A brief critique of reddit.

[Archer]

(A short, rough critique of reddit. I had been writing a reply to another post about reddit but decided it may merit a thread of its own. I could have gone on and/or given it a bit more polish, it but the reader will get the gist.)

Reddit is practically organized for censorship and social engineering. This also seems true of most other popular media websites (and to such an extent, I suspect, that many members of the public are rarely exposed to critical discourse at all) yet Reddit is exceptional in both its popularity and its design. Every post or reply has a score - a single integer that other users can increment or decrement with upvotes or downvotes, ostensibly. Comment visibility and position are a function of this score, which thus potentially serves both as a means of censorship and of psychologically manipulating users. Consider how easily this infrastructure could be used to censor certain users or make them feel like outliers - those who have inconvenient comments, observations or opinions receive downvotes (i.e. negative reinforcement) and conversely, users making expedient contributions are favored with upvotes. This is called operant conditioning. Upvotes and downvotes are not displayed separately (though I'm quite confident they're counted separately for internal research) and so the author of a post having a zero or negative score does not know whether there might exist many people who agree with what they have to say. Many subreddits have minimum karma (the sum of negative and positive votes a user receives) requirements and thus anyone for any reason can be effectively and inconspicuously censored.

These manipulations all belong in the category of "man in the middle" attacks. Does Reddit actually abuse their system in such a manner? Of course it's not hard to imagine a motive - those who can influence public opinion seem to have no lack of well-paying sponsors. The pretense Reddit uses to promote this system appears on their 'about' page: "Reddit is home to thousands of communities, endless conversation, and authentic human connection" and "Comments & posts can be upvoted or downvoted. The most interesting content rises to the top." Much like Wikipedia, Reddit encourages (at least implicitly) the idea that their site comprises a reflection of public opinion or consensus. Anyone may sign up and contribute to Reddit but the public has no way to audit this system or detect tampering. Why don't they show upvotes and downvotes separately instead of (or in addition to) combining them into a single score? There can only be one answer: they want to obscure this information from the public. To show these values would provide users a more accurate reflection of public sentiment and opinion. Additionally, while Reddit could modulate a single number freely and without anyone the wiser, they could not do so in quite the same way if the site reported both the upvote and downvote counts. For example, if a user casts an upvote (or a downvote) and the upvote (downvote) counter reads zero, the user will know it has been tampered with. Likewise, an organized group of users or researchers who cast a thousand upvotes (or downvotes) using separate accounts can detect any tampering that reduces the upvote (or downvote) counter below one thousand. Incidentally, Youtube removed their downvote counter some time ago. Considering all of this it seems complacent and naive to give Reddit the benefit of the doubt. These features - all very convenient for the propagandist or social engineer - seem unnecessary at best for having a coherent discourse. 'Traditional' forums work just as well and could readily incorporate upvotes/downvotes (along with the obvious searching/sorting features) without having comments and posts arranged according to these value(s) by default.

Those who find it necessary to censor discussion always have deceitful and anti-social aims. Nobody with an interest in candid or fair discussion would implement a churlish feature like shadowbanning. Sites like Reddit are not designed for natural discourse.

[ericbarbour]

Basically accurate, with one caveat: it DID NOT start out that way originally.

The founders had to generate phony traffic with sockpuppets in the first year. For many years afterward they "tolerated" (I suspect they encouraged) all kinds of trolls and cranks, like Violentacrez and Nolibs. Openly racist, sexist and other-ist subreddits were commonplace. The 2015 crisis triggered by Ellen Pao trying to shut down some really bad subreddits was when Steve Huffman finally cemented his control--they wanted to have a public IPO, and nazis and such are "bad for business" anyway. Then came the 2023 protest over pricing for Reddit API access. Weeks of chaos. The sysops were finally able to purge moderators for thousands of subreddits who had gone on strike or locked the subs down. They got rid of all the "troublemakers". Then came the IPO, which was apparently successful.

And so today Reddit, once among the most loosely-moderated social websites, is screwed down HARD. Creating a new subreddit or taking over an "abandoned" one is almost impossible. I suspect they are using AI moderation like Facebook, which is notorious for its false positives and general incompetence. Value for shareholders first!

[ericbarbour]

Plus, when someone like Musk complains, they fold up like a cheap paper fan

https://www.engadget.com/social-media/r ... 31945.html

[Archer]

I suspect they are using AI moderation like Facebook, which is notorious for its false positives and general incompetence.

I don't use facebook but their AI research team has always seemed at least halfway decent, with a few big names including LeCun, who invented (among other things) the convolutional neural network. I'd not chalk anything up to incompetence.

