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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.
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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