Reddit makes some changes in the wake of the Orlando shooting

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As the shooting in Orlando unfolded Sunday, the biggest news on Reddit – the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet” – wasn’t the crime taking place in Florida. It was, instead, about how Reddit was messing up the news about the shooting.

As The Washington Post’s Abby Ohlheiser wrote, the problems started when users began posting that the moderators of “r/news” – a Reddit subsection devoted to news – were unnecessarily censoring the discussion about the shooting. The subsection has strict rules about what can be submitted to the site. For example, there can be no opinion pieces or duplicate stories; those posts are deleted.

This past weekend, however, moderators appeared to be overzealous when deleting posts – particularly those identifying shooter Omar Mateen as a Muslim, and some non-controversial posts such as where people could give blood in the Orlando area. Things escalated further when members of the main Donald Trump community on Reddit began repeating accusations of censorship en masse and managed to dominate the site’s central page for displaying all Reddit content – known as “r/all” – with their accusations.

The situation exposed some uncomfortable truths about how small groups of Reddit users can affect what the entire community sees, and raises questions about Reddit’s reliance on volunteer moderators and its ability to act as the front page of the Internet.

To help address the issue, Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman said that the firm has tweaked the algorithm it uses to display what’s on the r/all page. Right now, the page displays popular posts from nearly all the site’s subsections.

Under the new algorithm, Huffman said, repeatedly posting from the same community will make it less likely that posts from that specific community appear in the r/all listing.

“The gist of the way it works is that the more often a community is in the listing, its ‘hotness’ gets demoted a little bit,” Huffman said.

That, he said, should help keep small groups of users from dominating the site’s overall conversations and keep situations like this from snowballing out of control.

That change will take effect Thursday.

(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Hayley Tsukayama

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