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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28346 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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It's a little late, but I'm gonna talk a bit about the Reddit-Pushshift drama.

TL;DR: Pushshift is in violation of our Data API Terms and has been unresponsive despite multiple outreach attempts on multiple platforms, and has not addressed their violations. Because of this, we are turning off Pushshift’s access to Reddit’s Data API, starting today. If this impacts your community, our team is available to help.

Needless to say, users who moderate subreddits were less than pleased, to say the least as it is a massive blow to critical mod tools like BotDefense and access to a comprehensive list of historical posts and comments filtered by subreddit, user, date, etc. It's also a blow to users who used to rely on it for academic projects to seek out precise information using certain keywords in the right subreddits. One of the comments from that post:

The thing that is most exciting about running Pushshift has always been getting to meet and know amazing researchers in the academic field. The Reddit Dataset paper that I co-authored has been cited a whopping 630 times and it constantly grows. I don't think Reddit fully understands just how much Pushshift is used in research and the academic world -- but when we speak to the admins sometime this week, we'll try and make a strong case to keep as much functionality as we can in the API.

I realise this isn't exactly "culture war" material directly, but I believe it's relevant if a massive website like reddit with an enormous left coded user base takes a hit due to terribly received decisions like this one. We might see more and more jumping ship if this remains a one-way trend.

You probably do not actually care about this and will not deviate from whatever plan corporate has set out. Reddit will probably not actually see that big of a blow to its metrics, but I can foresee a small dip and a lot of mods leaving, perhaps protesting / closing up shop on the way out.

You continually fail to understand that you have staked the operation of your entire website on thousands of unpaid and unmanageable volunteers, of which you're now pissing off continually in half-baked schemes to wring more money out of the site. Even if this doesn't kill the site, it will definitely lead to a decrease in overall quality as the people who care more about having good communities are pushed out in favor of those who instead like seeing numbers go up when they get to mod more subs.

It's really telling how TheMotte had to move offsite due to increasing hostility with reddit and in the past year or so there was too much nonsense showing up on my feed through ads and "popular on reddit" that I have zero interest in. It seems they're just actively trying to boost engagement with currently trending posts and chat. The reddit admin claims it is to protect privacy and sites like these and removeddit violate the principle. But even with that in mind, it doesn't look like most people are buying it.

It's interesting to me that it seems to be like the whole Net Neutrality thing, where all of a sudden every single subreddit (exaggeration, but still) is announcing that they'll be going dark to protest it.

Pushshift was an amazing tool both for research and for seeing mod-removed posts on reddit (whether for entertainment or research), or just searching reddit, as reddit's search function is barely usable. StuckInTheMatrix built a similar tool for twitter, but it's private / for researcher use due to (old) twitter's restrictions. That twitter restriction has probably prevented tens of thousands of moments of mundane utility, and the pushshift ban will prevent similar. I suspect a pushshift clone that scraped reddit adversarially would be sued if it got big enough?

Do Reddit mods actually improve Reddit much? My impression is that the best subreddits are very lightly moderated and what mods spend most of their efforts on is exerting influence in various ways that make them feel important but don't actually benefit anyone but themselves. If they spend more time than I think removing spam, then I could be convinced otherwise, but that doesn't seem to be what they mostly do.

/r/AskHistorians is probably a case where draconian moderation improves the quality of the subreddit.

I agree, but it's rare.

I was never a mod.

I you need some moderation or else it just become ad spam (when it becomes popular enough).

Personally, I think the problem with reddit is that they picked a side. That side was able to do things (like brigade, take over subs, etc.) that the other would get booted for. Then came the moral imperative of 2016 and it went full mask off... Now, the (most) mods are not there to block ad spam. They are there as activists.

It's kind of like an immune system. If it does too little, you get sick or die. If it does too much, you get sick or die.

Good question, but I am noticing a trend in the results, so I'll ask one a bit more specific: Does anyone who has never been a reddit mod think mods improve reddit? And does anyone who has been a reddit mod think mods don't improve reddit?

This is the sort of thinking that drives the spotlight fallacy.

The safest neighborhoods often have the lowest visible police presence because everyone already knows the drill.

Do Reddit mods actually improve Reddit much?

I don't think so. I think most of the powermods certainly make it worse than if they didn't exist.

Askgaybros was one of the least moderated subs around, outside of spam, and it was also one of the best, so naturally the reddit admins had to step in and demand it get pozzed to hell.

That’s interesting and makes you wander why they are allowing that. My first reaction was Reddit would just turn every sub into bash gop faster but that’s fairly well entrenched all ready.

So it would seem to be less mod = more users = more profits

The commons already seem flawed enough in Reddit so less modding couldn’t possible make the commons worse.

So it would seem to be less mod = more users = more profits

This may be what Reddit wants, but it's not what the volunteer moderators want. The power mods wanted The_Donald gone because having a conservative community that large and influential on the platform meant a steady influx of right-wing users into other communities. This was referred to as "brigading", and the mods complained until the admins did something about it. Mods do not want vigorous discussion on their subreddits. They would much rather a circlejerk where all rulebreaking comments are already massively downvoted before a mod even gets there.

