[HN Gopher] Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)
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Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)
Author : jamescun
Score : 232 points
Date : 2023-06-06 10:13 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lethain.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lethain.com)
| thih9 wrote:
| Note that this is about the 2010 launch. More details:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4
| cainxinth wrote:
| I still read Digg, along with HN, Reddit, slashdot, metafilter,
| lobste.rs, kottke, boing boing and many other sources of news and
| links. I've always been an information junkie. High brow, low
| brow, I don't care. I want it all.
| marban wrote:
| See https://upstract.com
| IanKerr wrote:
| Sorry if it's too much to ask, but would you mind posting a
| list of your common sources? I'm familiar with everything
| you've posted, I'm always looking for new sites.
| cainxinth wrote:
| http://boingboing.net
|
| http://digg.com
|
| http://news.ycombinator.com
|
| http://slashdot.org
|
| http://www.drudgereport.com
|
| http://www.engadget.com
|
| http://www.nytimes.com
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
|
| https://engineeringblogs.xyz
|
| https://gizmodo.com/latest
|
| https://kk.org/cooltools
|
| https://kottke.org
|
| https://lobste.rs
|
| https://nowiknow.com/archives
|
| https://old.reddit.com
|
| https://pluralistic.net
|
| https://www.bogleheads.org
|
| https://www.darkroastedblend.com
|
| https://www.garbageday.email/archive
|
| https://www.google.com/trends/hottrends
|
| https://www.metafilter.com
|
| https://www.neatorama.com
|
| https://www.newsbreak.com
|
| https://www.openculture.com
|
| https://www.recomendo.com
|
| https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending
| IanKerr wrote:
| Thanks!
| CodeArtisan wrote:
| I would add https://devurls.com/
| drumhead wrote:
| Original Digg was what reddit is now. And Reddit was what Hacker
| news is now. But luckily I cant see a mass migration here from
| reddit. I cant even see a reddit replacement. Discord is the
| platform of choice for discussion these days. Most users will
| either drift off there or find alternative single issue forums to
| replace what they were viewing on Reddit. This is one of the
| places i'll come to but I'll see if I can find other
| communitities with a decent level of activity as well.
| skizm wrote:
| I remember when hacker news would shut down signups during
| reddit outages to prevent the mass migration lol. Great move
| IMO. I don't think they do that any more. Probably because
| reddit doesn't have nearly as much downtime as in the old days.
| nitia wrote:
| Lemmy?
| edrxty wrote:
| There's one guy who spends a ridiculously large amount of
| time posting nothing but pro Russian and Chinese propaganda
| on various communities and I've seen people turned off to
| Lemmy just because of him.
| PhoenixReborn wrote:
| No chance. If the Twitter/Mastodon debacle taught us anything
| it's that federated networks have a long way to go before
| they can achieve anything close to mass adoption.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Waiters? ...really?
| esprehn wrote:
| That is/was tech culture, but also the cost of catering an
| event like this is not that high. Maybe a couple thousand
| dollars to boost morale? It probably cost the same as a couple
| of MacBooks or office chairs and those are consolidated costs
| to individual employees. The catering is divided by everyone.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| When you're truly in the zone, even walking for food or booze
| is too much effort.
| neom wrote:
| Kevin Rose: We migrated from LAMP to Cassandra because LAMP
| doesn't scale and Cassandra does.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQNBcIPSROs
| geenat wrote:
| Note: Vanilla PHP was not the cause of the scaling issues.
|
| Digg was 3 webservers with _8_ database slaves in 2006.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20060412174457/http://www.oreill...
|
| Digg even moved some processing from MySQL into PHP in 2009 to
| increase performance.
|
| http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/23/digg-4000-performa...
| ojbyrne wrote:
| Well, 1 master and 7 slaves.
| mr90210 wrote:
| Hasn't Facebook moved away from LAMP because of... scale?
|
| Given how many users they have I suppose they know a thing or
| two about scale.
| ojbyrne wrote:
| They still use L, M and P (though the P is now Hack). Not
| sure about the A.
| neom wrote:
| Facebook made Cassandra specifically because of this.
|
| https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/papers/lakshma.
| ..
| esprehn wrote:
| Later Facebook stopped using Cassandra though, and
| continues to use MySQL.
| dmazin wrote:
| MySQL backed, in turn, by a log structured storage engine
| (RocksDB). But the they reason they do that is storage
| space efficiency rather than availability or performance.
| swalsh wrote:
| There was a period around 2010 where developers all
| declared sql dead, and started playing with nosql
| solutions. My personal experience at the time was, most
| people didn't have Facebook's scaling problems, and they
| created terrible tech debts as a result.
|
| Eventually most people remembered why SQL was so great, and
| they added Redis if they needed a cache. The Ruby people
| though still liked those NoSQL stuff, and I'll never
| understand them.
| xp84 wrote:
| I've been working in Ruby that whole time, and Postgres
| is like the right arm of the prototypical Ruby app. We
| did have a fad where Mongo was used at my company in the
| early '10s, and indeed we had little choice but to do
| rewrite that part. We actually had an amazing intern do
| that one year.
| jtms wrote:
| I started in PHP land 20+ years ago, moved into Ruby for
| the next 10, and now am firmly in JS/Node land. I have
| used Postgres nearly the entire time. It's my experience
| that you will never go wrong picking Postgres as your
| primary data store. Love that DB.
| mr90210 wrote:
| By the way, thanks for sharing the video. It took me back to a
| simpler era, two guys drinking and talking about the issues
| they had to overcome. We now take these social media for
| granted, but back then some of those problems were too knew for
| those guys.
| frou_dh wrote:
| Good old Kevin Rose is an NFT peddler now!
| geenat wrote:
| Kevins best ideas were always products that genuinely helped
| people, rather than self-serving concepts.
|
| Digg, Zero, etc.
|
| It's just sad he's using his fame for NFT crap now.
| adamrezich wrote:
| I miss Pownce, both for its functionality and color scheme
| --what a cool era of the Internet that was
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I still say Rose is one of the luckiest guys in business.
| He's jumped from thing to thing with no real long term
| success but has managed to do pretty well off of some early
| media exposure.
| yalogin wrote:
| I was really hoping there would be an analysis of why the v4 was
| needed from a revenue point of view. The v4 essentially winked
| the company because no one likes the UX/UI. Digg insisted on it.
| Interestingly years later, Reddit followed the same route. They
| moved to the exact same UI that I hated with digg. Luckily they
| kept the older UI which is what kept me with the site. I am yet
| to get an answer about why the redesign was necessary and what it
| would give them they couldn't get with the old design
| biorach wrote:
| > why the redesign was necessary and what it would give them
| they couldn't get with the old design
|
| Revenue. Well, that's what they hoped.
|
| At the expense of user experience.
|
| Enshittification, but without the lock-in, which ended
| predictably
| phire wrote:
| Digg was more or less dead before the v4 launch. They were
| already losing a flood of users to reddit and other social
| media networks (facebook and twitter were going though the
| roof). They had massive issues with voting rings manipulating
| their algorithm and selling access to their front page. And
| when new front page spots weren't bought, they were almost
| always just posts that had reached the front page of reddit
| several hours earlier.
|
| This post also mentions an update to google search which hit
| them hard, and a bunch of internal issues, senior staff
| leaving. They had a limited runway and the company was going to
| run out of money unless they did something.
|
| The something they decided to do was "launch digg v4". It
| wasn't ready from a technical perspective. Worse, it really
| looks like they skipped the market research step used their
| once chance to throw a bunch of ideas at the wall to see what
| worked.
| tomstockmail wrote:
| While the UI was part of it, a big reason people didn't like it
| was that corporations had their own accounts and were posting
| directly in the feeds. That's something that integrated into
| reddit Reddit a number of years ago, first as ads and now also
| directly in subreddits, and even longer if you count AMAs or
| obvious astroturfing.
|
| Tangentially related, just yesterday a rideshare company got
| into hot water for posting support on reddit where they used
| the persons real name instead of their username.
| donatj wrote:
| I have been through several full rewrites of major money makers.
| It's _almost_ always a really bad idea. _Almost_ being the key
| word.
|
| Beyond second system syndrome, you really have no idea what your
| users actually like about your product vs your competitors.
| You're too close to the product.
|
| A rewrite that breaks users muscle memory and frustrates them is
| the perfect time for a jump to a competitor.
|
| You are basically always better off mutating over time at a much
| more tolerable rate.
| [deleted]
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| People comparing this to reddit today and anticipating a downfall
| to a new flashy competitor are in for a rude awakening. A huge
| portion of the country believes in "hate speech" and "election
| misinformation" as a major issue in the country.
|
| If the original reddit were introduced today with the exact same
| owners (RIP Aaron), rules, and layout, they'd be cut off by AWS,
| their IP provider, called Nazi's on CNN, etc.
|
| On top of that, it's clear a site such as Reddit pushes their
| political viewpoints forward. Why would they give up such power
| for a more "balanced" and "fair" site. Look what happened in 2016
| when the DNC leaks occurred and Trump stuff was on the frontpage
| day and night.
|
| Personally I hope this does happen and would LOVE to see a few
| things defaulted in the new reddit.
|
| 1) Allow viewing of removed comments. 2) Give mods the ability to
| remove upvotes in comments (for a more OG message board vibe) 3)
| A different type of view for a political post. Maybe instead of
| just seeing the best comment, you'd get the ability to see the
| top comment + top rebuttal or something.
| shortlived wrote:
| > We had so little capacity that we had decided to reimage all
| our existing servers and then reprovision them in the new
| software stack.
|
| That's terrifying!
| runlevel1 wrote:
| Fun fact: Digg sold SendGrid its hardware after Digg v4 flopped.
| This made up a good chunk of our first data center.
|
| IIRC, it was a bunch of Penguin Computing boxes in an Equinix DC
| in San Jose. I think we probably retired the last of them in
| early 2015.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Albeit unpopular opinion, this kind of things is one of the
| reasons why I'll always push for Java instead of a jigsaw of
| different languages that sound cool.
|
| Stability, scalability and simplicity. Yes, you read correctly.
|
| Whomever complains that Java is bloated or complex, needs only to
| look on who is writing that "piece" of code. Expert developers
| will write proper code that anyone can maintain and keep simple.
|
| Too bad for Digg. Was a good site.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Digg didn't fail because it didn't use Java, that's
| preposterous. Java isn't more scalable, stable or simple than
| any other solution, that's Java consultancy bullshit.
| imran-iq wrote:
| > Java isn't more scalable, stable or simple than any other
| solution, that's Java consultancy bullshit.
|
| Twitter would disagree[0].
|
| > We now have the capacity to serve 10x the number of
| requests per machine. This means we can support the same
| number of requests with fewer servers, reducing our front-end
| service costs.
|
| ---
|
| 0: https://www.infoq.com/articles/twitter-java-use/
| nunobrito wrote:
| Java is just about the only sane language that one should use
| for complex projects.
|
| All phones since the last 30 years (including the famous
| Nokias) shipped with Java and apps that simply worked.
| Android is constructed on top of Java. What I build today
| with pure Java will run in 100 years from today without
| needing changes. Quite a different scenario for whatever
| other language that breaks stuff every couple of versions.
|
| Using other languages is of course possible. In the same
| manner as building a wheel with stone is possible instead of
| using rubber.
| dimgl wrote:
| > Java is just about the only sane language that one should
| use for complex projects.
|
| Another pretty extreme view... there are plenty languages
| that can be used for complex projects.
| biorach wrote:
| It's pretty clear from the article that the issues Digg had
| were not caused by choice of language.
| nunobrito wrote:
| They literally complain about python bad choices of
| libraries.
| biorach wrote:
| In that article? I'm not seeing that.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Yeah. Not really my fault there.
| stavros wrote:
| The word "libraries" is not even mentioned in the code.
| Python is only mentioned to detail a bug that caused a
| memory leak, I don't know how you generalized this to
| "Python is to blame for Digg's demise" but that's not
| anyone else's fault.
| geenat wrote:
| The choice of PHP had very little to do with it. Digg was 3
| webservers with 8 database slaves in 2006.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20060412174457/http://www.oreill...
|
| Digg even moved some processing from MySQL into PHP in 2009 to
| increase performance.
|
| http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/23/digg-4000-performa...
| swalsh wrote:
| Reddit, the clear winner of Diggs traffic was written in
| python. Guess Python might work just fine :\
| nunobrito wrote:
| Indeed. Or maybe it was the winner of Diggs traffic _despite_
| being written in Lisp at that time..
