I'm starting to wonder how some of you feel about one of Jeremy's other sites, linuxexchange.org ;)

I read also about a reddit feature called shadownban. This is reddit censorship also. What happens is that a reddit censor will shadowban someone for any reason at all. The poster is not told of the reason and not even told they're shadowbanned. The poster will see their own posts but the world will not see them. A lot of people never know they've been shadowbanned. The more I find out about these sites the more disturbing the picture becomes.

PerlMonks has a pretty good self-cleanup feature called "Consider," in which a sufficiently-experienced person can tag the node for "consideration." If enough people agree, the node disappears from view. But the consideration status, or the fact that it is even up for consideration, is not revealed.

(Yes, the "gods" of the site still have to clean-up quite a lot of junk-spam posts each day, which they do masterfully well.)

In general, I think that negative feedback, as well as negative action or the ability to inflict negative repercussions, is a very bad thing for a discussion group, although (as you will see) you can still "roll with it." I think that it actively promotes the sort of social behavior that we really do not want, and, especially, these are behaviors which in my opinion work against the mission of the site. If the site exists to allow people to ask questions and to answer them, that should be the start-and-end of it. If you give people the ability to down-vote, they will, and some people will become preoccupied with doing it, to the detriment of the user-experience for the community at-large which you are seeking to attract and to retain. No one wants to find themselves in a socially-hostile situation, and most people won't stay there for any length of time.

It's roughly equivalent to being served burned chicken on a not-spotless plate in a restaurant . . .

Is anyone supposed to be upset that a forum has moderators that attempt to moderate the forum? Anyone is a visitor at reddit and if they're not playing nicely then they're going to wear out their welcome real quick.

I think shadowbans are interesting. I wish other places had them, because quite frequently it's extremely easy for toxic people to get a new IP/name and fall right back into being jerks just minutes after being banned. If someone has found the attention of a reddit moderator, it's probably not by accident that they're being dealt with in such a way.

I'm not sure what's disturbing about either of those things.

I think you're digging pretty hard to throw dirt on reddit.

Yeah, I'm not really getting the "those other sites are garbage because they have moderators who moderate" sentiment. Well, I'd understand it (and that's "understand it", not "agree with it") if it wasn't expressed here. This site is at least as heavily moderated, if not more so.

You seem to be confusing a complaint about moderation that is unfair, abusive or nonsensical with a complaint about the presence of moderation. The two are very different.

I have found useful information on StackExchange when searching the web for answers to Linux Questions. I've not visited it other than in that context, so I have no idea what it is like for its regulars. Frankly, one active forum is all that I have the energy for.

Regarding Reddit, there's this:

http://gawker.com/how-reddit-became-...ism-1690505395

and this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3542201.html

Reddit is not a club with whose members I care to associate, even though there may be some good eggs in the carton with the bad ones.

Sadly, I didn't dig hard at all.

Censorship is still censorship. Just because you don't like it does not turn into something that is not censorship.

Moderation == censorship. Toxic people == people who's opinions and thoughts you don't like.

I take answers I find anywhere I find them. I never signed up for any of those sites just because they seem very circle-jerky.


I didn't look at those links.

But I guess that is the path I am taking with reddit too. Just move along.

Not sure what this means but at first glance it doesn't seem vibrant and healthy. A lot of the censors on reddit haven't visited the site in months and/or years. I can only speculate that they too grew tired of reddit. Or maybe they wanted to preserve their illustrious link and post karma and created sock-puppet acct and then made those accts censors.

I don't know what the policy or features are here around deleting posts or what happens when an account is deleted. But on reddit posts can be deleted. Accounts are deleted and the posts become authorless, it just says [deleted] for the author.

I've been dissatisfied in general with most forms of commentary and forum posting since the internet was absorbed by mainstream society. Back in the 90's it was great. Sure, there were some trolls, but not the bulk comment vomit of today. I almost never click on the commentary buttons at the bottom of articles anymore. I quit slashdot about 2007 and everything since, including reddit, has not been attractive.

It depends on what you view as "toxic." I would consider toxic people to be members (typically their first and only post) who post stuff like
and never reply back to people's request for more information.

Or people like the OP of this thread: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...rd-4175539498/
I may be wrong, but I think this is what many people mean when they refer to "toxic people"

I quit Slashdot too, but later than that.

Why, that's... exactly the kind of troll that was common in the 90s. ;)

And I know this comment is going to come back to haunt me, but I think that the reason things changed after the 90s is not because of "mainstream society", it's because Google started archiving Usenet postings forever (which of course changed the social dynamic). Yeah, I know DejaNews was doing that earlier, but it wasn't as well-known or widely used as Google was.

Perhaps in the real world you find the idea of "secret police" and people being abducted and and 'disappeared' 'interesting' too? ;)

It's a great idea until you're on the receiving end and screaming injustice, but no one's listening, but never mind, I'm sure you deserved it.
Those are just lazy members, not "toxic" members.

Youthful exuberance, combined with drink and/or weed and two big spoonfuls of stupidity... not really 'toxic'.

'Toxic' members can be long term, respected members - i.e. respected by a subset or the staff, but not all and they can be among the staff - rather than the new member who appeared yesterday and is trolling. I've probably been regarded as a 'toxic member' of a forum in the past.

So "toxic" does not necessarily mean the "devil incarnate", but just someone who is going against the status quo/establishment of that site and has lost favour with the administration and/or the members.

Or someone with more influence/ego than they should really have and an inflated sense of self importance, who has a malign influence on the culture. e.g. some kind of fake 'RTFM guru' who has all the bearing and pretense of superior knowledge but never actually displays it - beyond the typical advice to search the web, interspersed with a lot of chastisement, scolding, belittlement and scorn...

Oh yeah, we have a couple of regulars like that. The solution is to start reporting *their* unhelpful posts whenever you see them.