Do you feel the moderation over there is enough though, even on the "nicely moderated places" that you mention?
Compared to other communities where admins/mods delete users' comments to a much higher frequency relative to Reddit and freely edit or move unfitting submissions & comments, I've always felt the lack of moderation on Reddit for the most part has been the reason for attracting trolls and users making hateful comments.
And the thing is, Reddit looks to be a very hard place to moderate as large number of Redditors seem to become very mad when heavy moderation happens (seeing from the large # of "I thought this site was all about freedom of speech"-type comments when r/jailbait got banned few months back).
When the lack of moderation attracts all those characters who post "shit", filtering via voting just becomes useless as you mention in your other comment.
It's all about establishing ground rules. /r/askscience is the posterchild of this - they have 250k+ subscribers, and the discussion is still interesting, thought provoking, and on topic. Other subreddits, like /r/gaming, have devolved into nothing more than image macros and meme posts. The difference is 100% the ground rules that are set, and then the moderators sticking to those ground rules.
If I were in control of Reddit for a day, I'd create a "How to Build Community" packet for to give to new moderators. Often they're just promoted for being good members of the community - but that doesn't mean they know how to run or grow a good one.
The whole 'free speech/minimal moderation/no-censorship' is one of the core reason Reddit 'scales'. Unlike most sites, there's no sign out front saying you can't post there. No matter how terrible you are, someone will agree with you, and if you find the right sub-sub-sub-reddit, everyone will agree with you.
The other aspect is that voting systems are groupthink systems. Once the userbase gets large enough, the moderation system does not function in a way that encourages debate or questions common assumptions. It seems to be a terminal problem, which nobody knows how to fix except to escape to smaller fora.
> Do you feel the moderation over there is enough though, even on the "nicely moderated places" that you mention?
There's a huge range in how hands-on moderators are, and it varies dramatically by subreddit. Some subreddits are notoriously draconian; others permit pretty much anything. I don't think it's possible to make a statement about moderation on reddit overall, across subreddits.
To add to this, it also feels as that in most cases, for every topic that a niche subreddit (or multiple similar subreddits) covers, there usually exist better online communities dealing with the same topic elsewhere on the Web.
For example, let's say you're interested in airplanes and aviation. Relevant subreddits such as r/aviation just doesn't compare to communities like airliners.net with its sheer amount and high quality of content.
Quality of content aside, other communities in such instances also seem to have better organization, more strict moderation (although some subreddits do have very good, dedicated moderators), and certain culture that's not prevalent on Reddit (e.g. compared to some other communities that I visit, there doesn't seem to be a culture of searching before posting on Reddit, ultimately resulting in a lot of reposts), leading me to go to those places rather than the subreddits that cover the same topic.
This blogger aggregates "Best of 2011"-type book lists from all types of sources you can imagine (well, English-based ones anyway); thought it might be of interest to some of you here.
I'm not sure if the same term is used in the U.S., but few British journalists have spoken out about what you've mentioned - the race to get the story out first without applying strict fact-checking standards, all happening in an industry where resources are being cut all over the place and making matters worse.
This is les about checking facts than it is blatently putting a news tone/spin on the story.
They are selling sensationalist fear. There is very very little "news" any longer - everything is an emotional product.
They understand psychology and believe that the only way to manipulate the viewerships response is through their emotions - which is far easier to do than through critical thought. They are a self-fulfilling prophecy on the stupidity of their viewership: market emotionalism and do a poor job on actual substance because the viewers only understand emotionalism and cannot critically think for themselves -- or IF they do critically think - then the resultant opinion will be different than the opnion we are trying to sell which is fear.
Do you usually ask the same question to white Canadians as well ("Where are you from?", "Oh, where are your parents from then?")? It would be safe to assume that white Canadians are generally confronted with those questions with much less frequency than Asian Canadians are.