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| Reddit had already been rewritten in Python long before
| Digg's collapse. Several years. There may have still been
| ancillary services in Lisp, but nothing production-
| critical.
| tazjin wrote:
| Java itself is pretty good if you stay away from any popular
| Java library.
| darkstar_16 wrote:
| That's not a function of Java.
| dimgl wrote:
| > Stability, scalability and simplicity.
|
| These are not the adjectives I associate with Java...
| anaganisk wrote:
| Java has been stable for years I think, they don't switch
| frameworks and paradigms every weekend. Code you wrote in 10
| years ago in Java8 most probably don't even need a refactor
| for Java 22. And funny enough just yesterday there was a
| thread on reddit where people still claim to be running Java
| 8 on prod, now that's not a good thing but 10+ years even
| after deprecating means something here.
|
| Simplicity, you can code Java apps to be as simple as
| possible, unless you use a framework like spring, but that's
| true for any language. I used vert.X and it's expressJS of
| Java, very lean, basic but more batteries available if needed
| but still manages to be simple. Java doesn't have complicated
| concepts to understand nor does it have 100 ways to do the
| same thing.
|
| Scalability, dockerize and scale to your heart's content or
| tweak the JVM params and max out your hardware.
|
| What am I missing, not trying to be snarky, maybe you wrote
| more Java than me, may be for years, so genuinely curious to
| understand. For additional context, I coded in NodeJs,
| Python, Go, Swift and Java. and each have its own merits. So
| I'm not biased against Java.
| jtms wrote:
| I think its probably fair to say that we as individual
| developers are always going to push for the thing we are most
| familiar and comfortable with. Almost nothing is "complicated"
| or "bloated" if you are really productive with it and know all
| the pain points to avoid. My experience with Java is that the
| language is great, but the ecosystem and tooling is where the
| bloat and complexity comes in. If I were really accustomed to
| this ecosystem then I probably wouldn't hold this opinion.
| Andrex wrote:
| Coincidentally, I've been going through Digg's history including
| v4 and their early history, because it's nostalgic for me.
|
| What people don't realize is Digg actually had four founders,
| depending on how you count them. Owen Byrne[0] has as his bio
| "The person who built digg for $1000 @ $10/hour, lol". Going by
| that, I don't think he shared in any equity.
|
| The whole site was bootstrapped for apparently $6000 total.
|
| People also think Digg turned down Google's $200 million offer,
| but it was the other way around. Google walked away after some
| due diligence.
|
| Knowing all this, Digg's fall seems kind of inevitable. That said
| Reddit never really filled that hole IMO.
|
| 0. https://twitter.com/owenbyrne
| ojbyrne wrote:
| I had a significant amount of equity. Take most of the numbers
| with a grain of salt.
| philovivero wrote:
| I wasn't a Digg founder, but I worked with them from the
| earliest days on Digg until its downfall.
|
| The real story is probably way more interesting than anyone
| really would guess. I'll summarise it as so:
|
| What made Digg work really was one guy who was a machine. He
| would vet all the stories, infiltrate all the SEO networks, and
| basically keep subverting them to keep the Digg front-page
| usable. Digg had an algorithm, but it was basically just a
| simple algorithm that helped this one dude 10x his productivity
| and keep the quality up.
|
| Google came to buy Digg, but figured out that really it's just
| a dude who works 22 hours a day that keeps the quality up, and
| all that talk of an algorithm was smoke and mirrors to trick
| the SEO guys into thinking it was something they could game
| (they could not, which is why front page was so high quality
| for so many years). Google walked.
|
| Then the founders realised if they ever wanted to get any
| serious money out of this thing, they had to fix that. So they
| developed "real algorithms" that independently attempted to do
| what this one dude was doing, to surface good/interesting
| content.
|
| They thought they'd succeeded, or market pressures forced their
| hand, whatever. So they rolled it along with a catastrophic
| UI/UX and back-end tech rewrite all rolled up into one.
|
| It was a total shit-show. I was involved in the "old" MySQL
| stack, and watched them totally fuck it up with beta software
| that wasn't ready for production (Cassandra, at the time, was
| not what it is today).
|
| The algorithm to figure out what's cool and what isn't wasn't
| as good as the dude who worked 22 hours a day, and without his
| very heavy input, it just basically rehashed all the shit that
| was popular somewhere else a few days earlier.
|
| So you ended up with a site that was ugly, fuxed, no-one in the
| existing wanted, and with a bland boring bunch of stories on
| the front-page, which was not at all compelling for anyone new
| showing up to check stuff out.
|
| Instead of taking this massive slap to the face constructively,
| the founders doubled-down. And now here we are.
|
| To be clear, much of the tech behind Digg was very interesting,
| the work Owen and many other engineers did was very
| interesting. The algorithm was all smoke and mirrors, though.
| And Kevin and his little circle of buddies were all crap
| engineers that tanked the business with their hubris and
| inexperience.
| marstall wrote:
| (and that one dude was Owen?)
| dmazin wrote:
| I seem to recall that, years ago, this article's photo[1] of Digg
| engineers sitting together for the v4 launch used to get posted
| every now and then. Usually, the idea was to shock people about
| how awful open offices were. Only today did I learn that this was
| a photo of an unusual event, and not how people usually sat at
| Digg.
|
| Or maybe I'm thinking of a different photo?
|
| [1] https://lethain.com/static/blog/heroes/digg-v4.jpg
| [deleted]
| sfrench wrote:
| That is the room where all of the eng team worked, but
| certainly not how it looked on a normal day. If you look, you
| can spot three clusters of 4 desks around the edges of the room
| in this picture. There were ~10 clusters of similar size that
| scattered around a large open space.
|
| The worst part about that room was not the open feeling, but
| rather the silver walls and ceiling
| biorach wrote:
| > Our API server was a Python Tornado service... and one of the
| most frequently accessed endpoint was used to retrieve user by
| their name or id. Because it supported retrieval by either name
| or id, it set default values for both parameters as empty lists.
| This is a super reasonable thing to do! However, Python only
| initializes default parameters when the function is first
| evaluated, which means that the same list is used for every call
| to the function. As a result, if you mutate those values, the
| mutations span across invocations.
|
| How on earth did such a well-known Python footgun ever make it
| into production? This is the kind of thing that should leap out
| of the screen for even a mid-level Python developer - and once
| you've been trained by bitter experience it's very easy to spot.
| BoppreH wrote:
| Sure it's a known footgun, but I wouldn't be so harsh without
| knowing more. It could be the result of a series of only
| slightly bad decisions.
|
| A junior developer creates a function with default of []
| instead of (), but otherwise no mutations:
| def get_user(unchecked_ids=[]): ids =
| get_valid_ids(unchecked_ids) if not ids: ids =
| [current_user_id] return query_users(ids)
|
| Alice introduces a mutation in a place that is currently safe.
| fa55099 - 45 minutes ago - Alice - Avoid creating unnecessary
| new list def get_user(unchecked_ids=[]):
| ids = get_valid_ids(unchecked_ids) - if not ids: ids
| = [current_user_id] + if not ids:
| ids.append(current_user_id) return
| query_users(ids)
|
| Meanwhile Bob simplifies the code in a separate branch.
| f4e704c - 30 minutes ago - Bob - Fix caller who was sending
| invalid ids + def get_user(ids=[]): - def
| get_user(unchecked_ids=[]): - ids =
| get_valid_ids(unchecked_ids) if not ids: ids =
| [current_user_id] return query_users(ids)
|
| Then Charlie does something else on the branch, tries to merge
| it into master, and Git auto-resolves the conflict because
| there's no overlap between the changes. def
| get_user(ids=[]): if not ids:
| ids.append(current_user_id) return query_users(ids)
|
| And now everyone sees the data of a random user, and your foot
| is missing.
|
| Is it good code? No. Good version control hygiene? Also no.
| Should you crucify the developer who made this mistake? Of
| course not, especially once you add the boilerplate chaff that
| was omitted here. That's why it's called a footgun, it's easy
| to misuse.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Footguns are still footguns.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| You can work in python for years and never know this. How many
| devs know the entire spec of their working language by heart?
|
| I've been bitten by this exact thing. It's not strictly obvious
| IMO. Though it didn't make it through testing.
| Ndymium wrote:
| Having done this same mistake myself, it's just such an easy
| mistake to make. Most likely you're writing two or three
| programming languages in the same project, and the others work
| differently from Python. So it's very easy to miss an errant
| `foo={}` in a function definition when reviewing a commit of
| several hundred lines. Especially as the only indicator of
| something being wrong is the lowest priority warning PyCharm
| has, meaning the background colour `{}` is only slightly
| different.
|
| These days I'd set up a linter that enforces these things do
| not happen, but it's easy to be smart after the fact. You say
| "once you've been trained by bitter experience it's very easy
| to spot", which I feel is true. You just need that bitter
| experience first, and for me it came in the form of a
| production issue.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Forget about production, how did this make it into python? This
| is so unbelievably stupid it makes PHP look like a sensible
| language.
| faefox wrote:
| This is the question people should be asking rather than
| trying to identify which Digg employee should be
| retroactively thrown under the bus. Just a completely insane
| design decision.
| silvestrov wrote:
| This is one of those things that are so bad it warrants
| breaking backwards compability, possibly by releasing a
| python v4.
| faefox wrote:
| If they start today they could complete the migration by
| the mid-2040s!
| paulddraper wrote:
| I suspect because it's easier to implement defaults as values
| than as expressions.
|
| The scoping of list comprehensions in Python 2 was far less
| justifiable, IMO.
| contravariant wrote:
| It's an interesting decision to be sure. Then again it's not
| really that arcane, the question is simply whether you
| calculate function defaults once or on every invocation.
| Python made the choice to run it once.
|
| What I don't get here is why they didn't simply use 'None'
| instead. If a parameter is optional then 'None' makes way
| more sense than an empty list.
| fantasizr wrote:
| It's one of the top python posts on S/O, every python
| developer finds their way to this discovery
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1132941/least-
| astonishme...