What Reddit wants is something they can sell to advertising companies. And when an ad appears in-line with user posts, it gives the impression that the people placing the ads endorsed the content. In fact, the way power-mods and anti-hate and pro-pozz groups managed to successfully get anti-evil involved is to get mainstream press (and thus advertisers) to know exactly the kind of things on Reddit. So the Marvel ad might be photographed next to /u/kikehater88’s post about blacks being used by Jews or something. This gets reported, and suddenly very important executives are having serious discussion with the ad buyers because that sort of thing makes them look bad. Reddit doesn’t want those kinds of user names, or that kind of content (or at least not in the open) so they can sell ads.

Keep in mind the axiom of social media if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

But don’t moderators become nearly worthless if it’s just decided moderation leads to lower usage? Is there any reason to think left people would use the site less if The_Donald existed (instead of getting in fights and using it more).

I guess I’ve had enough subs ruined from usage from moderation to realize it significant shrinks my usage.

Well there is some level of labor required just to remove spam and enforce the actually important rules. Reddit won't be able to get volunteers to do it if their every decision is second-guessed by admins, and paying employees to do all that work would be both expensive and anti-creative.

The Reddit model is basically feudalism, which makes it inefficient and unreliable financially. You essentially have to steamroll over entrenched interests if you want to get money out of the thing.

Do Reddit mods actually improve Reddit much?

I've been a mod so I'm biased but I'd say...yes. Reddit is benefiting from a lot of unpaid labour to keep things running.

It really is like being a janitor. When you do it well, people take it for granted. But people quickly notice when the rubbish starts to pile up.

Especially since it takes a small number of defectors (especially for small subs) for things to get bad. I've mentioned this before but we had a situation where one user was making 2% of the posts. And they were prone to drama. Such types eventually get banned (I could have taken a harsher stance on banning them earlier) but just imagine the disproportionate impact such an obsessive person could have on the climate of a sub if they aren't deterred.

If they spend more time than I think removing spam, then I could be convinced otherwise, but that doesn't seem to be what they mostly do.

A ton of stuff is done on the backend users don't care about. And yes, removing spam is one part of it - big subs like /r/movies and /r/sports would be unusable if mods didn't prune the 6,000 reposts of the same breaking news . Another thing is nipping negative shit in the bud before it becomes a problem

So long as it isn't too contentious, users likely won't notice or be thankful though.

Another thing is nipping negative shit in the bud before it becomes a problem

Can you elaborate on this?

As I said there are people who just run around posting disproportionately and being negative. One example is podcast threads: you can have someone jump into a thread that was just posted (well before they could listen to it ) and make snide, low-effort comments about guests or the host (including back-handed comments like "well, at least he had a good guest this time"). Then that's the first thing everyone sees and a significant portion of the discussion is not about the topic but whether the guest is awful or not in some unrelated issue or, even worse, whether the sub is too toxic and so on.

Then there's users who have some grudge with each other and it can drag out across threads and weeks. Nipping it in the bud by simply removing those comments removes the incentives for that pettiness cause no one will ever see it.

I've previously described the psychology of a certain sort of poster that seems determined to ruin a sub and such people just have to be deterred or banned early.

There's also inflammatory off-topic stuff like HBD that has, ime, never went anywhere good. If it doesn't violate the relevance rule then we're stuck with it. But it actually did make life more bearable for everyone to just not discuss it (it seemed to draw the above sort of people like flies). The sub markedly became worse when it actually became relevant and we could no longer remove it.

It really is like being a janitor. When you do it well, people take it for granted. But people quickly notice when the rubbish starts to pile up.

Repeating and highlighting for emphasis.

Do Reddit mods actually improve Reddit much?

Yes. I never spent much time on the yuge subs as a user, but I did mod a larger sub for awhile. There's an incredible amount of generic internet garbage that reddit jannies clean up on a daily basis. For the smaller, conversational niche subs (<25-50k users) mods don't make as many mod actions. They still provide an important service. Good mods set the tone and prolong the life of a sub. Up until it grows to maximum reddit velocity and is ruined by reddit growth. The Motte is an extreme example of autistic, niche discussion sub, but its mods were/are necessary to maintain course.

I had /r/themotte in mind as a definite exception, but as a user who has only ever moderated a tiny subreddit, the spam is not apparent to me, so I mostly just see moderators removing interesting comments.

I have a feeling that there's a reputation thing going on. If mods are active at deleting spam and maintaining automod to make it more difficult, then spammers mostly don't bother and there isn't that much work to do. But if people pick up that a sub is essentially unmoderated and highish traffic, then it'll be off to the races with constant spam.

Relatedly, I wonder how many mods do most of their work on mobile. If it's a lot, what happens if lots of them just quit when Reddit blocks all third-party apps?

This is somewhat unfalsifiable, but my guess is that we don't see all the work they do. Poorly-modded subs will have dozens of duplicate crypto-scam posts a day. My guess is that most of the mod work is removing spam and banning extremely obnoxious users, and only a small amount of time is spent enforcing political dogma.

