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Did you know that Parsi's in Mumbai, instead of being left at the Tower of Silence after
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they die, are now cremated?
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Because a cow fell sick in the early 1990s.
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Did you know that the smog in Delhi is caused by something that farmers in Punjab do, and
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that there's no way to stop them?
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Did you know that there wasn't one gas tragedy in Bhopal, but three?
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One of them was seen, but two were unseen.
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Did you know that many well-intentioned government policies hurt the people they're supposed
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Why was demonetization a bad idea?
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How should GST have been implemented?
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Why are all our politicians so corrupt when not all of them are bad people?
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I'm Amit Verma, and in my weekly podcast, The Seen and the Unseen, I take a shot at
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answering all these questions and many more.
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I aim to go beyond the seen and show you the unseen effects of public policy and private
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I speak to experts on economics, political philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and constitutional
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law so that their insights can blow not only my mind, but also yours.
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The Seen and the Unseen releases every Monday, so do check out the archives and follow the
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You can also subscribe to The Seen and the Unseen on whatever podcast app you happen
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How did we communicate with each other before the internet?
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Were you rude to random strangers?
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Did you call people names just because they disagreed with you on something?
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Did you have close friends you had never even met?
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Were you running around the neighborhood showing photographs of your food to everyone?
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If someone said something funny, did you respond with a string of letters like LOL or R-O-T-F-L-A-M-O?
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Did you look people in the eye when you spoke to them?
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In fact, that's a pretty good question.
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Did you look them in the eye?
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, my topic for today is online conversations.
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The internet has transformed how we speak to one another and indeed how we exist as
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society and even how we are as individuals.
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On the one hand, we've been empowered with information and knowledge and the ability
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to make connections, both with other people and with new ideas.
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We have wider and more diverse social circles.
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All our interactions are so much richer.
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But on the flip side, the internet seems to reveal the dark side of human nature.
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Anonymity emboldens us to express our deepest prejudices, all the bigotry and misogyny
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we otherwise never would show to anyone.
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And we behave in ways online that we would not even consider in real life.
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Also, instead of bringing us together, the internet might actually be driving us apart.
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The internet makes it possible for us to form different echo chambers, really large echo
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chambers of people who share our interests or ideologies or prejudices, some of them
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repulsive to others, even as we close ourselves off to views and people who don't match us.
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As a society, we are getting more and more polarized.
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As individuals, we are becoming more and more strident and judgmental.
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What can we do about it?
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To discuss all this, I have with me a guest who has seen this evolution of human conversation
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Nikhil has been a moderator at Reddit for a few years, and I bumped into him socially
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a few days ago and had a fascinating conversation with him.
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He's a perfect guest for the seen and the unseen.
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But before we get into our conversation, here's a small commercial break.
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If this happens to be the only podcast you listen to, well, you need to listen to some
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Check out the ones from IVM Podcasts who co-produced the show with me.
#
Go to ivmpodcasts.com or download the IVM app, and you'll find a host of great Indian
#
podcasts that cover every subject you could think of.
#
From the magazine I edit, Pragati, I think, pragati.com, there is the Pragati podcast
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hosted by Hamsini Hariharan and Pawan Srinath.
#
There is a brilliant Hindi podcast, Puliya Baazi, hosted by Pranay Kutaswamy and Saurabh
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Chandra, and apart from these policy podcasts, IVM has shows that cover music, films, finance,
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sports, sci-fi, tech, and the LGBT community, all under one roof, or rather all in one app.
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So download the IVM Podcasts app today.
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Welcome to the seen and the unseen, Nikhil.
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So I'm really fascinated.
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What made you start off as a moderator on Reddit?
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Were you a user before that?
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So I used to be on a lot of online forums.
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I enjoy talking online.
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I like, quite often, I like the anonymity, and I like the ability to engage with people
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from many different places.
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And it's always been very fascinating to see our interactions happen.
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I've seen people lose their minds because some small thing happened in a video game
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And then I've seen other really high, sophisticated discussions on the most minute parts of code
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and computer architecture somewhere else.
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So I was always wondering what made a difference.
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So Reddit was the new big thing, and it was one of the few places where you got a lot
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of interesting conversation.
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And I was there for a long while, and then the subreddit, which I was on, which is sort
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of a constrained topic forum, where they were looking for moderators.
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They were looking for people to help them deal with the influx of new users and disruptive
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behavior, to put it mildly, which they were seeing.