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| It is perfectly sensible... if your language is guaranteed
| immutable everywhere
| geenat wrote:
| This. Should have been taken out in Python 3, but nah, still
| present even today.
| Macha wrote:
| Humans aren't perfect. Open source projects have missed
| unescaped spaces in directory paths that caused the deletion of
| /usr (Bumblebee), video games have forgotten to check the cwd
| and deleted vital windows boot files (Eve Online) and operating
| systems have forgotten to check passwords (MacOS).
|
| Given this was 2010 I wouldn't be surprised if they had a less
| mature development process that doesn't use things people take
| for granted today, like linters, and pre-merge code reviews.
|
| If you assume perfection of humans, maybe 95/100 times it works
| out and 4/100 it's a small oops, but 1/100 times you get
| something embarrassing like this
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I was like "hold on, 2010 wasn't that long ago!" but thinking
| about it now, things like Github and its code review flow via
| merge requests only came into my radar at about 2012, and
| even then it took a long time before it was widely adopted.
|
| Around that time I was in the middle of the Java ecosystem
| though, which had tons of tooling for validation, linting,
| verification, books full of best practices, etc.
|
| Still a far cry from what is normal these days, but we did do
| things like unit tests, end-to-end tests and code reviews
| back then. But, that was enterprise, the SF web companies I
| think weren't as enterprisey as the bank I worked for at the
| time.
|
| It's ironic though; the old fashioned companies I've worked
| for adopted a lot of the more fast-and-loose-feeling
| practices from SF, think extreme programming, agile, taking a
| chance on rewriting the whole back-end to a new language,
| things like that.
| belter wrote:
| Completely disagree with the aproach humans are not perfect.
| This was not a one opportunity only event. Every test case
| they did not run, every load simulation they did not perform,
| every chaos test they decided to overlook was an example of
| humans failing repeatedly. Massive websites were running
| since the early nineties...And robust software practices are
| a thing of the sixties.
| WJW wrote:
| Agreed, but this was not a solid company in the first
| place. Rather, Digg was (according to TFA) a failing
| startup losing money hand over fist that was launching v4
| as a hail mary. They were so hard up that no hardware was
| available for hosting the new environment, so they started
| reusing v3 servers for v4 _while the migration was
| ongoing_.
|
| They bet it all on this v4 thing, and lost.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Not knowing Python, but I have a feeling things like this
| weren't as well known back in 2010 and the reason they're so
| well known is from people doing it at sites like Digg and
| then telling everyone that's a really bad idea. There are so
| many things that I know now for programming that were pretty
| much unknown 10-years ago because no one had really
| encountered them in a large scale setup.
| biorach wrote:
| Nah, this has been very well known since decades and is
| very easy to spot.
| ubercore wrote:
| Yeah this is covered in pretty much every style guide,
| tutorial, and reference. And is an easy screener in an
| interview. I'm also surprised anyone using Python as more
| than a toy experiment had this issue, especially in such
| a critical service.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| I've worked on a lot of Python as a hobbyist and student,
| much of it in real world use - probably at least 100kloc
| - and I've never encountered this. Where is this
| information? I'm worried that I'm missing some other
| "obvious" things. I've of course run into python's
| shallow vs deep copies, but I don't remember default
| values being shared between invocations.
| biorach wrote:
| Still... did no one with even moderate Python experience even
| glance at this very important endpoint at any stage during
| those 4 weeks? Like I say, this is the kind of thing that
| jumps out of the screen for an experienced developer.
| Macha wrote:
| In 2010? You'd be surprised before widespread adoption of
| git at how many places the process was individual
| developers committing changes unsupervised. I'm not sure we
| even disagree that's the problem - you feel a second person
| should have looked at it, I feel the process should require
| that. A code review might be something that they'd sit down
| with a selected piece of code that they felt was risky on a
| biweekly basis or something.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| I'm 2010 access to prod over ftp:// might have still been
| a thing even at digg.
| biorach wrote:
| Forget code review. This is one of their most important
| endpoints. They had severe issues for 4 weeks. Did no one
| not even glance over the code and spot this glaring
| screw-up?
| 0xAFFFF wrote:
| Considering the context, most people were probably
| overloaded with work and a lot of changes must have been
| made with little to no oversight.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > Humans aren't perfect.
|
| Humans are good at designing processes and procedures that
| compensate for their lack of perfection. In this case that
| capability was not used apparently.
|
| Anyone can make a mistake and that's fine, but a company
| would be expected to have processes and enough eyes to make
| sure that a bunch of other people need to make the same
| mistake before it makes its way into prod at which point the
| likelihood of mistake becomes really low...
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It feels like they had someone developing this service that
| hasn't done this kind of thing before. Which is a pretty
| startupy thing to do. I've been there before, even with that
| exact footgun. Though a much smaller feature and testing
| revealed it.
| [deleted]
| deergomoo wrote:
| Good read. Interesting that the author's takeaway is that folks
| consider Digg v4 to be a catastrophic launch because of the
| myriad technical issues.
|
| I don't even remember there _being_ technical issues, I just
| remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced
| with a bunch of crap I wasn't interested in.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| This is why I'm excited for the Reddit third party apps change.
|
| In a few years nobody will remember that this is what
| precipitated the fall of Reddit. It's already turned into an
| echo-chamber of nonsense, ruled by all-powerful mods to whom
| every user is a racist transphobe nazi homophobe enemy.
|
| Even the smaller subs catch the contagion year over year.
|
| I've been a Redditor since before the narwhal baconed at
| midnight. I miss the Reddit that was good.
|
| I'm excited to see what replaces it.
| philistine wrote:
| [flagged]
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| "You must be fun at parties", "awwwkard", "okaaaaay", "tell
| us what you really think"...
|
| It's just a way to dismiss a point.
|
| Reddit has controversial subreddits, the vast majority of
| which were closed down. That's neither here nor there.
|
| I'm not looking for a pleasant subreddit for racists. I'm
| looking for a subreddit for my local hometown where the
| default assumption isn't that it's populated by racists.
|
| I'm looking for a subreddit for posting Star Trek memes
| where the default assumption is that I'm _not_ interested
| in depriving trans people of their right to exist.
|
| The problem with Reddit and its mods is that the defaults
| are way out of wack. It's always war-time and anybody who
| isn't quoting from the latest propaganda film is a commie-
| nazi.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > You must be fun at parties.
|
| FYI,this can come across as an ad hominem attack.
| WJW wrote:
| Oh don't worry, they know.
| anaganisk wrote:
| Eventually if anything is popular enough it attracts,
| advertisers, corporations, govts, spammers, influencers and
| what not. It's true from Reddit, to AI and crypto. Enjoy
| stuff while it's new, even if all the apps reroute to a new
| backend, it will still be the same again. Probably not
| instantly but eventually.
| whyenot wrote:
| I've been using Reddit for 14+ years and while the site has
| changed, mostly for the worse, in the past few years.
|
| "It's already turned into an echo-chamber of nonsense, ruled
| by all-powerful mods to whom every user is a racist
| transphobe nazi homophobe enemy."
|
| Moderators (excepting automod) are human, and like all of us
| they sometimes make mistakes, some may have biases or having
| a bad day. I have not seen what you are describing.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Sometimes groups of people making occasional mistakes, none
| of which are related to any other.
|
| And sometimes groups tend to become pathological, such that
| no one joining the group is just "someone making occasional
| mistakes". Groups become like that for various reasons, but
| one of the qualities that seems most problematic tends to
| be "authority with minimal or no effective oversight".
|
| This is why most police departments are just cesspits of
| anti-human torment and oppression. If reddit mods aren't
| murdering people, I'd chalk that up to the fact that they
| aren't given sidearms, fetters, and a mandate to patrol the
| streets.
|
| > I have not seen what you are describing.
|
| Cops never see anything worrisome either. You know, until
| some 11 yr old is shot in his own home after putting his
| hands up.
|
| Reddit mods probably have it better in that reporters don't
| really go out of their way to put their abuses in the
| headlines.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think quality contributors have been evaporating from
| Reddit for a fairly long time in a dead sea fashion, leaving
| a place that's effectively inhospitable.
|
| I left in 2018 or there-around. Probably stayed too long, in
| retrospect. 10+ year account, moderated multiple subreddits
| and a pillar of the community type figure in a few others.
|
| On some level it felt like each election cycle dug deeper
| trenches until the entire website looked like the battle of
| Verdun. This wasn't exclusively an American phenomenon
| either. The same thing happened on several national
| subreddits.
|
| I also got the sense that the reddit members cultivated a
| sort of creeping depression that was really allowed to fester
| on some subreddits essentially all about exchanging thoughts
| of hopelessness and doom. This was before Covid. I can't
| imagine it got better those years. Granted, Reddit was
| wallowing in "forever alone"-memes even 15 years ago, but it
| feels like the darkness of that abyss got darker as the years
| passed.
|
| I've looked back a few times but I've immediately turned heel
| as I saw what a toxic dumpster fire it's turned into. Like it
| isn't as obvious if you've been in it, but jesus f christ on
| pogo stick is it ever clear to see when you've been away for
| a couple of years.
| [deleted]
| comte7092 wrote:
| > It's already turned into an echo-chamber of nonsense, ruled
| by all-powerful mods to whom every user is a racist
| transphobe nazi homophobe enemy.
|
| I've literally never had this problem. And I've commented on
| a multitude of subreddits for years.
|
| Curious to see some concrete examples where your comments
| were framed in this manner.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > I miss the Reddit that was good.
|
| Reddit was never good.
| glonq wrote:
| I almost agree. _Some_ subreddits are echo chambers of woke
| nonsense. Others are echo chambers of different nonsense.
| Others seem mostly fine.
|
| It's less about the wokeness and more about the ability for a
| handful of mods to hijack popular topics and create an
| unecessarily unpleasant/unproductive experience for their
| communities.
|
| I'll leave _ineffective admins, lack of original content,
| spam, karma, bots, misinformation, automod, and monetization_
| as separate points of discussion :P
| DirectorKrennic wrote:
| > ruled by all-powerful mods to whom every user is a racist
| transphobe nazi homophobe enemy.
|
| I don't disagree with you about the problem of the power-
| hungry mods, but I don't recall seeing someone complain about
| being called a racist, a transphobe, a nazi, or a homophobe
| who didn't at the very least sympathize with reprehensible
| views of LGBT people, non-whites, or other marginalized
| groups.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Evidently I sympathize with reprehensible views about some
| group... although it's not clear precisely which group or
| which views, even to myself. Suffice it to say I'm
| deplorable though, otherwise I wouldn't be complaining.
| replygirl wrote:
| Some recent things I was downvoted to oblivion on:
|
| - Mentioning buses in a thread about road wear
|
| - Warning people talking about vigilante justice that
| intentionally tricking/luring someone into committing a
| crime makes you an accomplice
|
| - Telling fellow trans people they can't equate Jim Crow
| with gendered bathroom stigma
|
| - Reminding fellow queer people that Anheuser-Busch are
| just trying to sell more beer
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Are you just a massive contrarian maybe? Most people find
| that extremely annoying.
