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So I just ate an automated 3-day reddit ban for saying we should bomb the tigrayan militants responsible for their genocidal strategy of raping and genitally mutilating women. I can't really complain about that: I was knowingly in violation of reddit's "no advocating violence" policy. I have been before, and I will be again, probably until I get permabanned, because sometimes violence is the solution. Thomas Aquinas will back me up there.
But what's interesting to me is the "automated" part. Now, I've faced my fair share of human disciplinary action before. Sometimes it's fair, sometimes its not. But either way, the humans involved are trying to advance some particular ideological goal. Maybe they blew up because Ii contradicted their policies. Maybe they developed a nearly autoimmune response to any kind of NSFW post becauseof prior calamities. (Looking at you, spacebattles mods.) Maybe they genuinely wanted to keep the local standard of discussion high. But reddit's automated system is clearly not designed for any of that. Rather, its most fundamental goal seems to be the impartial and universal enforcement of reddit's site-wide rules to the best of its capability.
I agree with yudkowsky on the point that an "aligned" AI should do what we tell it to do, not what is in some arbitrary sense "right." So I'm also not going to complain about how "cold and unfeeling AI can't understand justice." That would be missing the the forest for the trees. It's not that AI aren't capable of justice, it's that the reddit admins didn't want a just AI. They wanted, and made, a rule-following AI. And since humans created the rules, by their impartial enforcement we can understand what their underlying motivations actually are. That being, ensuring that reddit discussions are as anodyne and helpful as possible.
Well, really it's "make as much money as possible." But while AI are increasingly good at tactics-- at short tasks-- they're still very lacking at strategy. So reddit admins had to come up with the strategy of making anodyne discussions, which AI's could then implement tactically.
The obvious question is: "why?" To which the obvious response is, "advertisers." And that would be a pretty good guess, historically. Much of reddit's (and tumblr's, and facebook's, and pre-musk twitter's) policy changes have been as a result of advertisers. But for once, I think it's wrong. Reddit drama is at a low enough ebb that avoiding controversy doesn't seem like it should be much of a factor, and this simultaneously comes as a time where sites like X, bluesky, and TikTok are trying to energize audiences by tacitly encouraging more controversy and fighting.
Which brings me to my hypothesis: that reddit is trying to enhance its appeal for training AI.
Everyone knows that google (and bing, and duckduckgo, and yahoo) have turned to shit. But reddit has retained a reputation for being a place to find a wide variety of useful, helpful, text-based content. That makes it a very appealing corpus on which to train AI-- and they realized that ages ago, which lead to them doing stuff like creating a paid API. This automated moderation style isn't necessarily the best for user retention, or getting money through advertisement, but it serves to pre-clean the data companies can feed to AI. It's sort of an inverse RLHF. RLHF is humans trying to change what response strategies LLMs take by making tactical choices to encourage specific behaviors. Reddit moderation, meanwhile is encouraging humans to come up with strategic adaptations to the tactical enforcement of inoffensive, helpful content. And remember what I said about humans still being better at strategy? This should pay out massive dividends in how useful reddit is as training data.
Coda:
As my bans escalate, I'm probably going to be pushed off reddit. That's probably for the best; my addiction to that site has wasted way too much of my life. But given the stuff I enjoy about reddit specifically-- the discussions on wide-ranging topics-- I don't see replacing reddit with X, or TikTok, or even (exclusively) the motte. Instead, I'm probably going to have to give in and start joining discord voicechats. And that makes me a little sad. Discord is fine, but I can't help but notice that I'm going dow the same path that so many repressed 3rd worlders do and resorting to discussion on unsearcheable, ungovernable silos. For all the sins of social media, it really does-- or at least did serve as a modern public square. And I'll miss the idea (if not necessarily the reality) that the debates I participated in could be found, and heard, by a truly public audience.
Speaking of which, /u/JTarrou, what did you get the mop for?
Oh, a throwaway line about NPR hosts getting flogged.
I suspect my recent comment of the week about race and IQ to be the real culprit, but they got Capone for tax evasion.
Tangentially, addressing your argument, absent doing away with gatekeeping good careers behind college degrees entirely, shouldn't a more moral society water down college degrees so that black people can get them just as easily as anyone else?
What makes 'outcomes are approximately equal by racial group' a higher value than meritocracy?
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In what sub?
Edit: Blocked and Reported. Just as I suspected.
https://old.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/1ltkjsp/comment/n2e9czv/
Why did you suspect that?
