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mike_hearn • today at 8:27 AM • 3 replies • view on HN

You missed maybe the biggest one, /r/bitcoin, which around 2015 started banning anyone who wanted Bitcoin to actually follow the original design and continue scaling up on-chain transactions. The moderator, some anonymous student (possibly named Michael Marquardt), literally declared anyone who wanted Bitcoin to be used for regular transactions offtopic and banned them on a massive scale.

When explaining his actions he said something like, "I've moderated forums before so I know how sustained censorship can change a community". And then he set out to do it.

Reddit has been garbage for a long time and people's reliance on it is a huge problem. Abuse of it redirected Bitcoin onto a fundamentally different path (one nobody had agreed to), simply because of the sustained gaslighting and psychological manipulation its format allows.

That said, user-driven content moderation sucks everywhere. Wikipedia has the same problem. So does HN to some extent. The future is moderation driven entirely by LLMs with openly published prompts.

Replies

debtta • today at 11:52 AM

I think maybe this is a feature rather than a bug.

I know at least a couple of subreddits for specific 'true crime' cases which split into one for people who believed the suspect was guilty and one where everyone believed they were innocent.

The thing is, the split fora were actually much better than pre split. When both sets of people were together every topic degenerated rapidly in exactly the same way:

    meticulous_postrr: I just reread the transcript of Fred's sixth interview and noticed that he mentioned seeing a purple t-shirt in the woods. Could this be the shirt that Ahab was wearing at the road house, which looks blue in the security footage? 
    middled_aged_loner: Nice try, but unless you can explain the severed foot in the ashtray, the blue shirt is irrelevant here. 
    AhabDidIt: Still trying to shill the 'only two feet' theory, m_a_l? What about what Edgar saw?

    curious_n00b: Hi, I love the podcast but I'm not sure about one thing: is the Sylvia mentioned in Dushane's diary the same Sylvia who knew Edgar from volleyball camp? 
    AhabDidIt: welcome curious. Good question, but you're wasting your time with the diary. The July entries were written in August, by April. See my previous threads /r/TheScarletFred/Ahabs_lies /r/TheScarletFred/Ahabs_lies_2 and /r/TheScarletFred/the_diary_evidence_reexamined
    middled_aged_loner: So in your opinion ADI, April apparently knew that Dushane had seen Vanessa on the rollercoaster but didn't mention it to the police on the 1st October? This completely fails to stack up. What about Vanessa's unfinished ice tea? WHAT ABOUT THE SEVERED FOOT?
The split subreddits have better information, better curation and better flow. People who are otherwise in agreement debate precise points carefully and in detail. Both are available on the same internet so anyone who wants to can read both and make up their own mind.

I know we're all supposed to be worried about echo chambers, but sometimes an echo chamber is somewhere a specific conversation can take place which couldn't elsewhere.

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newyankee • today at 2:01 PM

No, the biggest one is r/india as it is the subreddit for the largest country in the world with moderators being from an adversarial country and any positive news about the country always being removed while constant critiques and hate allowed

Uptrenda • today at 12:26 PM

Exactly this. They had full control over both bitcointalk and /r/bitcoin. A few persuasive individuals circumvented the design and censored all discussion against it. It turns out that 51% attacks don't matter if you control social consensus. You control what engineers get to participate. What the project direction is. What views are considered "credible" -- credible enough to be "worth posting." Then with the other hand you wave away opposing ideas and accuse those who disagree with you of your own bad deeds. Eventually, over time the original is replaced and there's no longer anyone around to remember it.