|
| I've had far worse opinions in far larger subs and only
| gotten a couple downvotes. Careful with being an "early"
| comment in a post that you expect might get big, because
| essentially half of reddit just clicks the button
| according to what number they already see. That's just
| basically human nature.
|
| LBGTQ communities can be very sensitive but what do you
| expect? There are laws on the book to make it harder to
| get medical care that LBGTQ people need, and at least one
| law that could TAKE YOUR CHILD AWAY. There's growing
| animosity to them as a group. Any community where
| millions of people regularly scream at you for something
| you are will be sensitive and probably aggressively
| moderated, see /Conservative. It's a safe space.
| replygirl wrote:
| I don't think any of the positions I listed are
| contrarian, they were all in response to questions openly
| posed to the subs, and I felt I gave my comments soberly
| and in good faith as a member of each community.
|
| On the note about queer communities: I get why queer
| people are sensitive because I'm a trans woman with a
| nonbinary streak and I was oversensitive in my first few
| years after coming out. My experience living out+proud
| all over the country for the past decade, lining up with
| the experience of other queer people in my life, is that
| that sensitivity is largely motivated by self-loathing
| and fear that our communities reinforce, and that one of
| the best things you can do as a queer person is learn to
| love yourself. Once you do learn to love yourself, you
| can see that life is actually really good for queer
| people--many less marginalized groups are falling over
| themselves to support us, our married couples average the
| highest household income of any other family unit when
| controlling for other factors, tokenistic representation
| and marketing are booming, and despite what the news
| cycle will tell you things are by-and-large improving in
| the legal domain. Had one bathroom incident in New York a
| few years back, dealt with sexual assault and groping in
| the early 2010s, 10 years later I'm still visibly trans
| and road tripping around the rural South making friends
| will all sorts of strangers in unexpected places.
|
| You can apply the same logic to all sorts of other social
| groups and formations, internet conservatives included.
| The disingenous way to state the truth is that internet
| communities in all corners of society are full of
| pedantic snowflakes who need to touch grass.
| drumhead wrote:
| Its any view that they dont find acceptable however mild
| they may be. If you dont fit into their political world
| view you're likely to be banned. Discussion unless you
| subscribe the dominant viewpoints is almost impossible on
| reddit. Say something the majority dont like and you're
| downvoted into oblivion or banned. Literally the only place
| left where you can speak your mind without censure is sadly
| 4chan.
| DirectorKrennic wrote:
| > Say something the majority dont like and you're
| downvoted into oblivion
|
| So? That's how every society works everywhere. Don't
| disturb the peace. You are an adult. You're entitled to
| your opinion, but you should have the courage of your
| convictions. Reddit is no different from other social
| media platforms in this regard, even HN.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > So?
|
| The issue is that we lose a forum for clearly examining
| and correcting our own beliefs, be they popular or
| unpopular.
|
| This is the echo-chamber effect, and it's the antithesis
| of curious discussion.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| Downvotes are not a productive means of communication. If
| you have problems with my views be an adult and oppose my
| views rationally. Otherwise ignore me and move on. Having
| any form of social credit score that can be abused to
| silence others is quite literally a pillar of
| authoritarianism and de-incentivizes the free flow of
| ideas if they disagree with established groupthink. It
| doesn't matter if the majority believes it to be true. At
| one time the majority believed the Earth to be flat.
|
| Thankfully HN doesn't fall into this hole as deeply as
| Reddit, due in part to the steeper requirements to
| participate in downvoting and simply how varied the
| opinions are here. Not to mention HN doesn't have a cabal
| of "powermods" forcing subreddits to follow their own
| agenda.
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| Guess you haven't criticized Californian way of business
| and was banned by d*** for it yet.
|
| Nothing of value lost with the user full of internet-
| points. Though I'm no reddit user (never was), so it may
| be really worse there, but this was already too much
| bullshit for my post-communist easter-european taste.
| replygirl wrote:
| We can take things in stride at the same time as wishing
| for a more enlightened discourse
| carlosjobim wrote:
| That's not how for example newspapers work. They will
| publish opinion pieces from people and with opinions that
| they themselves strongly disagree with, because they see
| it as their duty to promote freedom of speech and a
| healthy public debate.
|
| Or parliament debates, where representatives for smaller
| parties get to have their say on equal terms as the big
| dogs.
|
| Some countries even force radio and TV stations to air a
| certain amount of time to each candidate for their
| propaganda before an election (which can be hundreds of
| people).
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I'm happy to say that even HN largely doesn't work like
| that: many of us upvote comments with which we disagree
| because they are well thought-out or interesting, and
| made us reconsider our viewpoints, even if we ultimately
| settled on the same viewpoint as before.
|
| Or at minimum we don't downvote as knee-jerk
| psychological defense mechanism.
|
| And Dang doesn't go around removing comments and
| commenters he philosophically disagrees with either, even
| when they're obviously wrong or hyper-emotional, so long
| as they're not hurting the community.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I think the ability to block/ignore users would be much
| better than having down votes. If some poster is simply
| insufferable to a person, better that they have the
| ability to block than that they silence by downvoting.
|
| And upvoting people you disagree with if they move the
| discussion forward in a good way is something we all
| should do, but it is a struggle.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| If people on 4chan don't like what you say, your post
| dies after about 15 minutes so I don't understand what
| your point about that is.
|
| Which is worse, your post literally disappearing, or
| having a big negative number next to it. Which is less
| censorship?
| matthew9219 wrote:
| [dead]
| babypuncher wrote:
| I'm not quite so optimistic.
|
| The great Digg migration was something of a perfect storm.
| Digg shot themselves in the foot, yes, but Reddit was already
| up-and-coming and viewed as the most viable alternative.
|
| There isn't really a viable alternative to Reddit yet.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| If people keep telling you that you're racist then maybe
| you're...
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| ...commenting innocuously on a massive social network among
| college-age North American kids in 2023
| 1270018080 wrote:
| Users with this attitude all moved to Voat where they did
| silly transphobe nazi homophobe things. In order for a social
| media site to grow in quality beyond 4chan-tier users, they
| have to implement strong moderation. HN is doing the same
| thing.
| btreecat wrote:
| As someone who used to mod, jfc you're clearly one of the
| folks who was a problem if that's your opening position.
|
| I know that had you stepped up to help out one of your
| favorite subs, you'd have a different lense. You comment is v
| clearly just ignorant.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Can you elaborate how you "know" this? Or why you think it?
| It just looks like you're triggered.
| echelon wrote:
| I've been banned from multiple subreddits for describing
| stock-based compensation, for talking about AI, for
| defending trans people, and for worrying about crime in my
| city.
|
| Reddit's moderation system is exactly the kind of world I
| don't want to live in.
| torstenvl wrote:
| GP expressed an opinion about abusive moderators.
|
| Your response is to disagree with him, identify yourself as
| a moderator, and then... be abusive?
|
| How _exactly_ did you think that profanity and personal
| attacks were going to help make your point?
| btreecat wrote:
| _Former_ mod, because folks like GP is why I stepped
| away. Noisy nonsensical complaints based on a fantasy
| rather than real XP. Mixed with poor tooling, loads of
| spam, and bad workflows where the tooling did work.
|
| IDK how you think this is abusive, feel free to elaborate
| but I think you are being ridiculous so go for it I could
| use a laugh.
|
| I think it's perfectly reasonable to attack the person
| for a lack of XP in the domain for which they are
| attempting to lobby a silly and poorly constructed
| complaint that reads like a self report.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| But there could be a mod problem and a problem with
| regular users. You seemed trapped in some tug of war.
| biorach wrote:
| > IDK how you think this is abusive
|
| I'm not the person you're replying to
|
| I don't think "abusive" is quite the right word for your
| tone.
|
| > you're clearly one of the folks who was a problem if
| that's your opening position ... You comment is v clearly
| just ignorant.
|
| "Rude", "abrasive" and "confrontational" are probably
| better fits. And I think you have a God given right to be
| as obnoxious as you feel is fitting in response to
| someone you disagree with with. But maybe that's not
| conducive to a healthy Reddit
| b59831 wrote:
| > As someone who used to mod ...
|
| I'm pretty sure you were the problem
| roqi wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure you were the problem
|
| What problem is that?
|
| Your comment reads like a puerile "no u" and adds nothing
| to the discussion. It's quite ironic given the topic.
| btreecat wrote:
| I am certain the SPAM, low quality tooling, and shitty
| users were the problems. There is no pleasing everyone
| sure, but there is also no winning even accepting most
| folks, like yourself, not only won't understand but don't
| want to, when mixed with the barrage of "can I shill my
| junk here?"
| pdntspa wrote:
| I have to agree with GP, I am part of several subreddits
| where the moderators clearly enjoy being kings of their
| precious little fiefdom. Some of these folks are downright
| fascists, and the only way to fix it is to start a new
| subreddit or try appeal to reddit staff
|
| Maybe the burden of moderation makes them this way, I don't
| know. But reddit is worse off with them.
| jnwatson wrote:
| I think Musk learned the hard way how hard it is to
| strike the right balance.
|
| Anybody that thinks Reddit is fascist should spend 60
| days moderating a popular sub. Your attitude might
| change.
|
| This isn't to say that there aren't mods with power
| trips. Reddit has essentially outsourced their trust and
| safety department. It isn't going to be perfect.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > Anybody that thinks Reddit is fascist should spend 60
| days moderating a popular sub.
|
| I have little in the way of opinions about Reddit, but
| this strikes me as the wrong approach on general grounds.
|
| It might be true that anyone who spends time running a
| subreddit will change their mind about moderation.
| However, the only point of a subreddit is for people to
| talk to each other and to read what others are talking
| about; moderation is nothing but incidental overhead.
| That doesn't mean it's easy or unimportant, but it does
| mean that the burden is on the moderators to prove
| themselves reasonable to participants who don't and
| shouldn't have to, by default, understand their work
| going in.
|
| There can be different approaches to that, and in some of
| them the participants will come to understand and care
| about how moderation works--I'm not saying that they
| shouldn't. But I am saying that if they don't see why
| they should but the moderators wanted them to, generally
| speaking it's the moderators who failed.
|
| There is no natural law that says that there'll always be
| a way to succeed, though. Perhaps in some communities, in
| some political environments, etc. there just can't be a
| good discussion forum. In such cases, maybe it really are
| the users who suck. But the fact remains that if users
| get annoyed about the moderation and leave, then the
| moderators have built a forum that's wrong for those
| users.
|
| (This is of course the standard argument against every
| instance of "the users just don't understand how complex
| the backoffice is" ever. But this instance might look a
| bit unfamilliar because it doesn't involve computers.)
| ryandrake wrote:
| I briefly modded an old phpBB forum (remember those?) and
| therefore have sympathy for mods. The job is thankless,
| and the amount of crap that you need to mod is unending.
| And this was for a tiny hobby forum, not the vast sewage
| of Reddit. I'm talking spam, flamewars, spam, harassment,
| nazis, spam, porn, spam, spam, bigotry, and spam. I can't
| imagine how hard it would be on a forum with a user base
| as giant and interconnected as Reddit.
|
| The balance seems impossible. If your moderation is
| "light touch" the forum ends up like 4chan. If your
| moderation is heavy handed, you're a power-tripper
| control freak lording over your site. You can't win.