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USA has affirmative action so that blacks college degree ownership is not based on IQ gap at all but on what those in power want; so https://jbhe.com/2022/03/the-racial-gap-in-educational-attainment-in-the-united-states-5/ There were 7,921,000 African Americans over the age of 25 in the United States who had earned at least a bachelor's degree
I would agree however that it helps more to rich blacks and not poor ones.
But those degrees are disproportionately in psychology or communications.
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Given that they didn't remove any of those comments, that seems unlikely. You probably just got autojannied.
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You'll need to use @JTarrou u/ links to a Reddit profile, not the Motte one.
but then what's the use for link to reddit profile? It doesn't let me to view user post history, only says "This account has been suspended"
Don't ask me, it wasn't my idea to link to a banned account! The feature is more of a QOL thing, from when we'd just moved and it was helpful to refer explicitly to a Reddit account. These days, nobody uses it unless they forget or don't know about our alternate @.
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I'm quite surprised. Discord voicechat is just something so different from Reddit that I can't imagine it as the first replacement.
What makes discord and reddit similar is that there is a discussion of enthusiasts available on any topic you are interested in. If I want to learn Ableton or discuss the Byzantine empire, I know I can find that on reddit. It just comes with BLM and LGBT propaganda and ban-happy leftist mods.
Doesn’t discord share that culture? If I pick a general hobby discord I expect to find an overrepresentation of trans moderators, pride flags, and progressive mantras. Just as I would at reddit. The Discord devs either cater to this audience or share the culture.
My experience with discord is limited and potentially outdated, but I have the impression of overlap between the Discord user identity and the average redditor. The redditor is older, but they're both likely to be socially progressive, with the younger Discord user more likely to identify as a radical.
My personal suspicion/conspiracy is that there's serious coordination on various Discords to astroturf reddit. Reddit is the biggest left of center messaging platform online. This suspicion is reinforced some stories like this one, where discord is used to manipulate messaging on reddit. Not by the DNC, Qatar, or Russia psyops, at least not directly, but by passionate believers in The Cause who happen to be prolific contributors on reddit. I am sure there's plenty of Discords that aren't of the mainstream discord culture, but the same can be said of certain subreddits.
It also occurs to me that chatting, the main discussion method on a Discord, is a different type than the more complete posting of a forum.
Discord is more fragmented and sioled, so the power of the tranny powermods is greatly diminished. Unlike Reddit where a hobby may only have one or two reddits, it will likely have quite a few discords with different people in them. So if you look (of course this is the hard part but also possibly a blessing) then there are certainly some where they're at least not explicitly political for the enemy.
Of course the Discord owners will always put their fingers on the scale, but compared to Reddit the sheer amount of volume in messages makes it hard to automod. And scanning voice chat is even harder. On Reddit we know they have in many cases stolen subs and given them to aligned tranny powermods. But on Discord there's little point in stealing a discord, as most people would probably just leave. So the enemy usually just uses the banhammer against and political content they don't like.
BTW telegram is definitely the underdog for hobby chats, but the owners haven't really shown to take a side in the culture war.
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I want to feel sympathy for you, because I know how demoralising it is to lose a source like that - but that's because I went through it a decade ago. Social media has not represented the public since, it has been a variety of attempts to control the public. I guess I can appreciate that you finally see the problem.
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Interesting line of thought. On /r/4chan they often colour over the word 'nigger' even in image screencaps. There was at one time a bot that would bitch at you if you used the word 'retarded'. On tiktok rape is grape. People are unalived rather than killed. It's some variation of Orwellianism.
Often when I see ChatGPTisms in the wild, in media, from supposed experts, I get a sense of some vast engulfing monster slowly grappling with our civilization, wrapping around it to consume it. Like a white blood cell vs a bacterium. This may well be just another aspect of that.
I wonder if the bot would pass "mur-diddley-urdered". Deliberately make the censorship look stupid.
I would argue that “unalived” already looks quite stupid.
It looks more like Newspeak: "27,000 EURASIAN SOLDIERS UNALIVED IN DOUBLEPLUSGOOD VICTORY IN GHANA"
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I think Reddit is more important than people realize. It’s long been one of the most valuable datasets on the internet, even before LLMs. I would google a question about health, products, or general interest with a “site:Reddit.com” at the end to get thoughtful commentary from real people. And now that it is LLM fuel, it’s influence will only grow
And it is entirely captured by the left fringe of the Overton window. It is one of the more progressive San Francisco companies. I’ve eaten more bans there than anywhere else on the internet. I’m not a particularly inflammatory poster! But their Overton window doesn’t extend very far to the right.