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And I'd always been on the forum as a user.
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I would always communicate and always suggest ideas, which I'd seen work in other places.
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And they finally said that, you know, you've been here for so long, you have all of these
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Why don't you try and implement them?
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And I thought it's been years of me looking at all of these other forums and all of these
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Let's see what happens if we implement them.
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So I'll ask you a personal question.
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Were you a different person offline than you were online when you got online?
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Well, that's a difficult question to answer.
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I think, yes, to a certain degree of online, I am far, it's more about what ideas I have.
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So I reduce my interactions to those topics, which I feel strongly about.
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And I can express or have or try to have an opinion on.
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Whereas in real life, there are a lot of topics where I just don't know anything whatsoever
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and I have to interact on them.
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And so I tend to be a little bit more reticent in real life than I am online.
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But then online, there are a lot of places I avoid interacting because I believe that
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I'm really not in a good position to talk about it.
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So offline, essentially, you're, you know, you're mixing with people and you're doing
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small talk, but you're never actually doing small talk online in your case.
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You're just engaging when the subject concerns you deeply.
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Of course, there are always some topics or the other which are just amusing or some ridiculous
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picture of cats or something or the other, which just catches your eye and you will say
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something stupid out there.
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But yeah, if you look at it, but you can usually find out what topics I'm very interested in
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if someone were to just go through the comments I've written on the topics I've spoken about.
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And is there any early online behavior from you, which you now regret?
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That's another tough one.
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I would love to say no.
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I really can't think of anything at this point.
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Even something that's mildly embarrassing, not that you would regret.
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Oh, mildly embarrassing.
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I do on a regular basis.
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So that's really not changed.
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Every so often, there are comments where I do talk about a topic which I want to know
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And so for example, if there's an advanced subject, which I want to learn, I go there,
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I look at what other people are talking about, and then I try and put my opinion forward
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and then I realize a little later, I really didn't know what I was talking about.
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That's incredibly embarrassing.
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So how, like when you became from being a heavy user, when you became a moderator, what
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How did that change the way you looked at Reddit and at the kind of online conversations
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So I think this in itself should be broken up into parts.
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So first and foremost, I come in from, I really want to see conversation online succeed.
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I think it's really important for all of us.
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We do most of our conversation online and frankly, a large portion of our personalities
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today is just done by typing words in.
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So not being able to type words in, being banned or being restricted from saying something
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is effectively having that part of you online amputated because there is only the act of
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speaking you can do online.
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You can only speak and not being able to speak is a very big thing.
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You may be saying stupid stuff and you may be talking about something totally irrelevant,
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but the fact that you can and cannot is everything to your online personality.
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So I thought this is really interesting and a really different part of our lives and I've
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been here before the internet.
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So to have that tool where you can all talk to all of these people and you can see all
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of these people was a big thing and then seeing it misused from almost the get go.
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So a little prehistory, when there was no Facebook, no Reddit, people found ways to
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abuse each other on discussions about compiler code and just on basic things where you wouldn't
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People can get very passionate and fight about that.
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And there's just tons and tons of stories from those days where people were looking
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at and they were going, okay, that's really not what we expected people to do.
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And that's sort of this apocryphal body of work before moderating became as and before
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the modern research started happening on it today about what to do, what rules should
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be applied to make a good conversation online.
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Because when you went online, you'd find that a lot of people would just, like if you had
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a topic on religion or politics, they would get very ugly.
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So actually, let's move back.
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Have you ever heard of the term eternal September?
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So eternal September is one of those terms which encompass a whole idea, like signal
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And this is part of that, those terms which people use.
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And to be frank, moderating is not very researched as a science or anything right now, but a
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lot of more work is going into understanding how we interact online.
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But before that, there were terms like eternal September.
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Eternal September, there was a forum called Usenet, a bunch of forums called Usenet.
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This is around the 1990s and a little earlier than that.
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And the general pattern was that there were a bunch of people out there who were familiar
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who knew, had a certain general code of how to communicate and talk to each other.
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Every so often in the year, there would be a new influx of users, a periodic influx from
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a bunch of colleges where people came there, they now had access to Usenet, and they would
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And that was usually in September.
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And that period would be a period of adjustment.
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The new users would end up learning and imbibing the general rules and code of conduct online.
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And the forums would continue in peace, except finally in one day in 1993, when AOL allowed
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all of its users to use and access Usenet.