|
| I don't know how dang does it here. He's some kind of
| wizard.
| prions wrote:
| How many times does the hard libertarian view on forums
| have to be debunked until people stop trying to pitch it
| as a serious solution?
|
| Even 4chan has stronger moderation than what you advocate
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Um, I don't think I was advocating any particular level
| of moderation, was I? More like visibility into its
| processes amd motivations, and that providing those
| convincingly and to an appropriate extent is the
| moderators' responsibility. Dang's please-stop-this
| essays here come to mind, for example--even if not
| everybody can be dang and not every community would be
| moved by such essays.
|
| (There _are_ moderation practices that I disapprove of
| and are not coincidentally outright incompatible with the
| view I expressed. Like the advice to just ban the user if
| you dislike interacting with them or if they're
| complaining about suppression--especially in a small
| community like that advice was targeted at, I know I'd be
| more or less unsalvageably bitter after witnessing this
| in practice, let alone being its target. But it's still
| not the _strength_ that upsets me in this hypothetical,
| it's more the perceived arbitrariness. Which, if the
| moderator is not in fact being arbitrary, is again a
| communication problem, not a policy one.)
|
| Moderation is overhead, but so is Postgres. Both are very
| useful solutions to real and difficult problems. Both
| still have to pay for themselves with some mix of user-
| visible shinies and keeping out of the way instead of
| grumbling about how difficult the problem is. The correct
| choice of that mix is highly situational and I don't
| pretend to have the panacea in that respect.
| roqi wrote:
| > Um, I don't think I was advocating any particular level
| of moderation, was I? More like visibility into its
| processes amd motivations, and that providing those
| convincingly and to an appropriate extent is the
| moderators' responsibility.
|
| If you are not advocating for a particular type of
| moderation then why are you all bothered about how any
| type of moderation is applied? What would be the point of
| your suggestion?
| ncallaway wrote:
| > This is of course the standard argument against every
| instance of "the users just don't understand how complex
| the backoffice is" ever
|
| Except in this case the ones in the "back office" are
| volunteers and not staff.
|
| I'm amenable to your argument in most other contexts. But
| it strikes me as an awful argument to apply to
| volunteers.
|
| In that context, if you don't like it then you have to
| step up and do it yourself. If someone is doing work for
| free, you don't get to complain about the quality.
| Instead, you pick up a broom and do the sweeping
| yourself.
|
| Which isn't to say that Reddit mods are beyond question
| or reproach, but if there's a concern shared by all
| moderators, it strikes me as wrong to say "that's a
| backoffice issue". If you don't like it, go back into the
| office.
| jredwards wrote:
| Moderation is an incredibly difficult task and almost
| impossible to get right. There are subs with better mods
| and worse mods. But _lack_ of moderation is the best way
| to ensure that a platform becomes absolute garbage as
| quickly as possible.
| bwat49 wrote:
| see: Voat
| alienthrowaway wrote:
| Edit: this comment is descriptive, not prescriptive
|
| If you have ever moderated a subreddit you'd understand
| why mods wind up with heavy handed approaches.
|
| Even moderately sized subreddits are a lot of work,
| especially of a post gets to the front page. You can't
| have gourmet experiences at fast-food scale. When you
| have a long list of reports to go through, and you have
| been moderating long-enough, your decisions are based on
| heuristics rather than nuanced explanation or checking
| the post history of some (non-subscribed guest) snowflake
| Redditor who think their spicy take is insightful and/or
| you're taking away their 1A rights when they haven't
| bothered to read the rules of the subreddit they are
| commenting in. Subreddits are _not_ a townsquare open to
| all-comers, they are very large clubhouses with distinct
| rules and norms - mods exist to enforce those rules.
|
| There's no time for - nor an upside to splitting hairs on
| whether a commenter _is_ a transphobic nazi[1] or merely
| matches the archetype. When modding, false positives are
| vastly preferable to false negatives since mods value
| _their_ time more than the individual commenters who get
| caught up, and I don 't see this changing even if _you_
| were to become the mod
|
| 1. Or is a "woke brigader" on the conservative
| subreddits.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| False positives are always preferable to the person who
| gets to make them.
|
| They're somewhat less so to those who end up being the
| false positives.
|
| If your hobby's main forum on the internet dried up and
| withered away 12 years ago because the only place to
| discuss it is reddit, then it's not as if such a person
| can just go elsewhere. You have a monopoly on the
| conversation and you're clearly not interested in justice
| anywhere near as much as you're interested in kicking out
| people you just don't like well enough to care about
| justice for them.
| [deleted]
| roqi wrote:
| > I have to agree with GP, I am part of several
| subreddits where the moderators clearly enjoy being kings
| of their precious little fiefdom.
|
| You never used IRC, have you?
| sdwr wrote:
| Agree here. The worst moderators are the most visible -
| it's a power position. Anyone with tact, humility or a
| life will lie low and not exploit it.
|
| The bright line for me is whether they can handle direct
| criticism. Everything else is window dressing - is your
| ego strong enough to handle someone saying they don't
| like you? If not, you won't make good decisions.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Unfortunately, GP is more correct than incorrect in their
| opening position. And that's partally to blame for the fall
| of what was a once great community, so it's relevant to
| point that out.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Case in point
| adamrezich wrote:
| "that's just what a racist transphobe nazi homophobe enemy
| would say!", basically?
| slg wrote:
| You may be joking, but the specifics insults there are
| indicative of a certain worldview. OP only used words
| that would come from a small percentage of the population
| and insults that wouldn't be relevant on most subreddits.
|
| For example, these wouldn't be the insults you would here
| from anyone who qualifies as centrist or anything further
| right unless you are legitimately doing something wrong.
| There are also plenty of more conservative subreddits
| with awful mods too that would never use those insults.
| And if someone calls you a "transphobe" on some niche
| gardening subreddit, odds are you are doing something
| obnoxious and off topic that would upset the mods
| regardless of whether you are actually a transphobe.
|
| Combine that all together and it starts to sound like OP
| is one of those people who is "running into assholes all
| day" without ever questioning whether that is any
| indication of their own behavior.
| specialist wrote:
| > _the specifics insults there are indicative of a
| certain worldview_
|
| If it walks like a duck...
|
| A partial defense is the reactionaries are quite good at
| mainstreaming their blather. For example, a few of us
| fell for Haidt's moral foundations nonsense, if only
| briefly.
| jstarfish wrote:
| > And if someone calls you a "transphobe" on some niche
| gardening subreddit, odds are you are doing something
| obnoxious and off topic that would upset the mods
| regardless of whether you are actually a transphobe.
|
| Gaslighting in action.
|
| To earn the Transphobe badge, all you have to do is
| complain about anyone else bringing up the subject of
| trans-anything on a niche gardening subreddit. Or refuse
| to boycott Harry Potter.
|
| You're very quick to denounce this guy as an asshole
| "doing something wrong" based on absolutely no material
| information-- just a bunch of assumptions and
| speculation. Hardly an honest assessment on your part.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Agreed and thank you. The Transphobe badge is the easiest
| one to earn at the moment, and I've earned it multiple
| times in Star Trek subs, even though I have no problem
| with the existence of trans people in theory, in sci fi
| stories, or in my daily life.
|
| For instance, I recently earned the badge by saying the
| Dax character on DS9 isn't "a trans person"... she's an
| alien with a symbiote, that has lived 7 lives and doesn't
| much care which gender of body it inhabits per se, or
| whom its host is going around kissing.
|
| I'm providing plenty of content here in my comments based
| on which to either denounce me as an asshole or to agree
| that I'm not one.
| adamrezich wrote:
| all of which is completely useless--the judgement upon
| you has already been passed, and you have been deemed One
| Of Those Sorts Of People--the tar, feathers, and
| pitchforks should be headed your direction shortly.
| btreecat wrote:
| >she's an alien with a symbiote, that has lived 7 lives
| and doesn't much care which gender of body it inhabits
| per se, or whom its host is going around kissing.
|
| That's p clearly a metaphor for fluid concepts of gender
| and sexuality.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Clearly and unequivocally. To the point that disagreeing
| or even discussing the fit of this metaphor in a 90s sci
| fi show earns the Transphobe badge and risks a mod ban.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Star Trek is widely known to be extremely progressive. It
| quite literally is not like any other sci fi show at the
| time, and this continued throughout the series. Why would
| "the fit of this metaphor in a 90s sci fi show" be
| relevant given this?
|
| You're jumping through a lot of hoops to not directly
| show or link to what you actually said, making vague
| remarks about what was said instead and then playing the
| victim game.
|
| Someone else called it out in a separate thread as well,
| regarding the Coronavirus debacle. You seem intent on
| providing a single side of a story and then expecting
| everyone to believe you without doubt.
|
| Maybe just make it easier for everyone, link to the
| comments, and let us judge for ourselves.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I grant that Star Trek is extremely progressive- I've
| been watching it since before I could speak and every
| year since.
|
| Whether or not my reasoning is correct that the Dax
| character is too loose a metaphor for trans people to be
| applicable to real world issues, the point is this makes
| for no reason to label me an enemy of the state. I could
| be right or wrong, but it's a valid point of discussion
| in a Star Trek sub, under a post about how Dax is a trans
| character.
|
| I'm not linking directly to the comments for one obvious
| reason: I don't want to link my HN account and my Reddit
| account together.
|
| For that reason you can judge everything I've said in the
| worst possible light if you think that's fair under the
| circumstances.
| OGWhales wrote:
| I don't think gaslighting is the right word, it's
| speculation.
|
| In my experience on reddit, most of the time people
| heavily complain about how awful mods are it ends up
| being that person was actually just an asshole.
|
| I agree that mods can be an issue and many are power
| hungry weirdos. I've been on reddit over a decade and
| have dealt with them plenty. My solution to dealing with
| subs run by bad moderators is unsubscribing/filtering
| them, as the content is typically of poor quality anyway
| and it's usually a giant echo chamber. If that solution
| doesn't work and you are constantly running into problem
| mods, it's more likely that you are the problem or maybe
| you are seeking out communities where it's very likely to
| be ran by bad, heavily political moderators.
|
| The comment in question above does seem like the typical
| comment you see on reddit, where when you look at their
| post history you realize they totally deserved it. If
| that's actually the case for this person, I can't say, I
| agree there isn't enough info. But I can say I'm not
| surprised people are quick to assume that's the case,
| cause it definitely reminds me of those kinds of comments
| where that is the case.
| slg wrote:
| >To earn the Transphobe badge, all you have to do is
| complain about anyone else bringing up the subject of
| trans-anything on a niche gardening subreddit. Or refuse
| to boycott Harry Potter.
|
| Yes, this is the "obnoxious and off topic" behavior I was
| talking about. The mods of a niche gardening subreddit
| likely don't want to moderate a debate about your refusal
| to boycott Harry Potter.
| babypuncher wrote:
| If you are starting fights about boycotting Harry Potter
| in my niche gardening subreddit, you are going to get in
| trouble, regardless of what side of the argument you are
| on. It's totally off-topic.
|
| Many people come to niche subreddits specifically to get
| away from all the divisive political rhetoric that has
| infected all other corners of the internet.
| specialist wrote:
| Another option is descretion. Why say anything at all?
