Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

Comments

• Lun0tic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This is true for the their frontpage at least. Many say it wasn’t a good knowledge base, I feel like it was. Specially for those who starting hobbies or running into issues. Also the most random knowledge would show up there.

  If you were using it to get facts to form an opinion, I would say it wasn’t the best but then again, that style of research is difficult even without reddit.

  I miss the good quality reads I’d get from it, but Lemmy is now that filler for me.

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  • a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If you were using it to get facts to form an opinion, I would say it wasn’t the best but then again, that style of research is difficult even without reddit.

    Agreed. But if you wanted human opinions on say, a specific brand a vacuum, 👌

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    • Gyrolemmy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Not sure that is valuable anymore. They say when something becomes the benchmark it ceases to be a useful metric.

      That is to say marketing departments have been long aware of peoples use of reddit and have sewed themselves into the fabric of the “what do you recommend” posts.

      It might be useful to make sure you arent buying trash, but it wont ever give you the unbiased best answer on those recommended threads.

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  • WidowsFavoriteSon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I never saw a top-voted comment in my fields of expertise that was even remotely correct. Reddit as a “knowledge base” is shit.

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• madthumbs@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Reddit was never a place to go to for facts. Reddit has always hated facts.

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  • The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It’s perfect if you want to feel outraged all the time though.

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    • madthumbs@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’ve been learning to control the outrage, and figuring out ways to turn things around. It’s like my time with conspiracy theories helped me to discern bullshit, fact check, be objective, etc.

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  • FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Depended on the sub, some were actually pretty well moderated (though a lot weren’t)

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    • madthumbs@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That didn’t stop the circle-jerking, romanticism, and ignorance of the sub’s participants, or the ridiculous and inordinate amount of positive and negative karma coming from subs about weevils, for example. Easy karma just for posting ‘aww lawd, here we go again’ in r/bedbugs. Post a pic of a steak in r/steaks with ‘cast iron’ and ‘reverse sear’ and get easy karma too. - Post the same steak or even a much better one with ‘tri-clad / air fryer’ and get nothing. -First-hand experience with a crappy AI generated steak and one I put in an air fryer for 25 minutes at 180F before finishing in a tri-clad. -Edge to edge medium looking better than 99% of theirs. -lol. (The karma system is shit)

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  • Declan_Smartwood@lemmy.whynotdrs.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    And you think Lemmy is better? Lmao

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    • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I see all over the internet a certain tribalism towards each person’s social media of choice. Even when people admit that there are problems, they still want to convince themselves it’s better than all the others and that everywhere else is pure drivel.

      I am rooting for Lemmy but I’m only going to call it “better” when searching with “site:lemmy.*” returns me better results than “site:reddit.com”. For now the culture is a bit better but the content is still pretty scarce, not to mention that there is nothing making this place any less susceptible to misinformation.

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    • Vilian@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      of course

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    • madthumbs@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I felt it was enough to hint that.-lol Criticism of alternatives being too much like Reddit hasn’t been well received.

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• southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  A quote from the article: “response to concerns that the new r/homeautomation mod team could overlook posts with dangerous misinformation, the anonymous Redditor pointed me to the subreddit’s sidebar, which has a disclaimer about the dangers of electricity. However, the disclaimer is only visible on old Reddit. The mod doesn’t know why.”

  That kinda sums it all up, right there.

  If a mod can’t be bothered to know why something only shows on old reddit, they shouldn’t be a mod at all. It takes all of two minutes to find out why, and not much longer to fix.

  It’s fine to jump in and learn on the go. It isn’t fine to jump in and not learn at all.

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  • Think_Positively@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It’s almost as if replacing much of your unpaid labor force who largely seemed to care about content with shills isn’t a smart plan.

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• alianne@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  While I enjoy some Reddit drama every now and again as much as the next person, this article had a plenty of words but very little substance. A few former mods are concerned that new mods don’t have the proper knowledge and background to moderate effectively (but with no concrete examples of a post’s misinformation directly leading to harm), and researchers are worried they may no longer be able to use Reddit data for their studies (although Reddit has a policy around research-based access and is working with Pushshift to improve access).

  These examples feel cherry-picked, and the article itself says that it’s too soon to say whether or not content quality was impacted by the API changes and mod replacements. Without actual data - or at least many more examples of specific concerns that weren’t present before the changes - it doesn’t do much other than say “a few people are worried that something bad might happen.”

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  • Yaztromo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Hey — I’m one of the former r/Canning mods quoted in the article.

    The issue with trying to get data on unsafe canning from Reddit is twofold: firstly, people who undertake an unsafe canning practice who fall ill (or die) don’t typically come back to Reddit to report on their situations. If you’re fighting for your life in a hospital bed, you’re not likely going to login to Reddit to post “Well, I followed some bad advice here, and now I’m in the hospital”. So while we do know from a small number of documented sources that people who have got sick (and died) did so from following bad advice online, it isn’t as if they routinely self-report this.

    (And conversely, if you just wind up with the shits for several days you may not even connect it in your mind to eating bad home canned food — and you’re probably less likely to go online and brag how you were able to shit through a sieve because you followed a bad canning recipe).

