Daily Bard Digest 2024-09-30

At 09/30/24 16:49:48 in modnews with a score of 1 point:

I am going to press X to doubt that Facebook is compensating people whose primary role is community moderation.

At least, in the US.

At 09/30/24 16:28:57 in modnews with a score of 1 point:

Do they also have lawyers? Their lawyers should read about the AOL Community Partner Program & Mavrix Photography v LiveJournal Inc

At 09/30/24 15:06:19 in modnews with a score of 1 point:

reddit will always be the one profiting from everything you do

I'm exceptionally sure that one community I help moderate pushed Reddit to create a significant cost center. Reddit didn't have a noticeable Trust & Safety department, and now they do. They have a whole soup-to-nuts process for handling bad faith subreddit operation. And that was in part accomplished by organizing to inform advertisers, "Hey, if you advertise on Reddit, you're advertising alongside [litanous list of terroristic hate speech and violent extremism]".

People should be compensated for the labour they provide in contract with a larger, more powerful, corporate entity.

They should also not expect to be compensated for being given, and exploiting, free-of-cost infrastructure services that elsewhere would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars US a year.

The expectations here are clear. Top 20 subreddits on Reddit aren't being charged i.e. $0.15/gb egress fees from the network onto backbone peering (standard industry cost, btw). They are not being charged for spam mitigation, for CSAM mitigation, for gateways to partner user authenticity verification. They're not being charged for the ML expert systems that mitigate hate speech, harassment, and other evils. That's just the things I can think of off the top of my head.

They're not being charged for GDPR compliance, a legal department, subpoena production requests …

They don't have to navigate the theoretically limitless copyright violation liability that could be brought by any rightsholder if they mismanage their moderation teams and also happen to host a piece of media that rightsholder doesn't want distributed.

There's tradeoffs. Some people want a turnkey solution and have no profit motive. Some people provide that turnkey solution and profit thereby.

The good news is that free enterprise is not dead yet, and you, too, can build a UCHISP which competes with Reddit.

At 09/30/24 14:04:43 in modnews with a score of 0 points:

It's been clear since 2018-ish that there's a group of people who used / continue to use Reddit, who want to use Reddit to Make Reddit Die.

This removes one of their openings to manipulate the platform to make it die.

At 09/30/24 14:05:57 in modnews with a score of -1 points:

Every subreddit is now undermoderated

Have you considered volunteering

At 09/30/24 14:07:20 in modnews with a score of -1 points:

No one is stopping subreddit operators from setting up communities on competing platforms.

At 09/30/24 14:15:42 in modnews with a score of 0 points:

community votes

Polls are trivial to manipulate, and every subreddit I moderated on which went private, the discussion was amongst moderators who wanted to punish Reddit based on a disinfo narrative claiming Reddit was bouncing a good faith API-using dev out of access — which turned out to be pure marketing by that dev; their chronic abuse of the API enriched them and offloaded most costs to Reddit.

The API could have been managed between 2016 & 2022, and people's expectations would not have been set that it was a free ride. But it wasn't managed, it was only algorithmically, minimally throttled.

Abuse of the API was rife for 6 years, and that abuse affected Reddit revenue models and streams, their ability to market their business, undermined trust & safety, & the abrupt transition was leveraged by bad actors who abused the API & who wanted to Make Reddit Die.

At 09/30/24 14:30:30 in modnews with a score of 1 point:

I don't moderate for Reddit. In fact I moderate a subreddit that, for eight years, has criticised Reddit, highlighting T&S flaws.

I also moderate a discussion forum for my hometown.

Not for Reddit - for my hometown.

I also moderate a community concerned about political terrorism. A community for my faith. A metacommunity for political action. None of these are operated for Reddit.

No one makes you use subreddits. User profiles exist. Chat exists. DMs exist.

Public forums - even private forums - need people who will curate those forums. For the sake of the community.

I have a subreddit I moderate which has such a reputation for quality discussions and good moderation that we regularly have to turn away people who want to post there about something ultimately unconnected to the subreddit.

They don't want an arbitrary selection of Reddit. They want to interact with the community we've watched over and built. Because it's a good community.

At 09/30/24 14:46:53 in modnews with a score of 1 point:

sole and only tool for moderators to interact with the bottom line of reddit

Boycotts and setting up communities on other platforms.