| Especially knowing that it'll just keep the slap fight
| going?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Also yes? Every nazi literally believes they are being
| oppressed.
| conradfr wrote:
| Well yeah they are, for good reasons.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Most fringe political ideologies do to some extent. It
| turns out it's hard to compel people to act or vote if
| they're feeling content and safe. So you make them feel
| indignant and under threat.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| And yet every person who _is_ literally oppressed is not
| a Nazi, nor am I one.
|
| Not that I'd equate the decline and fall of quality
| interactions on Reddit with "oppression".
| paulddraper wrote:
| Every nazi also drinks water.
| veave wrote:
| [flagged]
| radarsat1 wrote:
| I don't know about the social justice issues, but I've found
| that a growing problem with reddit is what I'll summarize as
| "the rules".
|
| I admit I'm much more of a lurker than a contributor, but I
| do post things from time to time. Comments fairly frequently
| in technical forums, and posts much less frequently, but when
| they are, they are either: 1) to show a project I did, or 2)
| to ask a technical question.
|
| Basically all of these use cases are more and more an
| exercise in frustration. I've been using the site for at
| least a decade, but I can't remember having so much trouble
| using it until quite recently. The last several posts, let's
| say during 2023, I've made get either manually or auto-
| removed. Every single subreddit no matter how small has its
| own, different, set of "rules" and if you don't memorize them
| you get your post removed. These rules are often very
| antisocial, in my opinion.
|
| For example, in one forum that I read very often, I never
| post anything because I only like to post my own work, as I
| consider such work to be "original content" -- I'm not one to
| spend my time scouring the internet for other people's work
| to share, instead I like to share when I've got something to
| share, right? Seems natural enough to me anyway. Well, I
| posted a project that I spent 2 months developing, yes as
| part of the startup I work for but it was a for-fun April-
| fools type project, intended to amuse. Banned. Immediately.
| For "self promotion". (There were literally no ads in it or
| anything, just a website with a fun interaction, and the
| startups logo in the corner.) Thanks guys. Guess I'll take my
| ball and go home. Apparently they prefer reposted nonsense to
| original contributions? Bizarre, backwards..
|
| Another example, someone was asking where they could go for
| some discussions on a certain topic, so naturally I responded
| to point to some other subreddits. Immediate auto-remove due
| to "posting links to other subreddits". Really? So, like,
| they have rules against hyperlinking? That thing that is at
| the foundation of the web?
|
| Similarly I posted a question to a Python forum, actually
| quite an advanced question about an interesting phenomenon I
| noticed related to async generators -- auto-removed. Told to
| repost it in LearnPython. Great. Did so, got a bunch of
| beginner replies, as I expected, instead of the in-depth
| discussion I was hoping for.
|
| Now, I understand that these rules and bots exist for a
| reason .. mainly one reason actually, which is to fight spam.
| But enough is enough. At what point does spam fighting become
| intrusive to normal, community sharing of ideas? To be
| honest, this has gotten me so down regarding reddit that I'm
| considering just not using the site any more, as it's gotten
| quite boring because I can barely contribute without jumping
| through hoops. Trying to post or share something is just
| depressing because either it breaks some rule, or people jump
| all over it with negative comments. It just doesn't feel like
| it's worth the effort anymore.
|
| Does anyone else have this experience, or is it just me?
| kaetemi wrote:
| Boards that have rules against self-promotion are a sign
| that they're centered around one or a group of influencers,
| or that the board intends to promote whoever is running it,
| rather than being a real social community with mutual
| interests where people actually learn to know one another.
| johnny22 wrote:
| huh? got an example? I've been to quite a few topical
| FOSS oriented subs and i'm happy for the no self-
| promotion rules.
|
| It's usually a bunch of people making an inferior version
| of neofetch or whatever basic tool is well known to the
| community.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Yeah; almost all the subreddits with more than a few
| thousand members have decided you can't post any links to
| anything of your own, labeling it self promotion. I think
| corporate blogspam is to blame.
|
| But I have been soft-banned from the Raspberry Pi subreddit
| for years (which is rich!) for self promotion since I used
| to link to my blog posts about various Pi topics.
|
| So I started doing text posts, and would have 3-5
| paragraphs about the topic, then at the bottom a link for
| more info to my blog post. Nope, self-promotion.
|
| I had similar issues in many other places, and in a lot of
| subs, even if you post a link, if you forget to also add a
| comment with specific points, or set flair after posting...
| all kinds of arcane rules, then your post will get deleted.
|
| I haven't been banned from any sub AFAICT, but mods are
| swift to ban for almost any reason these days, especially
| for anyone who dares to challenge whatever the groupthink
| is (in the Apple sub, it was basically "if you dare put
| Apple in a bad light or question anything they do" for a
| time, I think I may have been banned there for posting a
| complaint about the Touch Bar!).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >But I have been soft-banned from the Raspberry Pi
| subreddit for years (which is rich!) for self promotion
| since I used to link to my blog posts about various Pi
| topics.
|
| "I was banned from a subreddit for self promotion since I
| promoted my own blog"
|
| Like, come on man.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Yes, I agree, in general.
|
| But to be completely fair to him, it's Jeff Geerling.
|
| Being hyperbolic here, but practically all the content in
| the Pi (and Homelab, and several other subreddits) is
| either directly his or in some way derivative of his
| work. He has just put in _that much_ time and effort into
| this space.
|
| So the same post that got deleted would have likely been
| reposted, with less context, minutes later. Likely
| multiple times by multiple different people.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| This comes more from a background of "link-sharing sites
| work by people posting links with original and
| interesting content that a community would like."
|
| And Reddit (and HN, and Digg, etc.) started out as link-
| sharing sites.
|
| If not for "self-promotion", new blogs would never have
| been noticed once the era of blog rings died off and
| Google tried (and partially succeeded) killing RSS.
|
| I think blatant self-promotion for selling things is
| wrong. But writing a blog post with information relevant
| to a community and sharing that seems like it's useful.
| If the community thinks it's spammy, then the community
| can flag it or downvote it.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Just get your good friend "Geff Jeerling" to post them
| instead. ;)
|
| I think it boils down to the sad fact that "writing a
| blog post with information relevant to a community and
| sharing that" has become somewhat of a minority case for
| blogs nowadays. They are generally either "self-promotion
| for selling things" (blatant or not) which you mentioned,
| or just straight up blogspam (almost always blatant). And
| when your job is to moderate a large community, you don't
| really have time to go in and evaluate whether each and
| every single post is the latter two or an earnest attempt
| at getting information across.
|
| > If the community thinks it's spammy, then the community
| can flag it or downvote it.
|
| In theory, yes. If everyone used the voting and reporting
| system appropriately, and people whose posts were
| reported took the judgement tactfully and with grace. But
| I've seen people constantly argue that "what they said
| wasn't against the rules" just because it wasn't
| explicitly listed as a rule.
|
| When a moderator's job is already so loaded, they're
| going to push for making their lives easier. Blanket
| banning "self-promotion" means it's a simple decision
| when it does get reported and makes it harder to argue
| against a removal.
|
| FWIW, I think the model you mentioned works a lot better
| here, where there's a bit more of a professional bias,
| and especially when people have linked their real-world
| professional identities with their accounts. It adds a
| level of courtesy and assumption of best intent that
| isn't as prevalent on Reddit.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| You're not crazy.
|
| Others have noticed the very same effect and felt
| disenfranchised by it.
|
| In some subreddits your post gets removed because the title
| didn't end in a period.
|
| It results in subreddits full of boring recycled dreck,
| because the smart folks take their ball and go home.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Any subreddit that gets on "/all" regularly is owned by a
| few megamods, and their point is to make reddit money
| with advertising, not to be a useful community.
|
| Even if they wanted to actually be a useful community,
| the tools mods get on reddit are woefully unfit for
| purpose for communities of millions of people. You cannot
| have a public forum with that many people. The human
| brain is just not built for it. Perfect moderation is
| impossible
| castillar76 wrote:
| I've had similar experiences in other subreddits, yep. Not
| so much things being removed, though. Instead I ask nicely
| for help with learning something and get fried with "you're
| doing this all wrong, lrn2notsuck noob" responses, or I
| spend a good chunk of time on a thoughtful response to a
| question and it gets no votes or responses at all.
|
| Some subreddits are notable exceptions, though---those are
| the ones I'll actually miss if this thing collapses. By and
| large, they're small, very focused subreddits on particular
| topics; seems like once a subreddit reaches a certain size
| it just collapses into the above mess of behaviors.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Isn't that the old Linux joke? Ask nicely for help with
| Linux and people will tell you to go pound sand. Instead
| say "Linux sucks because it can't do this..." and tons of
| people will show up saying "No, you are wrong! Linux can
| do it, you just need to..."
| tylerscott wrote:
| I can confirm it is not just you. I've had similar
| experiences in other subreddits. Eventually I just stopped
| trying because it's super demoralizing trying to navigate
| the myriad of rules in each subreddit.
| afavour wrote:
| I've also been a Redditor for well over a decade. While I
| miss the days when it was a smaller niche site (before the
| Digg implosion it was basically a nerdier, smaller Digg) I
| still use and enjoy the site plenty today.
|
| I have never been accused of being a racist transphobe
| whatever, if that's your number one issue with the site maybe
| some inward reflection is in order? Just don't get involved
| in political flamewars, they serve absolutely no purpose for
| anyone involved.
| paisawalla wrote:
| > _I have never been accused of being a racist transphobe
| whatever, if that's your number one issue with the site
| maybe some inward reflection is in order_
|
| Perhaps you simply haven't encountered the kind of person
| who, at the vaguest sense of an opportunity to claim the
| title of Most Moral Person, will leap up to condescend you
| based on the most uncharitable and motivated reading of
| your words.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| If one person calls you an asshole, then they might be an
| asshole. If everyone calls you an asshole, then some
| inward reflection is in order because you're likely
| coming off as an asshole.
|
| If it happens again and again, in different circles with
| different people, like GP indicates happens, then maybe,
| just maybe it's not everyone else that's the problem.
| paisawalla wrote:
| The underlying motivation in these sorts of exchanges is
| rarely a desire for a global increase of genuine self-
| examination, but more often to exploit an opportunity for
| ostentatious preening. We know this because your logic
| can be trivially inverted to point the mirror in the
| reverse direction. So, reflection being what it is, if
| self-examination were the true goal, one imagines that
| those advocating it would at least show first that they
| had done it themselves.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| The underlying motivation is to have assholes take a
| closer look at themselves instead of continuously blaming
| those around them for what ultimately is the result of
| their own actions.
|
| If this struck such a nerve with you, then you may want
| to take a step back and re-evaluate why you're so deeply
| triggered by people advocating for introspection instead
| of deflection.
|
| It's pretty clear from your comment you won't, but that's
| a separate issue.
| david38 wrote:
| The old "if the issue doesn't affect me, it's probably
| something with you."
| wlesieutre wrote:
| The person they're replying to was the one who said
| "every user" so I'm not going to fault them for saying
| "hasn't been my experience"
|
| I've not run into that either and I've been on reddit
| since before digg v4
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I got banned from /r/CanadaCoronavirus for saying at the
| time we didn't yet know how many doses and on what schedule
| of the vaccine would be needed.
