26 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: Previewing Upcoming Changes to Blocking
Nothing in this proposal suggests that the admins are going to be monitoring this feature that attentively, and if you have a large number of people doing this as factions take advantage of it to amplify their perspectives, which is almost certainly going to happen if more people catch wind of how it can be abused, it would be functionally impossible for the admins to really audit this either.
I'm not just talking about /pol/ brigades, there are a dozen or more niche nationalist brigades on /r/worldnews, for instance, where it's the same people arguing with each other or in those threads and where we implicitly rely on the opposing faction to elevate objectionable comments to us to properly moderate. Some of those aren't very small either, and we would run the risk of having people denying the existence of concentration camps in China to denying the Holocaust happened to all sorts of fairly awful content just not get actioned and outright highly upvoted because we can't rely on the users to effectively see these comments and report them.
It just seems to me like a relatively easy fix (not sure how true that is from a technical perspective of course) to allow users to continue to see comments from people that have blocked them, but just be unable to interact with their content otherwise. That way, if there's something objectionable in that content, they can still elevate the issue to the moderators via modmail. It also doesn't seem to impact the value of this feature either since, again, determined trolls will just use alts once they've realized that someone they've been harassing has blocked them, and those alts typically get suspended by the admins anyways, so that threat isn't much of an additional deterrent for them.
Comment by Bardfinn at 20/12/2021 at 23:29 UTC
6 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Nothing in this proposal suggests that the admins are going to be monitoring this feature that attentively
True. I suspect that the data from this will be used at a high level to identify patterns of behaviour.
we would run the risk of having people denying the existence of concentration camps in China to denying the Holocaust happened to all sorts of fairly awful content just not get actioned and outright highly upvoted because we can't rely on the users to effectively see these comments and report them.
That's a real concern; I'm not persuaded that those kinds of comments will remain invisible / unreported. I do agree that the impact would be worth getting data on - though how one would make a reliable metric on how reporting is impacted, would begin with studying those doing the reporting (and their reporting activity), who are human subjects. No one is getting an IRB approval for that while volunteering as a Reddit mod for the affected communities.
Comment by [deleted] at 27/12/2021 at 12:23 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
where we implicitly rely on the opposing faction to elevate objectionable comments to us to properly moderate
Would you be open to a conversation on this?
I comment regularly on r/worldnews in those polarizing discussions.
I think the 'true ban' rule will have pros and cons with regards to this.