I’ll admit, I’ve been using Reddit some recently for certain things. Some experiences got me thinking. Over the years I’ve noticed that any actually honest discussion about certain things seems to either get your posts or comments deleted, or you banned. Things that tend to be counter to the myth of the virtuous 1% or of say the Trump myth, etc. seem to generally almost always end in this result. I’ve seen many examples. You can’t post a vodcast calling out Trump pocketing $230 million of our money from the US Treasury based a bogus lawsuit to r/Politics of all things, and there’s not much media coverage on it. You can’t post anything about issues with the business model of many optometrists in the US to the optometrists subreddit even if someone asks a question about it. You can’t even have a side discussion about economic and social policy when discussing the ACA. This is not recent either. I used to use Reddit a lot before the big exodus, and some of these are from years ago.
It got me thinking. People say that social media is bad because people don’t actually discuss things except maybe in their own silo. It seems to be that even if people wanted to, it is banned on at least Reddit. Is this common on most platforms, or is this just a Reddit thing.
I love lemmy and Beehaw, but there are a few issues here too. In particular, scale, and the other is it tends to be a silo. So it is not actually usable for some things.
Thoughts?
Yeah. It’s a necessary task, just I think the idea of parceling it out to overworked volunteers who are traditionally encouraged to create “rules” for the types of things that people are and are not allowed to say within their little domain, is a stinker of an idea.
Slashdot had a far better model for this: Duties pretty similar to what would be “moderation” in the current system got parceled out at random in tiny, tiny increments to well-established and active users. If it happened to be your day to take your 3 allotted mod actions (or whatever), and on that day you saw some spam or racism or something, you clicked to deal with it, end of story. Other than than, people just got to talk.
That model had some flaws (and I am oversimplifying a bit with that summary) but I think that now that we’ve had some experience with a variety of systems, that kind of idea showed itself to be infinitely superior to the Reddit model and pretty foresighted in a couple aspects of its construction.