|
| Banned. That's anti-vaxx propaganda on my part, evidently.
|
| I messaged the mods to explain that I was triple-vaxxed and
| what I said was not only factually correct, it wasn't even
| controversial.
|
| The mods patiently replied that anti-vaxx trolls like me
| will be reported to reddit to have my entire account banned
| "for harassment" if I contact them again.
|
| What inward reflection do I need? This is just one of
| myriad examples with mods who don't actually read or
| process the content about which they're banning people.
| strunz wrote:
| None of that sounds like you were called a "racist
| transphobe nazi homophobe" like you originally said.
| Funny how you picked an example of something to frame
| yourself as correct in the most "scientific" way possible
| instead.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I could have added antivaxx or generically "denying The
| Science" to my list of -ist terms, I suppose.
| afavour wrote:
| Yeah, that example does sound bad. In the ideal world I'd
| be curious to hear the mod's perspective: it's possible
| to be perceived as a troll even when you're stating true
| facts, depending on context and tone.
|
| That's kind of what I mean about inward reflection. If
| you find yourself on the receiving end of modding after
| stating entirely true and relevant facts... yes, maybe
| the mods are out of control. But maybe the impression
| you're giving off _while stating truth_ still leaves a
| sour taste. If you find yourself fielding accusations of
| being antivaxx _and_ being racist _and_ being a
| transphobe, etc etc, all in different subs with different
| mods then there's only a few commonalities left. I'm not
| saying you did deserve any of this, I don't have the
| evidence to, just that it's something worth pondering.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| The commonality could be that I am all those things, or
| the commonality could be that Reddit is pathologically
| sensitive to all those things.
|
| My claim is the latter: it's a Reddit auto-immune disease
| that was hardly present in the early days and is now
| impossible to miss after years of gradual decline.
| [deleted]
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| Occam's Razor suggests the former. Here is a perfunctory
| "I don't know you" - nothing below may be applicable.
|
| There are power-hungry mods, no doubt. They can be
| politically oriented in either direction, or sometimes
| just like to be the monarch. But I've been around reddit
| for over 15 years now, and in my view if you're
| _regularly_ being accused of being toxic, I 'm inclined
| to believe that you're the cause. And it may not be due
| to the factual nature of your posts, but the manner in
| which you share them.
|
| Again, I don't know you, and my experience certainly
| can't generalize to everyone else. I was a mod for about
| six months, hated it, but that gave me all the insight I
| need into how dishonest (or possibly not at all self-
| aware) people can be when recounting how they were
| "wronged."
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| To me Occam's Razor suggests that any giant social
| network inevitably declines into group-think and mod
| fiefdoms, barring an active mitigation strategy.
|
| This is the very basis of why HN rules and moderation are
| structured the way they are: to actively discourage such
| an anticipated decline.
|
| If a person seems reasonable and thoughtful on one
| anonymous forum, Occam's Razor suggests they are
| similarly thoughtful in another anonymous forum.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| > To me Occam's Razor suggests that any giant social
| network inevitably declines into group-think and mod
| fiefdoms, barring an active mitigation strategy.
|
| And I would argue any giant social network also
| inevitably declines into troll behavior and bad-faith
| brigading without active mitigation strategies. It is
| hard to balance these things.
|
| I certainly think "I'm routinely regarded as an a-hole
| because I act like one" to be much more plausible than
| "I'm routinely regarded as an a-hole because this giant
| social network has a metaphorical auto-immune disease
| that results in me experiencing this routinely."
| OGWhales wrote:
| > I certainly think "I'm routinely regarded as an a-hole
| because I act like one" to be much more plausible than
| "I'm routinely regarded as an a-hole because this giant
| social network has a metaphorical auto-immune disease
| that results in me experiencing this routinely."
|
| Especially when others participate in that same social
| network and don't experience that same problem.
|
| The one benefit I could give this person is that they are
| seeking out subs that have a high likelihood of being ran
| by highly political moderators and are extrapolating that
| to the whole of reddit. The same could be true for what
| kinds of discussions they find themselves participating
| in. If they are attracted to highly political communities
| and controversial discussions, they would have a higher
| likelihood of running into such issues.
| mistermann wrote:
| > But I've been around reddit for over 15 years now, and
| in my view if you're regularly being accused of being
| toxic, I'm inclined to believe that you're the cause. And
| it may not be due to the factual nature of your posts,
| but the manner in which you share them.
|
| Don't forget the sub-perceptual cultural axioms of the
| era the Event occurred in within Time.
| btreecat wrote:
| That doesn't sound like the full story.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| What else can I add? You've seen my interactions here.
|
| Does it seem to you like the kind of person you're
| interacting with is reasonable here but unreasonable to
| the point of group toxicity elsewhere? Or that I'm
| unreasonable here?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Your initial comment here was unsupported by real world
| examples, and used a lot of rage-bait buzzwords.
|
| When asked to put up a concrete example, no-one called
| you a fascist/nazi/transphobe in the example. They banned
| you for, according to you, "just asking questions" on a
| country specific coronavirus subreddit.
|
| Your tone comes off as "I'm right, they're wrong. I'm the
| victim here!"
| jboy55 wrote:
| "Just asking questions" is the biggest red flag of ill
| intent, its not doubt I would ban someone for resorting
| to that. Especially if we look at the facts given in the
| comment.
|
| " saying at the time we didn't yet know how many doses
| and on what schedule of the vaccine would be needed."
|
| "I messaged the mods to explain that I was triple-vaxxed
| "
|
| So we can infer from this post that this happened
| sometime after Aug 2021. So someone went into the Canada
| Coronavirus group, a group where posts seem to get tens
| of comments, and brought up completely innocently, "how
| we don't know how many doses" we need. To make a broader
| point on what... could it have been, "how we shouldn't
| have a mandate?"
|
| Perhaps this was closer to Feb/2022 where the Trucker
| protest was raging across Canada. Of course, the mods may
| not want a big flamewar over mandates in their group that
| seems like a niche information aggregation sub.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| It would be doubly damning if GP hadn't made up the "just
| asking questions" quote as if I had said or implied it.
| Or if you hadn't made up the "how we shouldn't have a
| mandate?" quote as if I had commented in either direction
| on that.
| mistermann wrote:
| > "Just asking questions" is the biggest red flag of ill
| intent
|
| I consider the playing of the accusation of the JAQ
| wildcard (an immediate victory in the minds of some
| subsets of observers) to be a much more dangerous (often
| literally unrealizeable) cultural norm, it is a go to
| staple technique in any delusional internet rhetorician's
| toolkit.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
|
| It is a well known tactic for ill intent. For a reason.
| People do it all the time and should be called out for
| doing so.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I wasn't asking questions. I was making a categorical
| statement of objective reality: at the time it was
| physically impossible to know how many doses of the
| vaccine, on what schedule, would achieve the best balance
| of effectiveness vs. safety.
|
| This was the content of my comment, which got me banned
| from /r/CanadaCoronavirus.
| jasonfarnon wrote:
| asking questions is also a well-known tactic for getting
| information. how do you figure out there's ill intent?
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Like everything else in life, by using contextual clues
| and judging the content of the questions.
|
| It's quite obvious when someone asks you questions with
| ill intent.
| [deleted]
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Ill intent to do what?
|
| What exactly would they accomplish if not banned, and
| were allowed to continue to "ask questions"?
|
| Why should anyone be afraid of them achieving that
| accomplishment?
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > That doesn't sound like the full story.
|
| Nope. That is it. Many, many subs would outright ban you
| if you dared to question the narrative or posted to a
| "misinformation" subreddit like /r/lockdownskepticism. It
| was pathetic, honestly. God forbid anybody disagree with
| what society chose to do with covid....
| jnwatson wrote:
| The full story is that this was the 100th similar
| interaction the mod had that week and they were short on
| patience.
| brightball wrote:
| Based on my experience, that probably is the full story.
| psygn89 wrote:
| I haven't been called that either, but I know what he
| means... many of Reddit's bigger community comment section
| basically seems to devolve into politics or racial issues
| even if it was a photo of a cute kitten. Often you'll
| basically see the comment section locked after it runs that
| course. The old reddit wasn't like that unless you visited
| political subreddits.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I think it's a product of some reddit communities
| becoming too big to effectively moderate.
|
| I mostly stick with smaller, non-default subs and don't
| really run into this problem anymore.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Yes, smaller subs do not have this issue.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| >every user is a racist transphobe nazi homophobe enemy.
|
| Nobody on Reddit has called me any of those things.
| [deleted]
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I literally once posted on T_D back in 2016 something to
| the tune of "hey that's anti semitic and dumb" on a thread
| that was on the front page.
|
| I guess later that meant that masstagger flagged me as a
| T_D poster, so about 10% of my future posts were responded
| to by someone telling me I was a racist piece of shit.
|
| I would also get mod messages once a week from subs I never
| post in(like 2xc) saying I was banned from their sub for
| participating in hate subs.
|
| And then later my account was perma banned for no good
| reason at all, I'm assuming it helped that I was tagged as
| a T_D poster.
| iopq wrote:
| Me neither, they just banned me for posting on subs they
| didn't like
| shmel wrote:
| I was banned from many subs just for being subbed to the
| "wrong" ones. I haven't even posted there.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| [flagged]
| malfist wrote:
| > Personally, I'm working on a reddit bot to spam the
| site/pm users with the truth
|
| I hope that is sarcasm. Consent is important, and
| spamming people with whatever pet theory you've decided
| is the "truth" is certainly not the actions of a moral
| person.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| [flagged]
| vore wrote:
| Well, good luck with that. Surely this strategy will work
| great.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> This is war,_
|
| That pretty much sums up most online forums these days.
|
| Most of one group: This disagrees with my views. I'm
| going to boycott it / ridicule it / or ask it to go
| elsewhere / some/all of the above.
|
| Most of another: This disagrees with my views. THIS IS
| WAR, I will destroy it!
|
| A few sensible people on all sides try to have a more
| mature debate, but are drowned out by the cacophony,
| mostly from those declaring war.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| I think you're forgetting the mass censorship, which you
| so cutely describe as "ask it to go elsewhere".
|
| If the original Reddit, facebook, or most other OG forums
| were introduced today, that "one group" would do
| everything in their powers to take it offline. The
| everyday members of that group also refuse to use that
| service until it conforms to their censorship needs.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| https://media.tenor.com/Qqhtb7KbrGcAAAAC/princess-bride-
| you-...
|
| You need to learn what the word "censorship" means if you
| want to continue using it and have people take you
| seriously.
| myko wrote:
| > This is war, a sitting US president was mass censored
| by the same ideology and I plan on fighting back
|
| This never happened and you seem unwell
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| How so? A sitting United States president was mass banned
| a few days apart by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit,
| Apple, etc. Hell, even Shopify, a Canadian company joined
| in the fun.
| myko wrote:
| He had just attempted to usurp the presidency of the
| United States, this wasn't censorship run amok
| dspillett wrote:
| There is a difference in perspective here. Being a
| sitting president didn't excuse him from breaking their
| codes of conduct.
|
| A person who broke their codes of conduct, who also
| happened to be a sitting president, was mass banned.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Are you suggesting that important people should not be
| subject to the same rules as the rest of us?
| jstarfish wrote:
| That's called Righteousness.
|
| Until you win hearts and minds, nobody's going to want to
| hear what you have to say. Strafing a community with
| truth bombs will not endear them to you, even if you're
| right.
| teslashill wrote:
| [dead]
| myko wrote:
| > all-powerful mods to whom every user is a racist transphobe
| nazi homophobe enemy.
|
| Weird, I've been put off of reddit because of the prevalence
| of transphobes, homophobes, and racists who inundate so many
| threads. I wish there were better mods to remove those folks
| from the site.
| mort96 wrote:
| I mean the racist transphobe nazi homophobes is probably the
| group I'm the most happy are getting banned... There are so
| many examples of mods power tripping, and you chose to use
| the banning of nazis as your example?
| Seanambers wrote:
| Yeah, the technical issues weren't that crazy from the user
| perspective. The change of features were though. It was a
| totally different site, people left because the core
| functionality of the site disappeared over night.
|
| Edit - makes me wonder if they used the site themselves.
| kolanos wrote:
| I remember Kevin Rose talking about the impending V4 and being
| struck by how obsessed he was with Digg doing every popular web
| trend at the time. He was particularly focused on everything
| Facebook did to the point where Digg aesthetically started to
| even look like Facebook. It seemed like Digg had all but
| abandoned what made it great in pursuit of copying others.
| Maybe this was VC pressure, who knows.
| swalsh wrote:
| Was it the V4 rollout where basically every link came from
| MrBabyMan?
