Daily Bard Digest 2024-07-12

Live feed of the best moderator on the internet, straight into your veins.

Here's todays official post from the BARDCHIVE:

11/21/22 22:29:16 with a score of -5: https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/z1bh30/outrage_bait_and_how_to_counter_prevent_it/ixbfpgm/?context=8

We - AHS - already won. We got Reddit to take a position on hatred, and nuke all the explicitly hate-oriented subreddits.

It's been two and a half years of a stable Sitewide Rule 1.

Unless Reddit does an IPO and then gets bought out and taken private by an Elon Musk, they're not going to walk that rule back.

But like … here's a good example.

I and a dozen trans women (who aren't stepping forward, for obvious reasons) spent six months, filing five reports each, each day, on hateful content in SocialJusticeInAction and TumblrInAction.

186 days; 13 women; 10 reports.

That's 24,000 reports.

During that time /u/love_in_my_heart was regularly posting posts here to AHS demanding that Reddit close SJiA & TiA.

During that time we also caught the operators as being involved with both types of hatred and harassment Outrage Bait campaigns.

We think that maybe those 24k reports got SJiA & TiA onto the radars of the admins, that they created the opportunities for their operators to repeatedly do the wrong thing in a way the admins could catch them, and finally decide there was no good faith intent in the operators.

Or maybe they exposed the audience as being hateful, and hit some hidden internal Reddit Trust & Safety threshold.

We also checked the engagement metrics of /u/love_in_my_heart's posts.

Votes, views, shares, etc.

This subreddit has 130k subscribers.

If all those subscribers were reporting … let's say the rampant transphobia in r|4chan, instead of reading this subreddit …

Chances are good r|4chan would be gone inside a month.

Posting to this subreddit doesn't move the admins. Posting to this subreddit, if 10% of the people reading and engaging a post go to the subreddit and report ten items, gets on average a single-day blip of 130 extra reports. On a dozen items. In that one post. A statistical outlier, which statistical analysis will smooth into a slight increase in reports on that subreddit over a week, month, quarter. A tiny fractional increase. Which is a lot of work for a vastly diminished return.

So here's the conclusion we can draw from that:

We can amplify the hatred on r|ArbitraryHateSubreddit to potentially 100k audience, and in return get a tiny, tiny statistical outlier blip increase on reports in that subreddit, where otherwise their audience don't report at all;

We tell people - 100k people - to stop reading this subreddit and start reporting hatred when and where they find it. We tell those 100k, 130k people to volunteer to be moderators (if they aren't already). We tell them to be moderators and escalate hatred, harassment, violent threats in the subreddits they moderate to admins. We teach people when and how to punt usernames with hateful slurs to modsupport, when and how to file a Formal Moderator Complaint because an AutoModerator response is saying "you used a word the admins don't allow. The word is literal slur. Use a synonym like slur synonym instead", or have hateful flairs.

We have documentation that i.e. Patriot Front uses our archives. We'd like to counter & prevent that. We'd like it if, when posts get made here, it's not "AntiHateCommunities (or whoever) are tumbling their nose at AHS again", but "Reddit is dragging their feet on actioning stochastic terrorism platformed in the Walkaway ecosystem, here's a tool to interdict their audience from participating in your subreddits and how to communicate with your users how to use the new Block Subreddit feature" (presuming they roll it out from just the iOS client to the rest of the Reddit experience).

In the best of all possible worlds, we help millions of Reddit users to block the Walkaway subreddits, or the Covid denier subreddits, or the "Jewish and Queer people are taking over the world" subreddits - the way we got millions of Reddit users to join the protest against hatred. Then Reddit uses that signal to inform Crowd Control, and their audience members get squelched automatically when they try to brigade /r/news, or /r/politics, or /r/grandmasknittingcircle, or /r/yourhometownvotingsubreddit.

In the best of all imaginable worlds, Reddit Trust & Safety says "the effect of your subreddit reposting every LibsOfTikTok tweet is encouraging terrorist violence, and you're banned".

These bigots, terrorists, and violent extremists aren't our responsibility to handle. No one should have to put their life on hold for five years, read through neoconservative theocratic source material books from the 1980's and trace them back to Josef Goebbels' Der Jude from January 1929, and cross-correlate it all to a Tumblr post from 2016 and the psychotic ramblings of an ex-8Chan admin neoNazi just to get safety in their online existence. People shouldn't have to become PhDs in Nazi lore to get them kicked off the platform.

AHS never should have existed. We win forever when we all can step away from here and go back to our lives.