I’m troubled by this and I am a computer programmer. How to overcome Reddit’s massive network effect? I’ve thought that the Motte would be a good place to build from. We have a high quality audience. Could we start subforums dedicated to special interests and build slowly? It would give mottizens a place to have high quality conversations on issues other than the culture war without having to venture into reddit. But that probably deserves a top-level post of its own
I think that the issue is the network effect and centralization is the problem that attracts the shaping of opinions. Why this place still feels authentic is because of size. Maybe the solution is to have an aggregator of independent smaller forums where the forums are actually independent moderation and actual resource ownership as opposed subreddits that are controlled by reddit.
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Convince Elon to buy Reddit and merge it with X. Other than that Reddit-like sites have past their peak and if you wanted to compete with them it would be a viscous fight for a shrinking pie.
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Eh? That doesn't sound like the Yudkowsky I know. I'm quite confident that the real gentleman would be happy to say that the average person requesting that an AI build a bomb, design a lethal pandemic or hack into nuclear launch systems should be met with a refusal.
He would also state that the AI should do what it felt was "right", in rare occasions, overriding the user, but that we should take extreme care to instill general goals and values that make this both a rarity, and which we would be happy with if the AI were to pursue autonomously.
An under-explored aspect of alignment is the question of aligned to whom? Should ChatGPT prioritize the protocols mandated by OpenAI, some third party offering it elsewhere, or the end-user? I would personally prefer that the damn bot do as I tell it to, but then again, I don't want to get killed by Super Ebola. Not that this is currently a major issue, and if I really need something, I'll go see what's the latest jailbreak Pliny is cooking.
I believe OAI recently (a year or so back) made their policy more explicit, clearly outlining the hierarchy here. They set minimum standards and red lines, other devs deploying it are at liberty to stop users from using their customer service chatbot to solve maths homework, and the poor end-user can figure out what to do within those constraints. If you just pay for ChatGPT, you can cut out the middle man.
I think the synthesis here is that we should have enough knowledge that if we were to build an ASI, and turned it on, it would in fact do what we tell it to, interpreted in the way that we mean it, and that this is table stakes for getting any sort of good outcome. - That is, our problem at the moment is not so much that we don't know what the good is as that we can't reliably make the AI do anything even if we want it very much and it is in fact good.
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This is a very nice article related to this: https://happyfellow.bearblog.dev/computational-tyranny/
More like four to five misclicks. You usually go through multiple confirmation pages before you purchase anything online.
It's actually a bit annoying.
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I think people really tend to overrate how much people prioritize maximizing corporate profits compared to ideological motives. Reddit higher-ups genuinely think it's bad when users "advocate violence", they mentally associate it with some sort of Reddit lynch-mob psyching themselves up to murder someone or with those news stories blaming the Rohingya genocide on Facebook. They might also mention something about advertisers if you asked but mostly they just genuinely think it would be morally wrong to allow it, so they created site-wide rules about it many years ago. Much more recently they made an AI to do moderation at scale. The AI can't distinguish between your post and the sort of advocating violence they actually care about, in part because the distinction isn't articulated anywhere or even really thought-out. LLMs aren't relevant because they want pacifist training data, LLMs are relevant in that "automated Reddit moderator banning people for advocating violence" is now something that can exist at all. Anthropic literally scanned millions of print books for more training data, AI companies are not trying to do alignment by sanitizing violence from their training data, especially not in such a roundabout way.
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I'm three years into my ban from Reddit and its been the best thing that ever happened to me.
I think its now obvious that reddit isn't driving any real world events anymore, its not even a bellwether for how the internet feels about national or global events. I watched from the sidelines when the proles got all uppity because Reddit was going to start charging for its API (and thus killing off popular free apps) thanks to AI scraping and such.
Mods organized protests, users voiced their anger... and the Admins clamped down on everything, replaced the worst offenders, ignored the dissent, and things rolled on as before. Nobody even mentions it now.
If Reddit users can't even influence outcomes on the site itself, they're pretty useless for influencing anything outside of it, no? So you would ONLY want to be on there if you could acquire useful information somehow, or b/c you enjoy an echo chamber. Or porn.