[ericbarbour]

I'd not chalk anything up to incompetence.

There are people who might take exception to that, if presented as a blanket statement.......

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/04/you ... as-always/

[Archer]

I'd not chalk anything up to incompetence.

There are people who might take exception to that, if presented as a blanket statement.......

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/04/you ... as-always/

An ANN-based classification model will generally not converge to a perfect classifier in the typical setting of supervised learning (i.e. a non-trivial classification task where the training data is (nominally) an unbiased sample with annotations). All the same, it's not all that hard to engineer/train a model like that and it seems reasonable to assume that facebook's AI moderation (and likewise youtube's, reddit's, etc.) works more or less as intended. Consider that even bayes spam filtering (a very simple model) is fairly effective for keeping spam out of your inbox with an acceptably low false positive rate.

There's also no reason to assume that Facebook (Youtube, Reddit, etc.) takes immediate action every time their classification model flags some contribution, nor that seemingly arbitrary 'moderation' reflects a false positive given by their model. If I had to guess, they probably log the result but only act upon it a certain percentage of the time, perhaps with certain exceptions.

[Archer]

Vague talk about a paywall now. Ho hum.

[Archer]

Not to labor the point but I'm really quite surprised that there's so little discussion about this, considering how popular reddit, youtube and the rest are. It's hardly reasonable to assume these sites are simply acting in good faith and nobody can call you an idiot or conspiracy theorist for saying so. I really don't understand why people seem so disinclined to make a critical argument or point out chicanery when they see it. These sites do not represent an undistorted reflection of public opinion/discourse and presumably they bury such critique - it's strange that hardly anyone seems to have a problem with that.

[ericbarbour]

Not to labor the point but I'm really quite surprised that there's so little discussion about this, considering how popular reddit, youtube and the rest are.

Don't forget Tiktok. Supposed to be the principal reason Andrew Tate has a worldwide following of angry young men who can't get laid. Tate violated Tiktok's terms of service and was permabanned 3 years ago, yet Tiktok management overlooks his fanboys constantly reposting his ravings, and sometimes posing as him--because "he brings in the clicks". Even his turn to Islam attracted criticism from Muslims because he abuses long-standing Islamic prohibitions. Doesn't matter: he is a political conservative who believes women belong in the kitchen (or online making sex videos for him to make $$ from) and conservative Muslims are willing to overlook his otherwise crass nature.

Tate has a YouTube channel which appears to be a flop. I suspect they locked it because of the usual TOS abuse.

Remember that the Romanian government released Tate and his brother from the country, at the insistence of Trump, despite being prosecuted for human trafficking. Being a pair of vulgar hedonists who hate cold weather, they went straight to Florida---which promptly started a criminal investigation of their activities. So they fled to Las Vegas. And received a comped hotel suite. And went out on the town.

His X account has 10.8 million followers. Musk likes him. And he's using it to taunt the state of Florida.

Yes, he had a subreddit. Which was banned for "spamming". Ha ha.

He's not popular on Reddit.....
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuesti ... rich_from/

[Archer]

Not to labor the point but I'm really quite surprised that there's so little discussion about this, considering how popular reddit, youtube and the rest are.

Don't forget Tiktok. Supposed to be the principal reason Andrew Tate has a worldwide following of angry young men who can't get laid. Tate violated Tiktok's terms of service and was permabanned 3 years ago, yet Tiktok management overlooks his fanboys constantly reposting his ravings, and sometimes posing as him--because "he brings in the clicks". Even his turn to Islam attracted criticism from Muslims because he abuses long-standing Islamic prohibitions. Doesn't matter: he is a political conservative who believes women belong in the kitchen (or online making sex videos for him to make $$ from) and conservative Muslims are willing to overlook his otherwise crass nature.

Tate has a YouTube channel which appears to be a flop. I suspect they locked it because of the usual TOS abuse.

Remember that the Romanian government released Tate and his brother from the country, at the insistence of Trump, despite being prosecuted for human trafficking. Being a pair of vulgar hedonists who hate cold weather, they went straight to Florida---which promptly started a criminal investigation of their activities. So they fled to Las Vegas. And received a comped hotel suite. And went out on the town.

His X account has 10.8 million followers. Musk likes him. And he's using it to taunt the state of Florida.

Yes, he had a subreddit. Which was banned for "spamming". Ha ha.

He's not popular on Reddit.....
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuesti ... rich_from/

I've never I've never used tiktok, so I'll take your word for it.