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And essentially, there was a very large influx of users, so large that the ability of the
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forums to condition and educate people on the ways that people used to behave online
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It was more than the old guard's ability to help or guide people or, I don't know, you
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could use any amount of words, you could even use indoctrinate if you're being very uncharitable,
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It was more like understanding how to talk to each other.
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And that was termed eternal September.
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That's a fantastic term.
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And it's like we're still in an eternal September.
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Yes, it's the most horrifying version of eternal September you can think of because everyone's
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a kid online, so to speak, today.
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The rules of the house or general rules of decorum either seem to have been forgotten
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or they haven't been discovered by a vast majority of people.
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And it's very scary to think of a large majority of India which is not online yet.
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So our way of communicating with each other is very important.
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Let's go back to the Usenet days for a moment.
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Then I assumed that in those days you could say that whatever policing or moderation there
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was was not overt moderation.
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It was more just a community sort of thing where the communities were small enough that
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you figured out what are the acceptable ways of conversing with other people, the acceptable
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behaviors and you quickly adapted to them and that was manageable every September when
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a small bunch of new people came in and they quickly learnt and those who didn't learn
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went and those who learnt stayed on and became stollwards.
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And then suddenly one day it all opens up and it's a free for all and everyone is sort
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So how did the various forums then sort of start adjusting to it?
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I mean, what were the different schools of thought on this?
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We should do nothing, we should police it in this way, we should police it in that way.
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So this is going really back in internet time.
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So before there were very large social media sites and aggregators like Facebook, I think
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the most places that I would go to were forums and you would tend, so there would be some
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technical forums, game forums were quite popular and all these tended to have a small community.
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So it was quite easy to understand the general rules and the general code of conduct.
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The moderators that I knew at that time generally didn't have to moderate for content or quantity
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And yes, there would inevitably be someone or the other who would try and attack the
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forum or try to attack users and those people tended to get banned and there are a lot of
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stories of even back then of how those halcyon days were even filled with problems and issues.
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But nothing I think at the scale at which we're dealing with now.
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So for example, back at that time one of the biggest problems you'd always face was spam.
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You would have someone or some robot which would come online and just constantly spam
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So those basic spam filters would deal with it.
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But then there were also some users who for some reason decided it was their life's mission
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to harass either the entire forum or harass a specific user.
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And that would be something which moderators of old would try and go and weed out and ban.
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But even in that time, there were issues of groups of people targeting each other.
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So for example, a lot of forums find it their life's mission to oppose an idea and then
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to oppose and attack everyone who embodies that idea.
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Very famously would be Nazi supremacist forum finding Jewish forums or even forums where
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people congregate for different reasons around Judaism and attack the users over there.
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So even before Reddit and before many of the other or Facebook, people were finding ways
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to harass and weaponize speech online.
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So the next major website I remember going to was a technical website called Slashdot.
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It was very interesting because everyone could upvote all their topics.
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And when you upvoted a topic, you had different criteria on which you could upvote it.
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You could say it was insightful, it was funny.
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Instead of having a generic like or dislike button, there was different varieties on ways
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you could upvote and you could say this person's contributing to the conversation.
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And Slashdot, if I remember, had a huge number of users.
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So you actually got a very good sample size of these different kinds of upvotes and downvotes
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for it to be meaningful.
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And around that time, what people started discussing was the concept of signal versus
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So that was the realization that not all conversation online is on topic and not all conversation
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online is as insightful as listening to the most intelligent person on that topic speak.
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So signal versus noise is sort of the other major way people explain the issues online,
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that you have lots and lots of people talking, not all of it is worthwhile.
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The question which then started bothering me is that how do you get the most useful
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information to come up?
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And sadly, it turned out that even a voting system like what Slashdot used where you could
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say that this comment is insightful and this comment is funny or this comment is interesting
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did not necessarily make it such that the most useful or relevant information came up.
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Most often, the most popular opinion still managed to be heard.
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And this is generally going to be the theme of what we see with interactions online, that
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it's just sheer numbers which tend to influence how we end up talking and what we end up talking
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And like I remember I started my blog India Uncut in 2003, 2004.
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And after a while, I found that my traffic was too much for me to have comments enabled.
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Because again, I couldn't handle the noise to signal ratio.
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And I figured out rather than try and moderate or keep an eye on it or whatever, I simply
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won't have comments because it is after all my space and save myself that mental bandwidth.
