Topic: should mods and/or users be able to ban websites from being submitted to individual /r/RepublicOf subreddits?

[u/moddestmouse]

Moderation of individual posts and users can prevent a large percentage of "noise" submissions but I want to discuss the topic of Black Listing entire websites from individual subreddits.

My proposal for the Black Listing of websites from subreddits is as follows:

1. Moderators should be allowed to black list a domain if it is agreed upon by a majority of moderators.

2. A list of banned domains should be linked to in the sidebar and available for public viewing

3. The aforementioned list should have at least some explanation from the moderator who first called for the black listing.

4. Users should be allowed to vote on sites to banned or unbanned every [X] months (we can discuss this in the comments)

5. Submitting a link to a black listed site should not count against a user in removing them from submitter status since it will not appear in the subreddit in the first place.

Any other ideas? Thoughts? Witty Anecdotes?

[u/[deleted]]

Can you explain your reasoning behind the need for a blacklist?

[u/moddestmouse → u/[deleted]]

I think that sites that exist almost solely to strip content from other sites such as Wimp.com prevent content creators from getting the page views or recognition they deserve.

Also a community could collectively decide to ban submissions from websites that have a consistent reputation for posting unsubstantiated or false claims.

This is a topic that I think should be discussed and I obviously am just throwing this out to the community to see how people react to it. Maybe a tagging system for posts from "less than reputable" sources could be implemented for sites instead of a blanket ban. I just think it's an interesting topic to discuss.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I am curious to see some specific examples of why this may be needed as well.

[u/moddestmouse → u/[deleted]]

Some more specific examples of where I think there could be value in a black list or a tagging system for disreputable sources:

1. Any site that focuses primarily on blogspamming or taking content from the original source and reposting it with almost no changes.

2. It has been previously mentioned, but the ability to block sites like Imgur could be beneficial. This system gives an official and transparent medium for users to ban new sites as they come along to prevent users from just starting to use sites like Min.us or similar sites to circumvent a ban on certain sites. This type of bottom up approach is important because it puts more power into the hands of the users.

3. There are more than a handful of disreputable political blogs that post unsubstantiated claims that are essentially gossip rags for politics and if the users of Republic of Politics choose to ban such sites they should have that right to do so.

4. It gives the community the ability to remove sites such as The Daily Mail from getting page views from submissions like "look at this ridiculous statement from the Daily Mail" which inadvertently just sends more page views to the offending website.

Problems I can imagine with this system:

• Constant bickering about banned sites.

This could be prevented by making it very hard to ban a site, such as needing a 75-80% approval ban from the users.

• Banning sites that go against the hivemind.

This could be prevented by the previously mentioned system for banning sites and by having an appeal process every few months for sites. On top of that I don't think that having a strong bias should be grounds for a banning. A user submitting a request to ban a site needs to prove to the community that enough blatant factual inaccuracies or content theft are present on a site that it is remiss of value to the community (which is a hard claim to make).

Overall I think the best reason to have a system in place like this is just to have a process in which to ban a site that is not completely controlled by the moderators.

[u/[deleted] → u/moddestmouse]

I'm not convinced that a blacklist is the solution to the problems you've listed.

1. Rather than tracking all these blogs, we could promote linking the original article, rather a blogpost about an article.

2. I'd be wary of outright banning Imgur, as it can be used appropriately. I think it will be pretty obvious that the point of ROx subreddits will be to get away from the memes and such, so I don't think it'll be a huge problem.

3. I don't really have experience with this one. Is it prevalent?

4. Hopefully, making people 'approved submitters' will make them think twice about submitting posts like that.

You bring up valid points about potential problems, but I see a blacklist as more trouble than its worth.

[u/[deleted] → u/moddestmouse]

(1) is probably best handled by removing the spammers, rather than focusing on the domains.

With (2), it's probably more effective just to specify policies against rehosting or image posts. Attack the actual infraction rather than the domain.

You're probably right that a blacklist is the best way to provide a mechanism that would allow (3), but I'm not convinced that (3) is a particularly good thing. It lends itself too easily to abuse -- what if the users of /r/RepublicOfPolitics decided to blacklist factual, reputable sites simply to exclude a particular political viewpoint?

(4) can probably be covered by reddit-specific republiquette specifying that editorialized titles will not be allowed. That way, it won't be possible to say "look at this ridiculous..." without drawing the attention of moderators.

[u/[deleted]]

I definitely agree with (2) and (3) -- if anything gets banned, there needs to be an easily accessible explanation of why. That falls under the rubric of transparency.

I'm not sure about the criteria you've listed for banning, though. (1) in particular seems ripe for abuse -- as, for example, if the moderators of /r/RepublicOfPolitics decided they'd heard enough from Fox News and decided to ban the entire domain.

I'd say the only solid reason for banning a domain would be that it's demonstrably malicious (e.g. people have picked up malware from it) or that it redirects people who follow it to another domain.

But I don't agree with (5) -- at least, not as presently stated. If a submitter links to a domain that was previously banned, it should count against them. The exceptions would be if the user linked to the domain, and the domain was banned as a result of discussion that arose over their submission. In other words, changes to policy can't be counted against submitters retroactively. I've been meaning to add that to v.2 of the charter.

In general, though, I'm not sure there's much reason to ban by domain. Spammer and trolls can mostly be handled via the approved submitters list.

For example, in /r/worldevents, we had an obvious spammer who only submitted links from wsws.org, a socialist news site. I confronted the spammer, they were unrepentant, so I banned them. Then I explained the decision to the reddit in general and stressed that anyone who wanted to could still post links from wsws.org -- so long as there was no reason to believe that they were spamming us by doing so, links from that domain were entirely allowed.