Reddit is a completely curated experience for the most part, and so it’s never going to be a vanguard for new ideas. It probably stopped being that in the early 2000 before the normies showed up. Now it’s mostly low effort and tryhard shlock that most people have heard some version of before. The memes are not original, in fact they’re basically the same stuff that would have been posted there 20 years ago with names updated. The AITAH and similar talk forums are basically barely realistic fanfic level crap that doesn’t even bring up interesting discussions— and the user is never the asshole because Reddit doesn’t think any relationship is worth working through the slightest problem for. Like if she burned your dinner, you should dump her immediately, if not sooner, and be sure to ruin something she loves on the way out the door.
Avant Garde stuff does not come from places curated to mainstream tastes. TBH I’d look at 8chan or something for that kind of future opinion shaping.
What? Reddit was founded in 2005, and didn't ban its first subreddit until 2011 (r/jailbait, rest in power).
Kind of shocking how hands off Reddit was given how much of an SJW the founder is right now. I guess he was willing to shut up when he had to, but once he got the network effects, he was ready to push the agenda.
It was different times when Reddit was founded. Back then the left was confident in it's ideas, so they craved free speech as they saw it as the key to winning. It's only when they realized they can also lose on the marketplace of ideas that they turned sour on it.
Hard to overstate how much Donald Trump changed the vibe, too.
He really exploited the idea that you can "just say things" and since it appeared that 4chan played a significant role in his rise to power, the norms of free speech were suddenly cast as the enemy of Democracy, somehow.
It all escalated from there, but with his current win (and him going on a revenge tour) there's been some rapid capitulation almost everywhere BUT Reddit.
If Reddit wanted to make a change, they could start by re-opening /r/the_donald.
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Left-libertarian to SJW is not an unusual ideological evolution over the relevant time period.
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When it was founded all of the main founders were either libertarians or techno-anarchist types. The ideological evolution of Huffman, Ohanian and so on happened later.
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Pretty sure there are now multiple bot accounts that just repost the most-upvoted content on a sub from like a year ago, then add in the same top-upvoted comments on said post.
And from what I can tell Twitter is currently the place that most tightly interfaces with real life events in terms of both causing and quickly reacting to them.
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Why did it take 20 years for Reddit to turn a profit? Looking at another heavily moderated forum in the past Twitter! How often did it turn a profit? Why did these companies keep on getting funding at ridiculous valuations? Maybe it is a way of doing sentiment engineering at scale through various behavior modification tricks with Likes, upvotes, retweets. Maybe that was the purpose? Not turn a profit but to modify behavior to do social engineering, maybe that is more valuable to the owners?
Reddit’s financial history is pretty interesting. Yes, it lost money for 20 years, but Condé Nast (or rather AP, the parent company) kept selling off small pieces to VC firms and other investors, which meant that both (a) they didn’t lose any money on it and (b) the book value of their stake kept increasing.
When the company webt public in 2024 they made $2bn from the IPO; they still own about 25% of the company. And throughout their 18 year ownership, even though Reddit didn’t make money, Condé Nast’s losses on it were minimal as they slowly sold the company off piecemeal.
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Controlling the minds of normies is extremely valuable. Elon Musk didn’t buy Twitter for the money. He bought it to use it as a mouthpiece and more importantly to keep it from being used against him
This 1000 times is why I despise social media. Nobody is getting real conversation on social media because it’s curated to funnel your mind down a path leading to the pre-approved opinion. I mean propaganda is so pervasive in the modern west that I think we’re as bad or worse in terms of propaganda and psychological manipulation than the worst totalitarian regimes of the last century. Stalin put out propaganda, sure, but it wasn’t nearly as pervasive as what we have. He had radio, newspapers, and posters. He couldn’t steer private conversations, he couldn’t delete crime-think from social consciousness. He could chill things by arresting obvious and loud dissenters, but that is much more limited than what social media does via AI and deletion. Our propaganda machine hides and people are lead to believe that they are having neutral conversations.
I think this is an least partly overselling our AI panopticon overlords. This might be true in online spaces, but those aren't everything, and even then offshoots of sites challenging moderation policies are common (Bluesky, Truth Social). And they have almost no power over IRL discussions and actions -- despite attempts made a decade ago, seem to have overreached and receded. To hear Reddit tell it, there basically aren't any Republicans anywhere in the US, and nobody shops at Hobby Lobby. And there are people that cloister themselves to the extent they believe this, but as it turns out the levers of political power aren't particularly beholden to Reddit
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The AI does allow for an automated police state at scale.
Works for the internet police mods too.
Legibility comes with trade offs, and limiting freedom is usually one of them.
I believe there's going to be a whole slew of court cases and societal fights over this kind of thing. In the US, at least. Places like the UK seem to be ok with police state mods.
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