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And I remember chatting with a friend of mine who ran a blog called Sepia Mutiny, a very
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fine blog, Desi Americans.
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And one of the guys who started that was a chap called Manish Vejj.
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And Manish once told me when he spoke about his comments policy and I was always very
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surprised because they also had very decent traffic, but the comment section was always
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And he said, oh, we ban liberally and we don't just ban for trolling or abuse, we ban for
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Which brings an interesting question of even when you talk about signal and noise, there
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are many categories of noise and there is a certain subjectivity to it.
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And the hard part for a moderator then becomes where do you draw the line?
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You don't want to have commenters or readers feeling that shit, this is only meant to be
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an echo chamber for people who agree with this guy.
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But at the same time, you do want to weed out bad behavior.
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And is there an issue sort of finding those boundaries, defining those boundaries?
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Have they changed over time?
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So yes, in general, there is an issue quite often finding boundaries, mostly because as
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you asked, yes, boundaries move.
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So in general, the way I've approached or what I've been exposed to has almost always
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been dominated by the general American viewpoint that free speech is critical and free speech
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And that the more free speech, the better chances for drowning out bad ideas.
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This was the general philosophy, which is why even on Reddit, there's always been such
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a pushback against moderation, where what your friend did turns out to be probably one
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of the only ways to deal with it.
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And what you did is turning out increasingly to be the only way for people to deal with
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There are many very large websites which have entirely shut down their comment section,
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you may be mistaken, but I believe either Scientific American or a major website has
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shut down their comment section.
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Because it's a bit sad, but people don't interact in ways which are healthy or in the best spirit
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So to go with an example of what happens, when I ended up moderating on Reddit, it was
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after the forum was actually dealing with such thing, when the forum which was created
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was very small and was built on that principle that let everyone speak, let everyone share
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ideas no matter how good, bad or ugly and deal with the bad ideas.
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Unfortunately, it turns out that since your entire existence online is words, words are
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also very literally violence online.
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You can gang up on a person and prevent them from speaking, you can compress their ideas
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and you can move them away.
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You can form, the internet really helps people find each other and this also means making
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lots and lots of ideological ghettos.
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So that process and those ghettos are quite often more like roving mobs.
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What would happen on the forum is that if someone had an opposing viewpoint, they would
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get relentlessly hounded and since everyone was expected to behave on their own in whatever
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manner was befitting them, well, since no one was stopping them, they behaved in any
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which way they liked, which would quite often just be straight up harassment.
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If you were a woman online, it's not a good scene.
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People would find them.
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If by chance you let people know you're a woman online, then you would be targeted.
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You would be targeted all throughout the web and you would be harassed.
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What is sort of the bent to women ratio in a place like Reddit, for example, in terms
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Because you'd imagine that it would become a sort of a vicious circle where women just
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don't feel welcome because there are so many men, many of them abusive and therefore they
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just don't bother to participate.
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I'm very certain that's the case and I'm sure most people who go and interact out there
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either choose places where they are welcome or they have a very thick skin or they come
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to those places where they know these conversations can happen and either try to engage or they
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ignore those conversations, focus on the parts which can be useful, but for the exact ratio,
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Knowing in itself would bother me because that would mean that there's some way to identify
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So, you know, I'm not a Reddit user per se, once in a while I'll see a link and go and
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I really like the Keto subreddit, which you mentioned is a fantastic subreddit and I'm
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of course a Keto evangelizer.
#
So here's what it seems to me Reddit's fundamental problem is, let me just articulate this and
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tell me if I've got it right, that on the one hand, it is true that freedom of speech
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is something that really applies to a state acting against its citizens and if you are
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like a private party, like a website, you have the right to set whatever rules you want
#
and if people don't abide by those rules, they can go elsewhere or you can ban them
#
or moderate them any way you deem fit and therefore people shouldn't really complain.
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But the other way of looking at it is that community sites like Reddit and Facebook are
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so large and all encompassing that for many people, they are the world where they exist
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and to stop somebody from expressing herself in a world like this would be very cruel among
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And the idea you mentioned of letting free speech prevail, I mean one of the fundamental
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defenses of free speech comes from the phrase of marketplace of ideas, that to get to whatever
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the truth might be on any subject at all, you have to let all ideas find expression
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and then let whichever ideas win out in the marketplace of ideas, that's really the function
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but you can't stop anyone from speaking, which is the original intention.
