I’m researching decision-making for a personal investment project I’m working on around real estate (Shortest explanation: Maximizing investment value by identifying perceived bias), and Reddit directed me to Less Wrong, a site that describes itself as a “community dedicated to improving our reasoning and decision-making.”
I loved it immediately. Not for any of the articles and stories on decision-making which I haven’t even touched yet, but because of this piece written in 2009 by someone named Eliezer Yudkowsky.
What’s mind-numbing about being a Twitter user the past few years is trolls misappropriating censorship while being boldly and publicly incorrect about it with a full chest. Pour some Elon on it, douse it with a healthy smattering of foreign state actor psyops, and an algorithm built on magnifying the most polarizing content?
You have a recipe for a garden that barely yields fruit.
Somewhere in the deepest reaches of the web, it’s happening even now. Web 2.0 was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of debate and enlightmentenment. But into this new garden comes a fool, and the level of discussion drops a little—or more than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their posting. (It is worse if the fool is just articulate enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions—for then the fool dominates conversations.)
So the garden is tainted now, and it is less fun to play in; the old inhabitants, already invested there, will stay, but they are that much less likely to attract new blood. Or if there are new members, their quality also has gone down.
Then another fool joins, and the two fools begin talking to each other, and at that point some of the old members, those with the highest standards and the best opportunities elsewhere, leave…
I am old enough to remember the USENET that is forgotten, though I was very young. Unlike the first Internet that died so long ago in the Eternal September, in these days there is always some way to delete unwanted content. We can thank spam for that—so egregious that no one defends it, so prolific that no one can just ignore it, there must be a banhammer somewhere.
But when the fools begin their invasion, some communities think themselves too good to use their banhammer for—gasp!—censorship.
This is so close to being perfect, but ultimately incorrect. The metaphor frames tending to the “weeds” of the internet as censorship, versus cultivation. The piece is also written in the era of a decentralized internet (early social media) so it’s showing its age considerably here.
Reddit – for all of its faults – is turning into a much healthier garden than Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, 4Chan, and Snap. The tomatoes are growing back. This happens because they’ve (unintentionally) removed the beetles that were dangerous to the flowers, fruits, and vegetables. Reddit’s moderators exercise full editorial control within the confines of a larger user and brand safety requirement. They moved away from seeing their private company as an arbiter of free speech, because they understand the most critical truth of Freedom of Speech™: It’s not the role of a profit-making entity to preserve free speech. It’s the government’s.
This is what’s needed in the next iteration of the internet. Reddit’s growing pains moved them into a clear leader in community development, content quality, and user growth.
Cultivate the flowers. Permanently remove the weeds.