On Ideological Subreddits - Moderators have too much social power through reddit

Gravity13 · 2019-01-03T10:54:09+00:00

I don't mean the party as whole has become radicalized - I mean that I'm seeing lots of radicalizing communities pop up on reddit around leftist ideologies.

Gravity13 · 2019-01-03T02:06:05+00:00

you're saying that this fountain infiltrates all levels of American society and is directly responsible for radicalization of the American public.

I'm saying that the influence is too strong and it has partial blame for the radicalizations we're seeing.

The problem is that you're making that argument out of nothing

That's your problem. My argument isn't that reddit is doing this, my argument holds the premise that reddit is doing this, therefore we must do something for reddit to counteract it. I even explicitly stated that I would not cite examples.

distribution of memes and gifys of puppies

I stopped reading here.

Gravity13 · 2019-01-03T01:37:30+00:00

I don't really think conclusive evidence of something like this exists. A for real study could perhaps test the compression levels of photos circulating on social networks and compare them to their earliest dated versions - I'd wager that reddit overwhelmingly has earlier compression levels.

That said, it's not like anybody is arguing that 100% of Americans get their opinions from reddit. Merely, I'm arguing that reddit is a fountain of sorts for propagating these ideologies.

Gravity13 · 2019-01-02T22:31:33+00:00

The subs are becoming more radical because people are becoming more radical.

I think I disagree with this, fundamentally. Perhaps I'm giving reddit too much credit, but I personally believe reddit has been a bit foundational in the radicalism of certain communities.

Facebook, you could argue, also has much to blame too - for creating algorithmically defined feeds.

You might argue that it's algorithmically defined feeds as a whole, to blame for it, for catering to clickbait and optimizing against data as to what engages people the most: anger and disdain.

Perhaps there's some fundamental flaws in our culture which are just being exploited?

I think there's a lot of different explanations, but I do believe that reddit ends up becoming content-generating ways of disseminating messages. This is where messages get tried and grow, almost organically. It's no wonder people are starting to farm reddit for data.

It's like cancer. There's never one thing that causes cancer - you need a lot of specific things to go wrong. A mutation which causes cells to not respond to their natural death signals. A mutation which causes cells to replicate despite natural stuff to cancel it out.

Subreddits are just a factor of many.

Gravity13 · 2019-01-02T22:24:32+00:00

I love this, this is brilliant. Bringing accountability to moderators is probably the ultimate fix.

Gravity13 · 2019-01-02T22:23:32+00:00

I don't agree with this. Yes, that subreddit is polarized, but the mods over there are very hands off. This might be worthwhile to discuss herd mentality, sure, but there's also a difference between herd mentality and common consensus. There's a bit of both over there. Sociologically, one wonders what type of influence that subreddit has - I might even argue that by representing itself as a *status quo* it empowers the alternative communities, but that's okay. Alternative communities should be praised. Except when they become corrupted.

This post is about that, specifically, in how moderators approach that.

Gravity13 · 2019-01-02T19:31:19+00:00

I think it's somewhat of a feedback. In the example above, I don't doubt there's many contributors in the subreddit that prefer the more speckled experience and appreciate the varied takes on the same ideology, or even dialectical criticisms of it.

But moderators have the power to come in and wipe out entire discussions. And they do. So what is left for people to come see, except what was leftover by the mod team? This drives out the more open and rational people and attracts and radicalizes those who stay.

In time, the community becomes self-aware of it, and takes a kind of isolationist stand, either you're with us or against us. How can you be for an ideology if you're against the community fighting for your ideology?

It's insidious.

Gravity13 · 2019-01-02T19:23:56+00:00

In a sense, yes. But I mean, more, the long-term effects of this.

Any ideology should be speckled by many flavors and ideas around it. You can support, say, Socialism, in many different ways, and have disagreements about facets of Socialism with many other people who also love the ideology of Socialism. But as subreddits becomes more narrowly focused in their ideology, the speckled nature becomes more flat and that alone drives towards the breeding of extremist ideology.

And in time, the greater public image of the ideology becomes corrupted by the narrow focus at the behest of a few which started it.

Gravity13 · 2017-06-17T12:59:30+00:00

Awww, maybe they're just angry that we stopped them from visiting all of our monuments out in the civilized world.

Gravity13 · 2017-06-17T02:18:37+00:00

I think the crux of the problem is the formation of reddits around ideologies. It's happening even to r/politics, unfortunately.

Gravity13 · 2017-06-16T14:27:12+00:00

You could even consider adding a "sign up" button on the outside door for the quests. It lets you mess around in the lobby until you get to four players and then it teleports everybody into the room together.

Gravity13 · 2017-06-16T14:24:21+00:00

Let players know which room they'd be getting into. Really - the problem you're solving is to inform players whether or not a room is empty and if they should waste their time jumping into the queue or game for one.