#
And that's Reddit's dilemma that because of the noise to signal ratio, it must moderate
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but at the same time, there are huge costs to moderating both philosophically in terms
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of the principle of free speech and also practically in terms of what it can mean for users for
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whom Reddit is a whole world.
#
Right, I agree, so funnily, one part of the internet which did work, I used this idea
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recently and someone challenged it with a far more sophisticated approach, they linked
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to an old US Supreme Court or US court or a law journal where they discussed this idea
#
and the limitations on how well the marketplace of ideas as an idea itself works.
#
And for one, I like the analogy, it's very simple, I like the marketplace of ideas because
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it gets the idea across what we're really trying to do, where we're trying to share
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But there are a lot of things which are automatically limited, so it's not that all speeches you're
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allowed to say fire, shout fire in a crowded theatre, you're not, we don't have unlimited
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free speech anyway and if you're in India, there are a lot of topics which you cannot
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speak about because if you do and you talk about them in a certain way, you will cause
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harm to others and the state has decided that that's not okay.
#
In general, there are certain ideas which we do not discuss in our marketplaces.
#
I think if I can just, you know the shouting fire in a crowded theatre analogy is actually
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one that I don't agree with and I've written a column about this in fact, a couple of columns,
#
it bugs me a lot when people use it because here's the thing, if you shout fire in a crowded
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theatre, if the patron does it when there's no fire, he's defrauding his customers, if
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a customer does it, he's in a sense defrauding the patron and he's disrupting all the other
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people who have, you know, paid for a good experience which is being disrupted.
#
So on all of these grounds, you can condemn that behaviour and stop it.
#
You don't need to, it's not an attack on free speech to do so per se.
#
If someone shouts fire in a crowded theatre, there are various grounds including property
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rights and contracts on which you can actually prosecute him and punish him.
#
I mean I'm a free speech absolutist as you would have figured but I keep pointing out
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We're going to have fun.
#
Yeah, but I keep pointing out that, you know, my free speech absolutism really comes down
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to how the state deals with the citizens because I believe the citizen should be in charge
#
and not the state and people seem to have the opposite view as a default.
#
It doesn't apply to how a private entity like Reddit deals with its users because as far
#
as I can see Reddit has its terms of use and those terms of use obviously include things
#
like you shall not do ad hominems and you shall not abuse and you shall all of those
#
things and they are entirely within their rights to kick out any users who have signed
#
that terms of use, those terms of use and don't comply.
#
So to me that's not so much a free speech issue in the classical sense of the term.
#
So I too started out from the position of view that free speech is that my driving force
#
has been to figure out what works.
#
And I've come to the conclusion that if you use the analogy of the marketplace of ideas,
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a lot of things don't work.
#
The big issue is that a lot of people can get together and suppress a good idea.
#
So a lot of people want to get together and they want to suppress discussion on racism,
#
They want to suppress certain discussion on religion or they want to specifically focus
#
discussion on XYZ topic about a different religion.
#
And these things, the previous protection and the shield which we had in the previous
#
era was that these things were very amorphous.
#
They were not necessarily something you could tangibly see.
#
But as a moderator or as a user online, these things happen every day.
#
Now because all your interactions are about conversation, you can end up spamming the
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You can keep or you can very subtly ensure that certain conversations get downvoted
#
and disappear, whereas other conversations which you prefer get upvoted.
#
So it's now more a question of whether the original idea of the original conception of
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this marketplace where everyone gets together and share ideas is still working.
#
And in the new era, it's not.
#
Practically speaking, there are many ways in which free speech as we knew it, it's done
#
I think you can argue though, I agree with you, but as a counter, you could argue that
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the marketplace of ideas was always extremely slow to work.
#
For example, if you had read it in say 1820 in America and someone said slavery is bad
#
and we should abolish it, the same thing would happen to them what you just described, that
#
the majority of people would just downvote them and shout them out or troll them or whatever
#
and it wouldn't matter and it would seem as if in the marketplace of ideas, pro-slavery
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has won and then society sort of took its own time to change gradually.
#
So it's never immediate, but the whole idea I think of the marketplace of ideas is that
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at least those ideas are allowed to exist in some form.
