpentry.
Comment by [deleted] at 05/06/2020 at 07:12 UTC
10 upvotes, 1 direct replies
You know who could save this site, Victoria.
Comment by inspiredby at 05/06/2020 at 07:21 UTC
6 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I agree, reddit should hire people with degrees in human behavior, if they haven't already, in order to assess the impact of various policies.
Comment by [deleted] at 05/06/2020 at 07:57 UTC
3 upvotes, 2 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by rrubinski at 05/06/2020 at 08:11 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I agree with almost everything, if we do create a AGI then we're totally fucked.
Comment by alfonso238 at 05/06/2020 at 16:01 UTC*
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
You're nailing it! The (bolded) insight you have, even though it is anchored in what should seem like a common-sense approach to create a savvy and profitable business endeavour, is directly opposed to the egos and White supremacy that you also identify as ingrained within the Reddit company. Their deliberate ignorance and resistance to change is another flavor of the systemic privilege and institutionalized violence that we've seen come to a head over the past week.
I've personally experienced the oppression and racism of the technocratic Silicon Valley mindset that you mention: if you can imagine the admins' attitudes and disregard for diversity+humanity coming together to actually try to manage a subreddit "community," I can give you a glimpse of what it actually looked like in /r/SanFrancisco as a microcosm of what is happening to the Reddit platform at-large (including eventually what the wasteland might look like).
Behind the scenes, moderators resented rather than welcomed my perspective, and were especially disdainful toward my background in understanding how community dynamics work. When I communicating with them about trends, insights, and pitfalls that I spotted within the subreddit, my messages were met with gaslighting, and I was tone-policed through their egotistical moderation based on "civility." As the ultimate indicator of their intolerance, I was eventually banned.
Unsurprisingly, they have only spiraled to encourage an incredibly toxic subreddit in /r/SanFrancisco since then -- **creating a virtual enclave for their technocratic White perspective, instead of a subreddit that should represent one of the most diverse and vibrant cities in the country.** If you go to /r/SanFrancisco now, you'll find sprinklings of pro-police rhetoric, political propaganda (aligned with the former-Admin moderator's beliefs), and then the majority of the only content that is contributed and that survives in that subreddit now is just pretty photos from tourists and recent transplants (i.e. folks who proudly gentrify the region with no awareness of their own racism).
Comment by redesckey at 05/06/2020 at 16:16 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I think what so many people seem to miss is that hate speech needs to be explicitly banned, and if it isn't the community will *always* tend toward white supremacy.
This is because by allowing a community to be a safe space for hate speech, you automatically make it unsafe for people from marginalized communities - people who are already dealing with that kind of thing in their everyday lives, and who are already living under threat of violence inspired by those ideas. These people are very unlikely to have the capacity to sit around and combat the hate speech, and it's insulting to expect them to justify their right to exist in the first place.
Eventually they leave, and the community consists entirely of people who are comfortable with hate speech.
If you make a space safe for bullies, eventually the bullies will run the show.
Comment by smacksaw at 05/06/2020 at 18:13 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I think it still goes back to Aaron Swartz.
We needed his voice.
I've been using reddit since the very start and watched it grow.
When it was smaller, we could self-moderate. Which is what Aaron wanted.
But the issue is that we're not allowed to self-moderate and in absence of that, we don't have admins who are community leaders.
We need to talk for a moment about safe spaces. They say you are guilty and may not be proven innocent. We need inclusivity badly. The rules alone on behaviour should be the safe space, not exclusive membership and excluding people. So if you are trolling against the rules, the best course of action is not to create communities where the innocent are excluded along with the trolls.
Remember, anti-cop speech was unpopular speech and often downvoted just a few weeks ago. We have to allow unpopular speech, but not false or hateful rhetoric.
This is why they need paid community leaders who can use the technology to make sure that bad actors who cannot follow rules are banned. We cannot protect everyone from trolls, but enforcing sitewide rules is a strong deterrent that balances both free speech and safe spaces.
We don't have a community when subreddits are allowed to pre-ban people, but it's an immune response to the lack of admin responsible intervention.
Comment by Pliskenn at 05/06/2020 at 21:24 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I don't disagree with your recommendation, but I do find a bit of fault in your understanding of technology. I'm curious, is your perspective coming from a religious or spiritual point of view?
Comment by SureCardiologist2 at 05/06/2020 at 09:58 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Dunno about this chief, bringing out an army of judges...
Censorship doesn't usually bring out *more* diversity...
Comment by paul_h at 05/06/2020 at 16:50 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I would like to see a “make public” button so that people who get sleazy **direct messages** can shame the sender. We can’t do that for regular emails because what’s in my “IMAP folder” can be forged and subject to hearsay. Not so with messages on a closed system like Reddit, they are provably authentic, yet still a channel for secret offensive messages that people wouldn’t send if they knew they could be made public. It is impossible to believe this has not been decided on deliberately.
Comment by karrdian at 05/06/2020 at 23:25 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I agree. I think the fundamental misunderstanding feels like reddit has always considered itself a product company, when it's really a community company. Google or Bing might be a tech company, at least insofar as search should be fast and efficient. But the reason people come to reddit *is not how fast it loads*. It's the people and the content and the community. And every effort made on reddit's side shouldn't be 'oh how can I change the product so more people use it', but instead a 'what do the *users want*. What do the moderators want? What do the communities want?'
Comment by tacopower69 at 01/07/2020 at 03:38 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
damn bro i feel like u were part of the reason reddit started to aggressively ban certain subs