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0 pointsnexuist5y ago0 comments

Ideally an ethical debate would precede rule making. But last I checked nobody who didn't already work at Reddit was involved in making those rules; there was no site-wide referendum, no discussion with users, no warning that these decisions were being made.

Every other social media giant operates the same way. To my knowledge no mainstream social network has ever polled its users for changes to its community policing model. Which is crazy, because in actual society we all have the right to vote, but online we are beholden to nameless moderators and provided no representation whatsoever. It's entirely up to chance whether your case gets seen by someone who would be sympathetic to you (assuming it even gets seen by a person instead of some glorified regex matcher posing as 'AI').

I know in tech we like to outsource lots of hard problems, but nobody should accept outsourcing their moral framework to Twitter, Inc. or Condé Nast.

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toofy5y ago

> Which is crazy, because in actual society we all have the right to vote, but online we are beholden to nameless moderators and provided no representation whatsoever.

I think the decision of users to continue to spend their valuable free-time using these social media sites is their vote in this scenario.

And I don’t mean that to come across as a flippant dismissal, I really don’t. When we consider those who like to say they simply want a place to explore unpopular ideas, people are correct to question why they keep coming back to these sites.

The wider internet has no shortage of places for these people to explore the craziest ideas imaginable, and if there isn’t a place for some idea, it takes minutes to spin a server up with already packaged freely available open-source platforms.

People are voting with their valuable free-time to go back to these platforms, it is personal preference in action.

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