#
This is the marketplace of ideas, if I remember correctly, that actually what you said is
#
a sort of one of the criticisms of the original concept and said that there's never really
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been a functional marketplace in the first place because there are several concepts which
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are as it is banned by the states or controlled by the states, you cannot discuss them, libel,
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there are certain topics which the majority will automatically take a stand on.
#
I think India is very harsh and unduly harsh on free speech, but in the US, the first amendment
#
is really quite excellent, I think in terms of-
#
It is and finally the person who was criticizing the concept of free speech, the marketplace
#
of ideas was a person on an American law journal.
#
So there are limitations, no idea is perfect and you don't deal with platonic ideas in
#
the first place and there will always be.
#
The thing which was most critical to me to realize was that when you started out putting
#
rules in our forum, we said basic rules, don't harass, don't hunt people and don't go and
#
be abusive, very simple straightforward rules.
#
And then what would happen is that once those rules got in place and people became familiar
#
with them, they go and we banned several users and said, no, you cannot behave this way,
#
you cannot just intentionally put insightful material, you cannot intentionally go and
#
find this particular subgroup of people you don't like, for example, furries and decide
#
you want to just abuse them.
#
There's no reason for you to use our forum to just harass furries.
#
It's not something which we really care about and we're not going to give you a space to
#
do that because that goes and causes other problems.
#
It makes other people upset and it just starts a chain reaction.
#
So that's one of the things where I agree with your friend that yes, you end up coming
#
to a position where you have to use a ban hammer very often.
#
And our first attempts were very distant and practical.
#
We said we will generally use it and as little as we can and for the most egregious violations.
#
But what happens is when you move the frontier, you have a new level of peace, you have no
#
longer the same kind of horrendous things happening as before.
#
People find new ways to abuse that.
#
They find, so the term which I love about this is fractal stupidity.
#
Once you've established a set of ground rules, they find that they can tweak these particular
#
ground rules or they can find another way to harass someone.
#
They can just follow someone and constantly repeat certain things, which are not offensive,
#
but are either dog whistles or either just slanted the right way to read as offensive
#
or they can constantly tag a user in a conversation.
#
There are many ways in which…
#
Give me an example of this.
#
So once we banned a lot of this behavior, there were people who would find ways to show
#
up in conversations about XYZ subgroup and say, well, these people have always done this.
#
And it wouldn't be outright offensive.
#
They wouldn't be saying these people need to die.
#
They would always be saying something which was polite and obviously rude.
#
And now that was a problem for us because now they no longer…
#
We were used the old frontier, which was straight up death threats, hate speech, abuse.
#
Here they're not saying anything wrong.
#
They're using plain simple English and they're saying something which when translated is
#
obviously offensive, but we had restricted ourselves because of our previous rules.
#
We said we would not deal with something and we would not ban someone or harm someone for
#
We would only ban them if they said an outrightly hateful things.
#
So now what do we do with this?
#
Because this is obviously wrong and we were constrained and we knew that so finally we
#
Eventually this became the new rule and then finally we had to come up with a new set of
#
rules because a lot of the users said that is obviously an attack.
#
You need to deal with it.
#
And so the frontier moved.
#
And you keep moving the frontier forward and forward.
#
And this causes a lot of pain.
#
As the frontier moves is the advance of complexity.
#
So first you're just this really simple line, don't abuse each other.
#
Now you have this new line which says you really can't use these particular types of
#
abuse and you can't use this particular type of abuse.
#
And then some guy will say, that guy is doing that.
#
Why are you stopping me from saying this?
#
So then you get, now you get the advent of lawyers, reddit lawyers.
#
They go through your rules and they say that person broke that rule by just that square
#
inch and you banned him.
#
Or they'll say you stopped me from making this post and see all of these people are
#
saying all of these horrible things.
#
They're not saying horrible things, they're saying things which that person thinks is
#
And he's saying you're lying them.
#
Why aren't you lying me?
#
So just as the members are in a sense at the mercy of the moderators, are the moderators
#
also being constantly held accountable by the members?
#
They are, but at the end of the day the moderators have far more power and they can eventually
#
And so, actually that's not true.
#
The moderators cannot really be held in the same way users can be because at the end of
#
the day, moderators enjoy a significant amount of power and a certain amount of opacity of
#
And do moderators like argue with each other about where the line should be?
#
In a certain extent in our team, we have attempted to keep that sort of different set of ideologies
#
But what we are finding is that the older set of moderators who still remember the old
#
free speech days are increasingly a more quiet bunch.