May be some do have a sense of self-hatred like you said, but I would guess most people are simply annoyed by those questions so they respond adversely. Like others have mentioned already, it's really frustrating from a point of view of a person who might be a 3rd generation Canadian, as the questions can make him/her feel like perpetual foreigner. Why can't you take "Canadian" as an answer when those people have lived there for all their lives and might have never even visited their grandparents' country of origin?
As you've said you're an immigrant, your ethnicity and the fact that you're a first generation immigrant might be a big part of who you are (if you do treat them importantly, that is). For second generation Canadians and on, that might be not so true. It's not that they are embarrassed by their respective ethnicity, but it just doesn't play a big part in their lives in their thoughts.
As for the post-it/to-do lists, what helps me is to develop a point system (scale of 0~5 or whatever) and assign a point next to a criterion at the end of the day, depending on how well you think the task was accomplished. It works even better if the tasks are something that's repeated weekly (e.g. organisation of your living space), as you'll end up with a collection of points.
While easy and non time-consuming, it's powerful in a way that it creates a feedback process. Of course, there's bunch of different reward systems people use besides scoring high points, like earning oneself a cigar, for example. So you can develop one that suits you for more fun.
Just as an additional note, MIT came up with a set of OCWs for introductory courses back in January that are specifically intended for independent learners (IIRC, one of the MIT's original aims for the OCW project was to provide materials for educators rather than learners). These 'OCW Scholar' courses contain complete course material, and I'm guessing we'll have more of these as time progresses.
Bias put aside, you get to detect certain patterns about the articles after you read BBC's online news service for a while. Most of the time, they seem to lack depth as well.
If you're familiar with their articles, you've probably seen a pattern where articles of ~4 paragraphs come up on the site when a breaking news occurs. You get the sense that they're only concerned with speed rather than accuracy - contents in those 4 paragraphs will change throughout the day, while they'll add about 10 more paragraphs containing some background information and/or interviews. So unless you don't read the "finished version," it's likely that you didn't read the most accurate information.
The way the BBC writers work gives them hardly any time to check facts as well. They're expected to write news tickers, e-mail the news desk about newly written stories, and make a post on Ceefax service as well (hence the 4-paragraph rule). Then they are also expected to harmonize their articles with news from other BBC outlets (e.g. BBC Radio services, BBC News Channel, etc.) so the writers multi-task and constantly have to keep an eye on those services.
I cannot agree more with this. Perhaps this might apply to almost all discussion-based sites, but often at HN (especially Ask HN posts), it's sometimes frustrating seeing how new conversations regarding a specific topic - most likely as a result of a frequently asked question - keep popping up.
It's not that I find presence of FAQs frustrating, but has more to do with how useful information contained in different discussions tend to get increasingly decentralized. Furthermore, depending on the topic, the nature of discussions might change as time progresses, and those who might want more "classic" advices on that topic could really benefit from this proposed style of wiki.
For example, "recommend materials for learning higher maths" type of questions keep appearing consistently. Each time there's a new discussion that contains unique advices. If I were to refer a newcomer to past discussions right at this moment, I could come up with at least 5 of them (which I have done in one of my comments few weeks ago). A HN Wiki that centralizes gems from different discussions in this situation would be highly beneficial, a time-saver for many.
I suppose alternatives are tagging and improved search functions which are common elsewhere, but a somewhat-active wiki community (whether official or unofficial) where people are willing to organize useful information would be just fantastic.
Compared to other communities where admins/mods delete users' comments to a much higher frequency relative to Reddit and freely edit or move unfitting submissions & comments, I've always felt the lack of moderation on Reddit for the most part has been the reason for attracting trolls and users making hateful comments.
And the thing is, Reddit looks to be a very hard place to moderate as large number of Redditors seem to become very mad when heavy moderation happens (seeing from the large # of "I thought this site was all about freedom of speech"-type comments when r/jailbait got banned few months back).
When the lack of moderation attracts all those characters who post "shit", filtering via voting just becomes useless as you mention in your other comment.