There's a long running microblogging platform that recently went to private ownership and changed names. I deleted all my accounts there, and urged everyone else to do so as well.

I have been boycotting another community-oriented posting platform and all its offshoot products and platforms since 2015-ish, when they failed to remove horrible content which was (imo) clearly placed there by a Russian agency. I was two years ahead of a clear breaking point, as the platform was used to carry out a genocide in SE Asia in 2018.

Boycott.

I have stayed on Reddit & criticised Reddit because I have reason to believe they're acting in good faith.

I bounced out of the API blackout protests after a few days because I had reason to believe they're acting in were in bad faith, were harming Reddit's community goodwill, and frustrating real people - for the sake of flipping a middle finger at a fratboy CEO who enabled most of the conditions causing this frustration and has since cleaned up and is making amends. For the sake of punishing a person who - for all intents and purposes - vanished in a sobriety program's twelve steps.

This doesn't stop people from taking their communities private, appropriately. It merely checks against people taking their communities private to make reddit a bad experience.

At 09/30/24 13:32:19 in modnews with a score of 2 points:

All examples that were addressed then by admin intervention

Nope. Those subreddits had to arrive at extremist criminal activity / violent threats for Reddit to do the right thing, back then.

being 'swindled' by bad faith actors

They were. It's a fact. I was kicked out of a Reddit moderator groomercord adminned by one of them for pointing it out to everyone.

Why do you accept an appeal to

I don't. You may not know this, but I spent 2016 to the present documenting & quantifying the harm of bad faith "anti-moderation" subreddit operation patterns.

never, ever resulted in platform harm

Deliberate manipulation of subreddit moderators to deceive them into taking actions that cause Reddit as a business to fail, is platform harm.

This is a business removing the ability of i.e. a network of bad faith, Politically Motivated Extremists who specialise in inauthentic engagement, to set up a portfolio of "communities" which can be manipulated to cause a load on employee labour and denial of advertising revenue / failure to meet SLAs in advertisement placement contracts, at an arbitrary time of the bad actor's choosing

Such as in the hypothetical event of a particular political candidate (whose "24/7" "rally" space was hosted on this site for 4 years, then kicked off, due to bad faith operation designed to destroy the goodwill of others using the site and load employee labour arbitrarily, thereby in kicking them off, shifting operation costs - estimated in the billions of $ US - onto those bad actors) loses an election and makes good on his promises to punish those who have not pledged their unwavering loyalty and support and free services to his cause.

Now, uh, I believe I have made perfectly clear where I am coming from. I should make clear that I'm not a Reddit employee and don't speak for them.

At 09/30/24 13:11:21 in modnews with a score of 2 points:

Reddit employees have always been able to see everything in private subreddits

Prior to the Spez editing incident, that was the case. In the wake of the Spez editing incident, they hired a real CIO and now I have every reason to believe that they provision access permissions to employees on a Least Necessary Privilege basis, wherein only a subset of employees have access to private subreddits, and I have reason to believe that such access is logged and audited.

Reddit is explicitly ok with every single action that has occurred on private subreddits.

That's directly opposite of what they write in the User Agreement, and what they argue in legal filings, and what they argue in Amicus Curae before the Supreme Court of the United States.

They have — expressly and functionally — no ability nor opportunity to supervise with agency all the content that users upload to the platform.

They do not manage communities. Communities manage communities. They provide infrastructure.

The "cowtools" to "deal with this" is the Moderator Code of Conduct, which has been in its current substantive form for 3 months, and the applicable clauses here have been in place for ~1 year.

There's plenty of reason to fault Reddit Inc. for allowing a plague of extremists and trolls to operate subreddits for a decade+. Try those. Don't try me.

At 09/30/24 12:17:02 in modnews with a score of 6 points:

The July 13 incident where comment processing on page views went into an hours-long backlog was managed by my teams by using the old.reddit.com features.

If old.reddit.com is ever removed / retired — it would break moderation on a normal day.

At 09/30/24 12:18:31 in modnews with a score of 2 points:

Run

At 09/30/24 12:44:15 in conservativeterrorism with a score of yall:

People delete accounts all the time.

Sometimes they delete them because they don't want to deal with a ration of shit.