Without mods, a handful of people could brigade and take over a sub pretty easily. Imagine if 100 people upvoted everything they posted and downvoted everything else.

Aren’t the restrictions on API usage part of an effort to restrict automated scraping for LLM training?

Isn’t it late for that, since the bulk of the website has already been scraped and is available in existing training data?

Reddit’s going to keep producing terabytes of new content every year and that content will be valuable for training new models in the future.

Obviously reddit doesn’t really care about the mere fact that a GPT-4-level LLM exists, but they do have an interest in protecting content related to, say, a niche hobby that was only invented in January 2023, and they want to continue to be the source that people go to for this content.

Is it that hard to make money? They have a huge userbase for advertisements. Surely they get money from various organizations to circulate narratives. If I wanted to spread propaganda in the English-speaking world, I'd head straight to reddit, facebook, twitter. Even though moderators have power over subreddits, the admins control what posts get popular and what doesn't. There was considerable suppression of T_D for a while, till they left as well. Reddit seems like valuable territory to hold.

On Facebook and Instagram, 100% of users are “logged in”. That means Meta likely has their date of birth, sex and name. Users who post content (a substantial proportion of Facebook and Instagram users) share their picture, location tags on the places they’ve been and - in most cases - their whole list of real-life friends and social connections (as friends/followers) with Meta.

On Reddit, most users aren’t logged in. Most users who are logged in never post or comment. They certainly don’t share their real face, age or in most cases gender directly with Reddit. The issue on Reddit is therefore a hybrid of Twitter’s issue with lurkers (which implemented an extremely harsh login wall that even Elon Musk has maintained, so even scrolling down on someone’s Twitter forces an unblockable pop up demanding sign-in), and anonymous forums’ issues with anonymity.

You can predict that an account that follows a college subreddit, the NFL subreddit, the Tinder subreddit and some videogame subreddits is a young, single, college-age male, but that’s nowhere close to the data that Meta has on that person’s account.

Reddit is trying to do what Instagram and TikTok did, and what Twitter is trying to do, by attempting to force all regular users into making an account even if they just want to scroll through this week’s top fifty cat gifs or the latest ice hockey news. Third party apps often provide a very high quality signed-out user experience that Reddit wants to kill, plus they often reduce or remove ads and reduce or remove the additional feature (like avatars) that Reddit uses to try to encourage users to make accounts and engage more with personalizing their profile (and so being more likely to add further data points to be sold to advertisers).

an extremely harsh login wall that even Elon Musk has maintained, so even scrolling down on someone’s Twitter forces an unblockable pop up demanding sign-in

Just an aside, but I think that has actually been removed now. I don't have a twitter account and I haven't seen the login wall in months.

Yeah, the third party apps are great. I rather liked pholder, I even thought redditisfun was their official mobile app.

You can predict that an account that follows a college subreddit, the NFL subreddit, the Tinder subreddit and some videogame subreddits is a young, single, college-age male, but that’s nowhere close to the data that Meta has on that person’s account.

Honestly in my experience as an advertiser/buyer-of-ads I've found a lot more productive use out of interest data/short-funnel than demographic stuff. Vast majority of people I know who interface with Facebook as an advertiser privately admit that it doesn't seem to accomplish anything, and the only time it does is when you let Facebook run its own attribution model/targeting (and essentially mark its own homework), in which it will forensically, passionately, accurately locate your existing customers and preach to the choir

Limited user data for Reddit is an issue. They can’t target ads as well or have the data to upsell ads.

I wouldn’t be shocked if Twitter ends up being a gold mine. But that’s in part because Musks will adds products like payments.

ML/LLMs can probably solve quite handily this based on browsing/posting history -- this will be a lot of work for Reddit though, and I'm not sure they have the capabilities/vision to pull it off.

They would have to figure out a way to sell moderation without selling the site itself. Twitter is “valuable”, but it does not generate much income.

Twitter didn’t generate much previously but it was also overly bloated and hadn’t thought through different ways of monetizing user base. Curious if now it is (or will become) profitable.

Twitter doesn't generate income because its politics don't match that of marketing companies. Reddit doesn't have that problem.

Yeah I don't see this directly hurting their profitability in long run, since they make most of the money from ad revenues and premium memberships. What I found interesting is that, many of the most upvoted comments on this issue describe the lack of moderation of far right content becoming an issue, but this was never one to begin with as every alt right sub has been axed since 2019 and they aren't coming back.

Upon a bit more reading on this issue, I'd say it's probably wise to consider that this could really be little more than just compliance with GDPR regulations as adviced by their legal team. So it does seem unfair that basically everyone commenting on this issue is jumping on the "evil corporation" bandwagon, and they'd probably react the same if reddit said they weren't gonna remove Pushshift's access to their API. But honestly, I'm beyond pissed with reddit in general to really feel sorry for them now. If they keep pulling hasty decisions like this one in a way that even pisses off all the left wing users, I say let em burn and I won't grab a single bucket to douse the flames.

How do these API changes enforce GDPR?

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