arakura Posted June 14, 2016 Share Posted June 14, 2016 Apparently in reaction to the r/news thread about the Orlando shooting, a massive number of posts were deleted (someone said 17,000), many of these for absolutely no good reason. I believe they blamed a suddenly-malfunctioning robot for most of it. People are really up in arms from what I can tell (posts with thousands of upvotes are being removed frequently), and nobody has admitted guilt at all. Instead, an unnamed mod is now "no longer a part of the team," and has avoided any actual punishment by making a new account, from what I can tell. From what I have read, it seems that almost no efforts have been made to fix the problem from the source, and furthermore that the mod pool on these big reddit subs are protecting themselves over the quality of the sub. Their position was something along the lines of 'We investigated ourselves and found that we have no real issues except for this one guy'. As one comment noted, this is a big deal. This is not something you can just mess up on. "oops, well gosh we shouldn't have done that so obviously." SO anyway, I don't really know much about reddit and wouldn't like to spread misinformation. Rather, I'd like to see some discussion about this and see what people think. Also if I'm wrong about this thing or that please correct me. If people care at all. Censorship is bad and it seems very clear that r/news has an agenda to promote. Also I learned about a site called unreddit. That was interesting. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4ny59k/lets_talk_about_orlando/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/06/13/redditors-checked-rnews-for-updates-on-the-orlando-shooting-instead-they-found-a-war/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nosebleed Posted June 14, 2016 Share Posted June 14, 2016 I saw the whole fiasco going down live. It was really depressing to see AskReddit being the main sub posting the story instead of /r/news. Even Donald Trump's subreddit reported on it properly (and then had a hearty laugh over how better they are than /r/news) I don't think it was the mods going on a tirade against the users, but I do definitely think they handled everything that was happeing incredibly poorly by locking all the threads and literally stopping ALL discussion when it was so vital to get information at the time. People like to decry censorship on the news subs a lot, but there's always a shit ton of hate in the comments on news stories like this, so I get that perspective, but this was some next level bullshittery. People were getting their comments deleted for simply asking why comments were getting deleted. Does /r/news have an agenda to promote? I don't know, but what I do think is that they want to protect their asses above all else, and I doubt political ideologies are heavily related to that, but I guess I could be wrong. Ultimately all we know is that everything that could have gone wrong on that sub went wrong, everything else is kinda just speculation. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nosebleed Posted June 14, 2016 Share Posted June 14, 2016 Because fuwa sucks on mobile and won't let me edit my post I have to double post. It's also important to note /r/news doesn't represent Reddit as a whole, even if they're one of the default subs. The mods acted on their own accord, and the consequences should only befall them and not the site as a whole. However, sending death threats and the like to the mods seems incredibly unnecessaryand just goes to showcase the community can be pretty cancerous too despite their whining. My experience with /r/news, and /r/worldnews for that matter, is that most news related to muslims committing any form of crime will always result in tons of shitty comments of people spewing hatred, and so the mods are forced to take a more active approach because they're being strictly followed by Reddit in order to make sure they enforce the rules. Despite that though I still find that as long as people keep it polite, they're usually not censored. Mentioning someone's religion as part of your argument won't get your comment deleted, but saying that everyone who follows that religion is cancerous is probably not a great idea. It's all a matter of how you approach the topic at hand. I believe Reddit is still pretty lenient when it comes to allowing all kinds of discussions, but on the bigger subs, especially the default ones, you should expect stricter moderation no matter what. You can always visit lesser known subs if you want to say more offensive stuff anyway. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arakura Posted June 14, 2016 Author Share Posted June 14, 2016 The issue is that comments that should not have been deleted were deleted. This is not under debate. Of course hate speech was deleted. Is it even okay to mess that way up on such an important matter? Some "mistakes" are just unacceptable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nosebleed Posted June 14, 2016 Share Posted June 14, 2016 Of course I agree that was really badly handled, I just don't think we should jump from that to /r/news pushing an agenda and trying to censor people on purpose. It seemed more like the mods just entered panic mode when they shouldn't have. What I think should happen is the mod team should get replaced instead of brushing this off as just an unfortunate incident. Right now they're really trying to avoid the issue and it's not helping at all. They really lost their cool at the time and I don't think anybody trusts them right now and it's creating a really unhealthy atmosphere in the sub. If the mods do stay, then they have no choice but to prove to the sub they can do better. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arakura Posted June 14, 2016 Author Share Posted June 14, 2016 I agree with you for the most part. It seems like they want it to blow over and have us blame a robot. I have no faith in them, from what I have seen. There were some downright absurd deleted comments. One of them was a guy asking for information about named victims because he knew a guy who may have been hurt. I don't understand how a mod can delete a comment like that. I'll post some pictures when I get home. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arakura Posted June 14, 2016 Author Share Posted June 14, 2016 https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4ny59k/lets_talk_about_orlando/d47ywef This kind of thing makes me think that they have no interest in fixing the deeper issue or punishing anyone in any way. They're unwilling to be open about the facts. The data is out there. They have it, but they're not sharing it. The why is obvious. The fact that it's easier to blame a program rather than themselves is apparent. Why aren't they explaining themselves with more detail? It's so incriminating. If you take the time to read that comment and the one after it, it's pretty disgusting. Reddit as a whole has taken a stance supporting the mods, rather than the people unhappy with the censorship. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