I an pd many of my colleagues have read through MAGA forums since 2015. I literally got physically ill wading through /r/the_donald before writing a way to automate what I needed from the subreddit.

They - MAGA - conservative terrorist footsoldiers - absolutely are immune from factchecking, from experts, from cross-corroboration. They're primed to take action at the first sign of something (no matter how bullshit) that affirms their priors. That's why people are throwing backpacks into restaurants in Pennsylvania right now. To push terror.

An article was published just today about how there's a whole Russian disinfo operation that leverages that tendency - https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russia/lies-russia-tells-itself

Premised on Americans cutting free from knowledge and moderation and fact checking, premised on Americans embracing hair trigger reflex responses to rumours and bullshit narratives.

If we want to be robustly immune to foreign manipulation that incites stochastic Domestic Violent Extremism - we are going to have to embrace values that choke out disinformation and misinformation and terrorist incitement.

We have values. The Conservatives have abandoned all values. We're not playing their game, dancing their dance.

At 09/30/24 12:03:18 in modnews with a score of 9 points:

Letting mods restrict their subreddits was never a problem until

I know of dozens of examples where bad actors used public / private switching of subreddit types in attempts to hide their activity.

One example being a community of neoNazis who had their community open to recruit members & then went private to prevent their subreddit & subreddit content from being reported under the then-revamped policy against targeted harassment in 2019. That subreddit never went public again and afaik is abandoned but — never got recycled.

There's another subreddit I know that started private, built up a large quantity of content that violates sitewide rules, then went public to pull off their operation goal.

Historically, subreddits that were normally public would go private to prevent community interference, aka brigading. Or they'd do so because the moderation team would have a personal crisis. Both of these cases are now solved problems with respect to moderation cowtools and sitewide moderation policy.

I also know that the 2015 blackout - the one that set the tone & use case for blacking out subreddits in protest - was protesting the site banning racist subreddits & non-consensual intimate media sharing groups, under the bad faith claim of "concern" for "freedom of speech". Some of those subreddits were trading stolen CSAM; some were run by a now-convicted terrorist.

The people running that "protest" in 2015 have now largely left the platform, but they were really eager to leverage the power they still had to push for the "API protest" blackout, to punish the corporation for cutting them off from the cowtools they abused to platform disinfo & hatred, run harassment campaigns, exfiltrate moderation data under the guise of "transparency", and otherwise abuse moderation privileges to undermine everyone else's experiences.

There's other reasons this change by Reddit is a good thing - an example is preventing criminals & bad actors from covering up their trails before law enforcement / investigators can collect evidence. I could go on for an hour. But I'm going to rest here, with this:

I've spent about six years now shouting at Reddit users to demand proper moderation features & user safety from Reddit admins.

Every time they've moved to fix the mistakes they've made, bad actors have found ways to swindle y'all into harassing the admins for doing it.

Maybe we can start seeing people not launch into the historic "zomg this is the death of free speech" mouthfoaming bad faith claims of discrimination, for once.

At 09/30/24 12:08:22 in modnews with a score of 1 point:

I absolutely should be able to use someone's reputation for ignoring and violating clearly posted community rules / boundaries / social conventions, to infer that they will do exactly the same thing in a community I moderate.

Freedom of association is a necessary and underpinning aspect of the right to freedom of speech, and that includes the freedom FROM association.

Your argument would allow people to force being added to private communities.

Thus has all been hashed out a dozen dozen times before. Your position is not tenable.

At 09/30/24 10:01:13 in conservativeterrorism with a score of 2 points:

Don't do what you just did

At 09/30/24 10:02:06 in conservativeterrorism with a score of 2 points:

Thank you for being vigilant and skeptical. Knowledge counters disinformation.

I am certain you do not wish to argue that several years ago you assaulted me at Tanglewood Forest. Several of your fellow company members have chased me and thwapped me with Amtgard -legal boffer weapons on Company Road while I was making announcements on behalf of Kingdom Officers.

Snapshots:

https://old.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/idclo1/understanding_hate_on_reddit_and_the_impact_of/g29e1qd/?context=8:

• undelete.pullpush.io

• ghostarchive.org

• archive.org

• archive.ph (click to archive)

/r/AgainstHateSubreddits:

• undelete.pullpush.io

• ghostarchive.org

• archive.org

• archive.ph (click to archive)