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| Yes. Here is more info from Wikipedia:
|
| Digg's v4 release on August 25, 2010, was marred by site-wide
| bugs and glitches. Digg users reacted with hostile verbal
| opposition. Beyond the release, Digg faced problems due to
| so-called "power users" who would manipulate the article
| recommendation features to only support one another's
| postings, flooding the site with articles only from these
| users and making it impossible to have genuine content from
| non-power users appear on the front page.[citation needed]
| Frustrations with the system led to dwindling web traffic,
| exacerbated by heavy competition from Facebook, whose like
| buttons started to appear on websites next to Digg's.[19]
| High staff turnover included the departure of head of
| business development Matt Van Horn, shortly after v4's
| release.[20]
| bacchusracine wrote:
| >Digg faced problems due to so-called "power users" who
| would manipulate the article recommendation features to
| only support one another's postings, flooding the site with
| articles only from these users and making it impossible to
| have genuine content from non-power users appear on the
| front page
|
| So familiar....
| thisismyhna wrote:
| Yeap, this was definitely the point where many of us jumped
| over to Reddit. I remember hating Reddit's interface but it was
| the lesser evil.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| It's interesting that as users, we think of v4 as this pivotal
| moment when the platform changed forever - but the article's
| author seems to think of it more as the inflection point of
| ongoing problems that had built up for a while.
|
| Especially with a high profile implosion like this, it's really
| interesting to contrast our experience in the userbase to an
| internal perspective.
|
| >Digg V4 is sometimes referenced as an example of a
| catastrophic launch, with an implied lesson that we shouldn't
| have launched it. At one point, I used to agree, but these days
| I think we made the right decision to launch. Our traffic was
| significantly down, we were losing a bunch of money each month,
| we had recently raised money and knew we couldn't easily raise
| more. If we'd had the choice between launching something great
| and something awful, we'd have preferred to launch something
| great, but instead we had the choice of taking one last swing
| or turning in our bat quietly.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Glad to see this as the top comment. I was a "Digg refugee" to
| Reddit, and I do remember a lot of outages with V4, but just
| like you, I remember thinking more clearly "Why would I wait a
| long time for this page to load when all that comes back is
| spam." It was the most useless, uninteresting set of basically
| ads that I could think of. Imagine if Reddit had no interesting
| user submitted stories but was instead 100% of some of their
| worst ads that try to use "Reddit meme language". It was
| pathetic and sad.
| patwolf wrote:
| I remember a growing frustration before the v4 launch. Early on
| it seemed to be an aggregator for fun stuff on the internet,
| but over time it become more and more political. The v4 launch
| was the last straw that convinced me to switch to Reddit.
|
| Reddit at the time felt lighthearted and fun. I think I read
| somewhere that a lot of the comments were being written in-
| house, which makes sense in retrospect. For example, someone
| would leave a comment like "Is this the real life?", and then
| the entire lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody would appear line-by-
| line as comments without missing a beat. It seems improbable
| that a bunch of strangers could have done that perfectly.
|
| While there are some parallels between Digg v4 and what's going
| on with Reddit today, I think predictions of its death are
| greatly exaggerated. However, I would be happy to see something
| else take its place.
| what-the-grump wrote:
| Digg was Digg, then V4 launched, and it was no longer Digg. It
| was really that simple, oh hey I should check Digg maybe there
| is something interesting went to oh hey I need to find
| something else to check because Digg is stale, the new UI had
| much lower information density, coupled with less content meant
| that there was no reason to go back if you could find a faster
| feed.
|
| New stuff like reddit, insta, twitter, simply took over filling
| the urge to hit f5 for latest content.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| Plus it literally didn't load half the time.
| conradfr wrote:
| That's my recollection of it. Just one day the content was not
| interesting anymore and felt certainly more gamed than before,
| which they wanted to combat as per this blog post.
|
| I'm surprised the conclusion is not that they learn to never do
| a full rewrite of a social product again.
| broknbottle wrote:
| This so much. I remember visiting digg after v4 launch and it
| felt like a totally different site. At the time I remember
| looking for site that filled void and offered similar content
| but wasn't so focused e.g. slashdot and I came upon reddit
| Dwedit wrote:
| All I remember was seeing some really stale stuff on the front
| page of Digg, making me look for an alternative.
| ndjdhdidve wrote:
| techbros had the lesson of their life, and learned nothing.
|
| still can't relate the failure of adding incremental value and
| foatering community... defends to again spending all the time on
| a full rewrite that wasn't even load tested.
|
| the sad part is that the whole team did have success! most of
| them went to be leaders elsewhere spreading their cancerous big-
| and-bust with their layoff cycles.
|
| techbro privilege is real. maybe similar to the political class.
| no other professions allow such reckless failures.
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| I was an avid user of Digg. I remember having to force myself not
| to spend too much time on the site. I enjoyed the content. Always
| interesting stuff was posted. I also enjoyed the funny comments.
| I remember the epic downvotes. The Dumbledore comments. The
| Photoshop comments. The DVD key comments. Lots of fun.
|
| My memory of what happened was this. There was some infighting
| about the comment threads and how they should be implemented. A
| new approach got implemented. The site started crawling any time
| you clicked on a comment. Everyone was saying that of course it
| wasn't going to work and a particular person's approach shouldn't
| have been used. The site became unusable. After that it became a
| blur, because I must have stopped using the site. I believe the
| downfall of Digg occurred around these changes.
|
| I would be curious of other people's timeline.
| synack wrote:
| There was an internal alpha build of Digg v4 that had
| "verticals", which were kinda like subreddits. If there weren't
| enough stories to fill up the front page, the backend would run a
| search query and fill in relevant stories from other verticals,
| or even external search engines. As a vertical got more users,
| the user-voted stories would be given priority over the
| algorithmically chosen ones.
|
| From a user perspective, this meant that there was already a
| subreddit for any topic you could conceive of, even if nobody had
| ever submitted a story to it. It was pretty magical.
|
| Sadly, this whole system was axed in order to get the thing
| launched before we ran out of money. I bet you could do an even
| better version of it now with recommendations based on LLM
| prompts.
| tyingq wrote:
| A year or two prior to this, they were also putting linked sites
| into iframes, with the "digg bar" on top. So they had managed to
| alienate not just their users, but also the site owners that all
| the content linked to.
| captainmuon wrote:
| That can actually be quite useful, if implemented correctly.
| Even as a site owner I wouldn't mind, because it lets users
| upvote my content after reading it easily. But evolving browser
| standards killed it and most of the time it was implemented
| annoyingly.
|
| Actually it would be nice if this was a browser feature. Click
| on a link on a site like HN or Reddit, browse to the new page
| as usual, but you have a little inconspicuous indicator in the
| toolbar that lets you vote or comment on the origin site
| easily.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| If reddit and Twitter kill their API, there's probably space
| for a noutofband plugin that creates arbitrary forums on
| content. Like, you find a website with an image, you hash the
| image and that creates your standard forum and voting system.
| Then wheverver that hash shows up, so does the forum.
| musingsole wrote:
| I'm always yearning for a modern StumbleUpon
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The problem with a StumbleUpon now that the internet is
| an everyone thing is that the second it becomes popular,
| it will contain nothing but spam.
| [deleted]
| jayknight wrote:
| There was a reddit toolbar browser extension at one point
| that did this. If you clicked a link in reddit, you'd get a
| bar with title, score, comment count, and voting buttons. It
| was integral to my reddit experience until it stopped working
| and afaik never worked again.
| tyingq wrote:
| Site owners just aren't going to be excited about stealing
| the most important bit of real estate and putting buttons
| there that navigate away from your site, that the end user
| presumably chose to navigate to. And other problems, like
| breaking bookmarking, no SEO benefits from the "link", etc.
|
| The selfishness of it is obvious if you think through what
| would happen if someone posted one of these dig iframed urls
| to another digg-like site, which was then itself posted to a
| third digg-like site. 3 stacked headers, yay!
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| This is how IE worked for most users in the 90s. It's
| genuine retocomputing.
| mdasen wrote:
| I'd think that too, but site owners were perfectly happy to
| go with Google's AMP for a while (maybe still). They put a
| big "X" to close out of the article and go back to Google
| in a bar at the top as well as horizontal swiping to get to
| other versions of the story at other publishers.
|
| I agree that site owners shouldn't like this behavior.
| Still, we've seen cases where content owners have welcomed
| things against their interest in the name of engagement or
| hype.
|
| For example, a lot of video producers started putting
| content on Facebook (where they received no revenue)
| because they were getting lots of views on Facebook
| compared to their own site. This eventually left them
| without the revenue they needed and they dwindled.
|
| Yes, site owners shouldn't like these kinds of things, but
| we've seen sites chase a lot of crazy trends. The Oatmeal
| has a cartoon that kinda sums up some of this:
| https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people.
|
| Even today, you'd think brands would want to move to
| ActivityPub where they could run their own server and
| actually have control; you'd think influencers would want
| to move to ActivityPub where they wouldn't be beholden to
| Facebook looking for money to boost their reach or Musk's
| arbitrary moods. Instead, so many are sticking around on
| platforms they know are looking to gain an advantage over
| them. I'm not even suggesting abandoning those platforms,
| but cross-posting to ActivityPub would mean building a
| future you're more in control of.
|
| There's a lot of platform behaviors that aren't good for
| sites that many sites end up being enthusiastic about.
| tyingq wrote:
| The carrot for AMP was inclusion in the SERP carousel.
| That's why they put up with it. I don't think many
| actually liked AMP.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| I sort of wish they had this on Reddit - one of my big
| annoyances is that their "best" view (the one that the
| homepage defaults to) will deprioritize anything you've
| already clicked on, so if you click on an article, read it
| and then go back to Reddit it's completely gone from the view
| if you want to upvote it or comment on it.
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