Evildoers, sock puppets, leopards ate my faces, 3 survived assassination attempts. yep, reddits explainer in chief got his benefits check and the stims are FLOWING

agreeing wih the hive mind

My account's 10 years old. I've appealed two or three “permanent” bans where bigots subverted the reporting system, and avoided / survived three attempts on my life - these happened because i “disagreed” with violent terrorists.

What exactly is this “hive mind” you're “disagreeing” with

Hopefully one day I can be done with The Explainer:

Because of the AOL Community Leaders program, and the labour law fallout from that, and the copyright agency legal theory from the Ninth Circuit regarding Mavrix Photography LLC v LiveJournal Inc (a case where a photographer sued LiveJournal for working closely with / directing moderators),

User-Content-Hosting Internet Service Providers (social media, forums, etc) that avail themselves of the DMCA Safe Harbour provisions are functionally prevented from having employees who have the agency - the power and the opportunity - to come across content which they could reasonably know to be a violation of copyrighted material, and fail to remove such, in the course of their duties.

A lot of what's wrong with social media moderation is ascribable to this - no employed humans proactively moderate content on US chartered social media. They rely entirely on algorithms and volunteer user reports and actions.

If they had employees proactively moderating, their liability for copyright violations (because of Mavrix) would be practically limitless.

Other corporations solve this by outsourcing moderation to black box contractors. Reddit relies on user reports and what seems to be employees or contractors who see an extremely limited set of content on sitewide rules violation reports, to shortcircuit the “agency and opportunity” criteria, to preserve DMCA Safe Harbour qualifications.

If there's no appetite to tackle the evil, it is because none of us are taking the initiative.

I shouted about it for years. It just isn't enough of a priority for most moderators.

My point is that there are many board members, many c level execs, many VPs, directors, employees. All of them want to bring us the best possible Reddit they can,

And

All of them are functionally prevented from doing so by extremely perverse incentives arising from case law tangential to the situation here. Hands-Off is the Best Reddit They Can Bring Us. It isn't the Best Reddit They Could Bring Us.

Every other UCHISP chartered in the US has the same legal situation.

We have a unique environment and situation, where we — the _volunteer_ moderators — have (or have had) a relatively unregulated environment where we could have taken steps to mitigate the evil-doers.

What was done was a few banbots and a lot of manual permanent bans, and a culture where almost no one has a documented ban appeals process because any ban is a mere stumbling block in the path of a group whose members each have dozens to thousands of sockpuppets and zero meaningful consequences for violating boundaries. And no morals.

The admins did little about this through a combination of bad leadership and regulatory hand-binding and realpolitik.

The moderators did little through a combination of quiet agreement with the views of the evildoers, a fantasy that the leopard wouldn't eat their faces, having no training or experience or idea of how to deal with the situation, having no time or energy to deal with the situation, no leadership, informal / formal red tape, burnout, nose-to-the-grindstone, and Someone Else's Problem Syndrome (that it was Reddit Inc's problem / not their problem / a Simple Matter of Programming). Maybe more — those are just the stages I went through / encountered in dealing with it.

I'm not interested in placing blame. I'm interested in real reasons for the failure mode that dominated Reddit hosting “culture war” evil from 2014-2020 (which was arranged by powerful political interests leveraging the free forum hosting here and the wide audience) and getting people with good faith stakes in the situation educated and working together because _it will happen again_.

They already succeeded in leveraging the API changes and Spez being a sneering jerk, to help make Reddit lose communities and audience. How many mods of large subreddits did indefinite blackouts and set their subreddits NSFW to try and force an impossible change, to protest things that were already compromised upon? For no discernible or foreseeable gain? And then entire communities took off for offsites? Where MAGA and g*mergate and russian disinfo and iranian disinfo and harassers are running rampant because those offsites don't have the anti-abuse systems Reddit developed over a decade?

I don't know what people want. I just want what I want, which is a society where I and others aren't under constant threat because we exist in public as LGBTQ people. One where Br—tb-rt and the Tr-mp campaign's operatives aren't doxxing and harassing and extorting anyone who doesn't give them free reign to vomit violence and hatred to millions.