DISPLACED DISCUSSION: THE IMPLICATIONS OF REDDIT QUARANTINE AND THEMOVEMENT OF THEREDPILL TO SELF-HOSTING
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reddit.com is a social media site with huge volumes and varieties of content, both hosted on their platform, and imported from other providers. It is also a place of counterpublic community action. Sub-Reddits like r/the_donald, and r/theredpill expound, in turn, alt-right and anti-feminist views. Along with various posts, links, and outside content, the communities support millions of words of user discussion. These communities are policed, at least in part, by their exposure to the community at large, and push-back from other people and groups to their content. When a community sees that its action on a site like Reddit is limited, and perceives that its ideas and ideologies are being silenced, what happens? This paper uses data from a digital ethnography of r/TheRedPill, a sub-community of Reddit dedicated to “discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men.” The community was quarantined by Reddit in September of 2018, and since that time has engaged in regular discussion about the movement of community discussion and forums away from Reddit to their own hosting site www.trp.red. Beyond simply allowing versus limiting speech, the case of r/TheRedPill provides an opportunity to engage in a discussion about whether progressive sanction is the right way to manage the intersection of counterpublic views with the needs of tech firms. This paper hopes to further that discussion using a community that is less generally associated with hate speech, and can therefore exist on the margins of acceptability.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.051 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.020 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".