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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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I don't necessarily disagree, but I think that there's a useful distinction between "this speech is banned and you cannot speak it nor seek it out" and "this gets you downvoted a lot on social media". There's very clearly something happening that's suppressing the distribution of speech in the latter category, but I don't know if censorship is the right word for it.

Sure, the distinction is worth making, but if you control search engines and social media, throttling and delisting might easily turn out to be more effective.

Down votes have nothing to do with my argument, so I have no idea why you bring them up.

Sure, the distinction is worth making, but if you control search engines and social media, throttling and delisting might easily turn out to be more effective.

Agreed, but at the same time I think this needs a new word or term.

Down votes have nothing to do with my argument, so I have no idea why you bring them up.

That's one of the mechanisms by which content gets deprioritised. Some of this "censorship" happens totally organically, because there are a bunch of extremely online hall monitors who obsessively downvote things they don't like.

Agreed, but at the same time I think this needs a new word or term.

I disagree. A central authority (or even ostensibly decentralized ones like Reddit power mods) making the decision to make content harder to find still fits neatly under "censorship".

That's one of the mechanisms by which content gets deprioritised.

But it's explicitly not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about social media companies deprioritizing content regardless of and/or because of it's popularity.

But it's explicitly not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about social media companies deprioritizing content regardless of and/or because of it's popularity.

I was thinking specifically of the reddit Powermods and their clique with that comment, along with SRS - mass downvoting was one of the ways that they got started manipulating content on Reddit. I am not sure how much further this conversation can go productively - our disagreement largely appears to do with terminology.

Coordinated downvoting is lame, but it's not that much of an issue. In a fair system a counter-coalition would form, and compensate or retaliate. The problem with the power mods is that they delete posts and ban people that say things they don't like (I've seen screenshots where posts saying harmless things like "hey, isn't it crazy that 20 people control the majority of top 500 subreddits?" get deleted, and the person banned). The other issue is their influence over admins, which allow them to ban entire subreddits with "wrong" opinions, and prevent a counter-coalition from forming.

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