    Secondly, time is a significant factor. Something you cook up in a pot on your stove and eat right away will be perfectly safe for all but the most immune-compromised of people, but stick that same food in a jar without proper processing and put it on a room temperature shelf and it becomes a time bomb, with the danger ramping up as more time passes.

    That passing time doesn’t really work with publishing deadlines, and considering the unlikelihood of people self-reporting doing bad canning and hurting themselves (or others) there really isn’t any way of “waiting to see if someone hurts themselves”. People sometimes can stuff and then leave it on a shelf for years — so the harm may not be realized for quite some time.

    Sure, it would have made for a better article if there had been a slam-dunk obviously unsafe recipe/practice posted and someone had died in the process — but gathering such data could take a very long time, and I’m sure Ms. Harding can always post another article in the future should such data become available.

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    • jet@hackertalks.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Is there a canning community in the Lemmy verse now. It’s fascinating, but I never thought about it until this article

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  • pqdinfo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Before I left, I saw some pretty controversial takeovers including r/diving being taken over by mods who blatantly lied about their experience diving.

    I don’t think the examples were cherry picked, the author was skimming the surface giving readers some ideas of how apparently “safe” subreddits like r/canning might actually touch subjects that can harm those not in the know. r/diving would have been too obvious, we all know it’s a dangerous hobby. r/canning was a great one to pick.

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    • Yaztromo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Something like r/diving also has immediate consequences for anyone who participates in an unsafe dive. They resurface with the bends and need immediate emergency treatment, or they die.

      Canning is different, because the things people can typically get put on a shelf at above refrigeration temperatures, and then sit there for months (or even years) before being consumed. The harm from unsafe canning often isn’t seen for quite a long time after the canning itself was completed — and worse yet, as canners often love to give the things they’ve canned to family and friends, there is a contagion aspect to it that doesn’t exist in something like scuba diving. So the dangers of bad home canning are more insidious.

      Back in 2015, an Ohio woman died and 23 others were sickened at a church picnic because of improperly canned vegetables. What’s extra insidious here is that the people who became ill didn’t even know they were eating home canned foods — the vegetables in question were mixed into a salad and brought to a potluck attended by around 60 people — over 1/3 of which became ill.

      Lesson being, don’t fuck around with canning. Dangerous diving may affect you, your five buddy, and possibly whomever eventually tries to retrieve your body. Bad canning can destroy your entire family along with friends, neighbours, and other members of your community — and it can happen years later, without you even necessarily knowing you’re eating badly canned food (or canned food at all).

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    • alianne@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      If anything, I think the r/diving example would have been a good choice to include alongside the others. It demonstrates how something that’s already risky can quickly turn even more dangerous when inexperienced (or outright deceitful) mods are appointed.

      It’s not that I find the examples in the article to be wrong, more that they give the impression (rightly or wrongly) that the author really had to dive deep to find any material to support their view. It gives off the same vibes as the articles claiming everyone’s outraged about ABC, when really the whole thing is based off three tweets and a TikTok. I’m not in any way trying to say that that’s what’s actually going on here, merely that it’s the way the article reads (at least to me).

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• NatoBoram@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I mean… tech news articles on Lemmy are posted by a bot, so we’re not far better off

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  • catastrophicblues@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Even without them, Lemmy has extremely limited material for learning about stuff.

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• autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This is the best summary I could come up with:

  ---

  The dangers of food canning were explained to me clearly, succinctly, and with cited sources by Brad Barclay and someone going by Dromio05 on Reddit (who asked to withhold their real name for privacy reasons).

  He noted various canning misconceptions, from thinking the contents of a concave lid are safe to eat to believing you don’t need to apply heat to food in jars.

  For example, Barclay pointed to one mod recommending “citizen science,” saying they would use a temperature data logger to “begin conducting experiments to determine what new canning products are safe.”

  It includes already-canned tomatoes, which experts like the National Center for Home Food Preservation (NCHFP) recommend against, as there’s no safe tested process for this.

  What’s critical for Reddit’s content quality is not that moderators adopt identical philosophies but that they are equipped to facilitate healthy and safe discussions and debates that benefit the community.

  But the hastiness with which these specific replacement mods were ushered in, and the disposal of respected, long-time moderators, raises questions about whether Reddit prioritized reopening subreddits to get things back to normal instead of finding the best people for the volunteer jobs.

  ---

  The original article contains 670 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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  • hellothere@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Wat.

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    • GravelPieceOfSword@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      1000019130

      Poor bot did its thing, but the article starts off in a way it can’t handle well it seems.

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    • spacecadet@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      This bot meta as hell

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  • TacoButtPlug@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    What a poorly written article…

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• Viper_NZ@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  To quote Nelson Muntz: “Haha!”

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• spacecadet@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Reddit has been shit for over a decade now and the mods were a big reason for that. I’m completely switching to Lemmy by the end of the year and any subs that don’t exist on Lemmy that exist on Reddit I’ll just create myself. Maybe even write a bit that takes top posts from the niche reddit subs I like and posts them here to get people to convert.

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  • silentdon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    No reddit repost bots please. There are already too many and they drag down lemmy’s quality.

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• detalferous@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Consider

  old.reddit.com/r/redditseppuku

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