solidbatman Posted June 14, 2016 Share Posted June 14, 2016 If you get your news from reddit, you're a blithering idiot anyway. Asonn and Narcosis 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kelebek1 Posted June 14, 2016 Share Posted June 14, 2016 2 hours ago, solidbatman said: If you get your news from reddit, you're a blithering idiot anyway. Why? As opposed to going to a single news website which has its own bias, doing the work of its funders? I mean, at least people post links from all over news websites and post from both the left and right. Reddit's sort of inherently biased in its young userbase, which are naturally more on the left, but yesterday after this whole thing happened /r/the_donald had more active users than /r/news did. So that shows a pretty big right leaning as well. It also gives you stories you wouldn't find on your single news website either, stories from other countries outside your own that they don't deem "big" or "important" enough to run. And at the end of it all, they link to news websites, it's not like they make the news up on reddit (though some titles can be misleading), so I don't really see the issue. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
solidbatman Posted June 14, 2016 Share Posted June 14, 2016 7 minutes ago, Kelebek1 said: Why? As opposed to going to a single news website which has its own bias, doing the work of its funders? I mean, at least people post links from all over news websites and post from both the left and right. Reddit's sort of inherently biased in its young userbase, which are naturally more on the left, but yesterday after this whole thing happened /r/the_donald had more active users than /r/news did. So that shows a pretty big right leaning as well. It also gives you stories you wouldn't find on your single news website either, stories from other countries outside your own that they don't deem "big" or "important" enough to run. And at the end of it all, they link to news websites, it's not like they make the news up on reddit (though some titles can be misleading), so I don't really see the issue. reddit is incredibly incredibly bias lol Look no more than the current front page filled with Donald Trump crap, or back when Berniebots were in full swing, upvoting stuff from all manner of sketchy websites. Point is, reddit is a hivemind of young, racist, sexist, bigots or young, liberal, Europeans. I make use of smaller, gaming related subreddits for discussion and thats about it. For news, I get 99% of it from the AP. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Down Posted June 14, 2016 Share Posted June 14, 2016 I personally plan to get all my news from Rooke's upcoming live streaming of his morning news reading sessions. I can't imagine a better way of doing it. Fred the Barber, Funyarinpa and Rose 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sanahtlig Posted June 14, 2016 Share Posted June 14, 2016 Reddit is fine for news on niche topics like visual novels, and for occasionally enlightening dissenting viewpoints that you might not see on mainstream news sites. But at its core Reddit is a hivemind like 4chan, and furthermore relies on popularity as the metric for what gets displayed to you. That metric is inherently flawed. Mainstream news sites also rely on popularity as a metric, but they're somewhat less susceptible to memes and outright pandering at least. In the end, Reddit is at its best when the active users are experts on the subject matter. The broader the subject and the wider the audience, the less likely this is to be the case. The "fix" for issues like these is greater user accountability. Ironically, greater accountability tends to coincide with greater censorship (self-censorship or otherwise). Reddit would be a different place I think if every user had to use their real name and face with a link to where they work. Tyr 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arakura Posted June 14, 2016 Author Share Posted June 14, 2016 ...Hence the emphasis on moderation Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kelebek1 Posted June 14, 2016 Share Posted June 14, 2016 2 hours ago, solidbatman said: reddit is incredibly incredibly bias lol Look no more than the current front page filled with Donald Trump crap, or back when Berniebots were in full swing, upvoting stuff from all manner of sketchy websites. Point is, reddit is a hivemind of young, racist, sexist, bigots or young, liberal, Europeans. I make use of smaller, gaming related subreddits for discussion and thats about it. For news, I get 99% of it from the AP. And you think AP has no bias? Associating yourself only with people who think similarly to you is just stupid, and only seeks to narrow your own worldview. A default sub like news or worldnews has, like you said, people on both sides. So what's the problem? If you want to know as much as you can about an issue and actually get an informed opinion, why not look at both sides and make up your own mind? Instead of raging at what you disagree with and secluding yourself with what you already agree with. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darbury Posted June 14, 2016 Share Posted June 14, 2016 21 minutes ago, sanahtlig said: Reddit would be a different place I think if every user had to use their real name and face with a link to where they work. Yup. /r/visualnovels would become an instant ghost town, for one thing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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