• alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgM
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    1 year ago

    the weirdest thing to me is these guys always ignore that banning the freaks worked on Reddit–which is stereotypically the most cringe techno-libertarian platform of the lot–without ruining the right to say goofy shit on the platform. they banned a bunch the reactionary subs and, spoiler, issues with those communities have been much lessened since that happened while still allowing for people to say patently wild, unpopular shit

    • frog 🐸@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Yep! Reddit is still pretty awful in many respects (and I only even bother with it for specific communities for which I haven’t found a suitable active equivalent on Lemmy - more frogs and bugs on Lemmy please), but it did get notably less unpleasant when the majority of the truly terrible subs were banned. So it does make a difference.

      I feel like “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” is apt when it comes to reactionaries and fascists. Completely eliminating hateful ideologies would be perfect, but limiting their reach is still good, and saying “removing their content doesn’t make the problem go away” makes it sound like any effort to limit the harm they do is rendered meaningless because the outcome is merely good rather than perfect.

    • jasory@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      You’re literally on a platform that was created to harbor extremist groups. Look at who Dessalines is, (aka u/parentis-shotgun) and their self-proclaimed motivation for writing LemmyNet. When you ban people from a website, they just move to another place, they are not stupid it’s pretty easy to create websites. It’s purely optical, you’re not saving civilisation from harmful ideas, just preventing yourself from seeing it.

      • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgM
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        1 year ago

        When you ban people from a website, they just move to another place, they are not stupid it’s pretty easy to create websites. It’s purely optical,

        you are literally describing an event that induces the sort of entropy we’re talking about here–necessarily when you ban a community of Nazis or something and they have to go somewhere else, not everybody moves to the next place (and those people diffuse back into the general population), which has a deradicalizing effect on them overall because they’re not just stewing in a cauldron of other people who reinforce their beliefs

    • Auzy@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      They took way too long unfortunately , but totally agree. thedonald, femaledatingstrategy and fatpeoplehate should have been banned a lot quicker

      It feels like they’ve let it degrade again too now. Last I was on it, lots of subs had gone really toxic and weird

    • jarfil@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I’d argue that it still broke Reddit.

      Back in the day, I might say something out of tone in some subreddit, get the comment flagged, discuss it with a mod, and either agree to edit it or get it removed. No problem.

      Then Reddit started banning reactionary subs, subs started using bots to ban people for even commenting on other blacklisted subs, subs started abusing automod to ban people left and right, even quoting someone to criticize them started counting as using the same “forbidden words”, conversations with mods to clear stuff up pretty much disappeared, application of modern ToS retroactively to 10 year old content became a thing… until I got permabanned from the whole site after trying to recur a ban, with zero human interaction. Some months later, while already banned sitewide, they also banned me from some more subs.

      Recently Reddit revealed a “hidden karma” feature to let automod pre-moderate potentially disruptive users.

      Issues with the communities may have lessened, but there is definitely no longer the ability to say goofy, wild, or unpopular stuff… or in some cases, even to criticize them. There also have been an unknown number of “collateral damage” bans, that Reddit doesn’t care about anymore.

        • jarfil@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          The only time I got banned for bigoted stuff, was precisely for quoting someone’s n-word and calling them out on it. Automod didn’t care about the context, no human did either. Also got banned for getting carried away and making a joke in a “no jokes” (zero tolerance) sub. Several years following the rules didn’t grant me even a second chance. Then was the funny time when someone made me a mod of a something-CCP sub, and automatically several other subs banned me.

          There is a lot more going on Reddit than what meets the eye, and they like to keep it out of sight.

          • Vodulas [they/them]@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            The only time I got banned for bigoted stuff, was precisely for quoting someone’s n-word and calling them out on it. Automod didn’t care about the context, no human did either.

            It sounds like the right call was made (as long as both you and the OP were banned). As a white person, there is no reason for you to use the n-word. In that situation simply changing it to “n-word” is the very least that could have been done

            I’m not really sure how that provides and example of stuff going on in the background that someone wants to keep out of sight.