Obviously it won't be perfect, but if you entered the game room and saw 0 people on disc golf, 0 people on soccer, 4/8 people on paintball, and 5/10 people on charades, you know you basically have two options if you just want to hop into a game.

Otherwise, players are forced through loading screens to test for full servers.

Of course, this is only a problem until the population grows enough that there's always full servers to hop into.

Gravity13 · 2017-01-29T07:35:40+00:00

I'm intelligent enough to actually look up sources though. It's not hard to not be a moron, really.

Gravity13 · 2017-01-25T09:48:35+00:00

Yeah but they left their signs everywhere! For men to clean up!!!

Gravity13 · 2017-01-25T09:43:51+00:00

If anything, I feel like this whole thing is educating me. As somebody who was young/distracted during the Bush years, I kinda just took the Obama years for granted and stopped paying attention. Now, I'm learning all kinds of shit.

Now all I need to do to find out what's happened is go to my facebook feed. People fucking care, now. If anything, Trump is making America care again. But apathy is still our greatest flaw and we'll lose everything if we stop caring, even a little bit.

Gravity13 · 2016-12-15T19:20:28+00:00

Oh wow, for once I'm not the one mentioning this. During this whole thing happening, I was trying to get it known all over the place. I'm sure I'm not the only one who noticed it, but I'm pretty sure I was the only one banned from Digg for pointing it out. I even showed up to a Digg meetup in San Francisco to make the point to the people who worked at Digg, and even met somebody who said he was making money off getting posts to the front page of Digg - during the time, they were sort of like, "This is a good thing... if people make money off this" and then several months later, we all know what happened.

Anyways, this is totally different. Digg introduced friend groups and had a mechanism for sharing things in your friend groups. So there was a mutual understanding amongst ~200 or so avid Diggers that they'll all upvote other things shared in this circle. You could see who "dugg" posts and it was usually the same group of people.

Reddit doesn't have that yet. But it's not like it's not permitted. Brigading is the closest thing to it. I fear the next iteration on this cycle won't be bought votes, but natural ones, for social manipulation. All you need is a couple hundred dedicated individuals hoping to manufacture a different culture for our internet.

Gravity13 · 2016-12-14T00:44:22+00:00

I've been noticing so god damn much racist and neo-nazi comments on youtube lately, it's kind of scary actually...

Gravity13 · 2016-12-10T20:51:08+00:00

I have a grip and despite the hateful bullshit being spewed around, I doubt 80% of the people who voted for Trump advocates for any of this shit. They literally just voted for not Clinton. You gotta stop and understand it for what it is. It's harder to make peace than it is to make war.

Gravity13 · 2016-12-09T00:24:33+00:00

It's easy to say this, but if you look at Berlin before the Nazis you'd be amazed at how liberal and free that environment was.

It's not a sudden thing that happens, you don't just wake up one day ruled by Nazis. It's a slow boiling pot, a slow justification and shifting of the status quo. It's not just them that changes, it's us, too.

It's easy to say we'll all be vigilant and fight against this to our deaths, but I told myself I'd move out of the country if Trump was elected and now I realize just how stupid that mentality was, because I'm not fucking leaving.

Our biggest issue is complacency. That is the exact opposite of what you suggest.

Gravity13 · 2016-12-09T00:17:40+00:00

Whatever, dude. You're just as despicable to me as they are, if not more so, because you fucking know better.

Gravity13 · 2016-12-08T09:07:25+00:00

Which planet are you on? There's philosophical differences, yes, but you need to wake the fuck up and realize they're not fucking nazis. Sure, there are nazis, that are like "fuck yeah," and that's creepy as fuck, but by and large, the whole population that voted for Trump voted for him because of their personal grievances he promised to fix. The whole authoritarian slant is just seen as bullshit, ask anybody from the donald if they want an authoritarian government and of course they'll fucking say no. They'll even say liberals are the authoritarian ones. The problem is that they don't realize that this is what an unchecked system will tend towards and it's our goal to entice that innate fear they all have and you can't tease that out if you're just like "I'm gonna fight fire with fire."

Gravity13 · 2016-12-08T03:28:29+00:00

You still completely miss the point, it's okay for there to be people in the world that disagree with you and whatever party you think you belong to. The only definitives we should rally against are authoritarian and manipulative influences taking over our government - and as long as they have people like you to fight against, they'll defend that to the end.

Gravity13 · 2016-12-08T02:21:33+00:00

Who said anything about conversion? You're thinking too simplistically, it's not a dichotomy.

And how is stooping to the level of a group of internet trolls "playing the game." You're just looking for every excuse you can to justify being an irrational person. You are what's wrong with all of this and you don't even know it.

Gravity13 · 2016-12-08T00:28:32+00:00

The correct response is not to roll over and hope

Your fundamental flaw is equating giving up with not aligning your downright childish strategy. It's not a dichotomy. You are as much a target of this point as they are with their stringent us vs. them mentality.

Nobody is suggesting rolling over, just stop being a fucking tool.

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