Boz (he/him)

I love the Gangnam Style reference, lol.

…I honestly thought that was a deliberate pun, because Reddit as link aggregator was not optimal, either…

This. The whole question of whether Reddit meant to restore comments is a distraction. The actual issue is that people who wanted their comments deleted are finding that their comments have not been deleted. If Reddit wants to prove that it was not their fault, they can do it in court. No lawyer is going to believe the kind of half-assed excuses Reddit has been handing out. I would like to see this hashed out in court, if for no other reason than that a court case is probably the best way to find out what is actually happening here. It seems like Reddit not going to be honest unless they’re forced to be, even when honesty would benefit them.

Please do so, when you can. This is not just about protesting, deletion can be a matter of personal safety for some people, which is why these laws exist.

I wouldn’t be surprised. This is the kind of problem that would usually only affect a small number of users. They should probably have done something about it before it had a chance to come back and bite them…

Whether they’re doing it on purpose is not relevant to the legal aspect of the situation. They have a responsibility to honor deletion requests. If a user complains, the appropriate response is “sorry you had a problem, we’ll fix it,” not “sorry, we will only honor our legal responsibilities if you follow our preferred [but not stated until now] procedure for requesting deletion, try again.” Having database problems opens you up to legal liability whether you like it or not, and trying to convince users that you are not responsible for your own database is… inappropriate.

Besides, there have been bugs with manual deletion, too. This is at least partly a problem with their own systems.

“Welcome to gaslighting 101! Please take a syllabus from the pile you will [not] find by the door, which will [not] include your instructor’s contact information and office hours.”

I liked the Mashables title: “Reddit is trying to make nice with its moderators. They aren’t having it.”

Yes, I think content warnings make it easier to have difficult conversations, not harder. People who don’t want to discuss something are not magically going to become open to those discussions because you spring the topic on them without warning. Content warnings save time, and give people a chance to brace themselves before going into what is usually a big fight.

I like that this is being covered in The Independent, which, afaik, is not a tech-specific publication. Sure, they’re being prim about the phrasing of the protest message, but they’re presenting the motivation behind it in a relatively sympathetic way.

I think they actually did put in fine print saying they could remove about a dozen different kinds of things, including insulting specific people. So this is an example of general restrictions on content creation in /place rather than specific anti-protest action. But it’s still an example of Reddit sucking. If they don’t want free expression, they shouldn’t market this as an opportunity for free expression.

There’s a difference between “incapable of understanding” and “doesn’t have enough background information to understand.” Are there people who can’t understand certain tech concepts? Absolutely. But there are a lot more people who just miss the first rung on the ladder, and can’t make it to the top. They can understand when they get the explanation from the ground up, but until then, they’re stuck.

I see it happen a lot when tech people try to explain something that is brand new to the listener, because when you are already able to understand something at a high level, you forget to mention the first several rungs. It’s usually a great explanation, it’s just not an explanation the person on the ground can use.

…also, I don’t think it’s failure to understand login when every instance asks for a separate login if you don’t navigate there through your own instance. It’s a misunderstanding that results from experiencing the fediverse without understanding how it works, not a failure to grasp an abstract concept.

That’s not strictly true, now. I found a good fountain pen community, and a few for knitting and embroidery, among other analog interests. Not everything is here, but the non-tech stuff is starting to trickle in.

I expect them to move chat functionality to the official app. Facebook made a similar move many years ago, and I think they did get increased access to users’ phones that way. Reddit might find it a harder sell, given that they have a totally different role in people’s lives, and (much as I hate to imply anything nice about Facebook), a much less usable app.

Same. It might take a minute to curate for the specific news you want, but there are plenty of communities providing substantive news at least daily.

I agree that social interactions are good! I just learned forum etiquette at a time when the default state of any forum was everyone socializing all the time, and no topical discussion. Even communities with fewer than 20 people had to make rules about staying on-topic in topical threads, and the rules were made by and for the community, not by corporations or algorithms. Coming from that background, I feel like it’s rude to OP if I don’t stay on the topic they chose. I suppose it’s a different internet, now.

Very cool. I think you can see by my display name that I like showing pronouns, lol. I remember when putting pronouns on a name tag was like waving a trans flag. It wasn’t very long ago. And I also appreciate the heads-up on politics. I’m far left enough that I usually feel comfortable with the level of disagreement I have with communists and anarchists, but the feeling is not always mutual, so it depends on specifics. I will take a look at the communities when I have a little time to go in depth.

Anyway, I think we’re a bit off topic, except that issues with bigotry etc are part of why figuring out how to manage vote history is important.

Thanks for the tip, I’ll check it out! The issue isn’t my local instance, though, it’s that clearly marked safe spaces always attract people who want to make those spaces unsafe. It’s kind of a “Trolls? Must be Wednesday” kind of thing for me, after a lot of years online, but it never stops hurting. The only thing downvoting does to trolls is allow non-trolls to communicate to one another that the space is still supposed to be safe, which offers a little comfort, but it doesn’t actually make the space safe. Banning the trolls is much more effective.

I agree that a lot of information can be inferred from vote history, that’s not what I meant. I’m sorry if I came across as trying to minimize the risk there.

What I meant is that exponentially more information of the type you describe can be inferred from post history, particularly for those of us who use this space to connect with other members of marginalized groups we belong to. Voting history is a minor risk to me when just the fact that I have replied with “I have also had this experience” to a certain post or posted a meme in a certain group could cause serious trouble for me in my offline life. I don’t understand the use case where someone would become concerned about privacy because they found out their vote history could be accessed by unknown parties if they weren’t already concerned about privacy because their posts and comments are visible to anyone and everyone.

I guess the tl;dr is that I just don’t understand how the hyper focus on the risks associated with voting history is consistent with an assessment of personal risk in a broader sense. I am conscious of taking a huge risk by being on the fediverse, and I decided it was worth it. The stakes were high enough to begin with that I just assumed that the only source of privacy I had would come from anonymity, not the technology, which might be why I am confused by some of the responses I am seeing.

I agree with you about harassment issues, and the importance of controlling the transfer of admin-level data between instances, but for your last scenario, doesn’t blocking only apply to users who are logged in? Assuming your hypothetical tankies and Nazis were actually posting as well as blocking, it would be easy to find them just by logging out, and there are a lot of ways to get them banned or otherwise counteract their activities that don’t require someone to interact directly with them while logged in. The case you’re describing is not the kind of situation where the most important action is to argue with them. Arguing with extremists usually just validates their delusions, and encourages them to keep doing what they’re doing.