#
And the newer moderators, especially ones who are having more experience from a lot
#
of the other forums and so on, are very clear that yes, these are the only things that work.
#
You're not going to have a conversation and you need to get rid of the bad habits.
#
So the new moderators are not reinventing the wheel, but they're also discovering new
#
kinds of behavior which they have figured out how to deal with.
#
So there are, depending upon the size of your subreddit, the type of interactions you have
#
can be very minor or they can be a very massive amount of interactions.
#
For example, Rketo doesn't have that many subscribers compared to a subreddit like World
#
And World News has to have its own stable of moderators to deal with it because a lot
#
of the topics out there can attract emotions from every corner of the world and they really
#
need to be on the ball with figuring out what the hell is acceptable or not.
#
But Rketo, on the other hand, is what I call a topic constrained forum.
#
People go there because they want something to do.
#
They want to figure out how to get their keto diet working.
#
They want to showcase their successes.
#
I think these forums in general are one of the few places which work because they are
#
what I prefer calling them, they're sort of vector quantity.
#
There is a start point and a direction, whereas other current topics which are just general
#
where people can come in and discuss politics and religion almost inevitably follow a very
#
sad path of polarization, anger and fighting and then heavy moderation, if any.
#
So Nikhil, tell me something, in all these years that you've been first a user and then
#
a moderator and so on, how have online conversations changed?
#
So when I would go to forums initially, it was not that prevalent.
#
It was very hard for people to find these places.
#
You would either be a gamer or you would be a technical person and you would find these
#
things and so people tended to be in communities which they already knew about.
#
But once you had Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, then it became far larger aggregations
#
So what I started noticing is that in my bubble where people would rather use full sentences,
#
people tried to be civil, but then as more and more people just started coming online,
#
people quite often didn't have the same reasons or need to talk in the same manner.
#
So you started having your word length or questions would go down, the topics change.
#
People generally quite often just like shooting the shit.
#
So a lot of general time pass.
#
Because I guess less personal connect because of larger groups, so therefore less etiquette.
#
And also a lot of topics which were just for fun, like general.
#
So one of the big things which you find in a lot of forums and what you need to actually
#
and where a lot of the rules start coming out is just jokes.
#
Because people online, if you're going to a serious discussion, there are a lot of people
#
who don't really have anything to contribute, they're there to watch, but they feel an urge
#
to go and say something funny or to say something, they find something amusing.
#
And that's usually the most common content, which you tend to have to moderate out of
#
You have to say, okay, no jokes, that's pretty cruel.
#
So you'll find that jokes perform so well, because it's so easy for everyone to get that
#
they used to go and they would end up crushing the rest of the more insightful comments.
#
So the longest, hardest to read comment is the one which very few people would read.
#
And the more funny, simpler comment would be the one which is on top.
#
So that I observed, you could see that effect of how just easy to consume material would
#
And you'd see that not just in comments, you start seeing that in content.
#
And then you saw the buzz feeds of the world, you saw how all of them worked, you saw how
#
people understood memes in a very deep and fundamental way.
#
And all of this would also then become a disincentive for the more serious comment and would have
#
a chilling effect on the deeper stuff.
#
So you would have to make very serious efforts to let that part of your garden grow because
#
it turns out jokes and memes are sort of like weeds, they're very hardy, they can get into
#
your brain, they can stick there and they can dominate your short-term memory and even
#
your long-term memory in the sense that, well, they don't dominate your long-term, they'll
#
dominate your short-term, but they end up crowding out everything else.
#
And also, I mean, I've seen an analog of this in Twitter where the most common mode of expression
#
on Twitter is snark, because it's so easy to be snarky about someone.
#
You know, someone says something you don't agree with, you make a one-line joke and you
#
mock him and 50 people are to you and everybody's, oh, you're so witty, while you actually didn't
#
address the argument at all.
#
You just said something supposedly witty.
#
Because that's just easy to consume, that's the entire analogy with junk food.
#
This is just so easy to get.
#
It may not answer the question, may not deal with the issue, but you read it, you got it,
#
you figured out the positions, you felt happy, you got some superficial understanding of
#
the matter and you're on your way.
#
And you stuff your face with it and you feel good.
#
And I'll give you an even more fascinating way that people are using this to spam accounts.
#
So this is a bit different and a little off-topic.
#
So today, recently, someone pointed out what's happening on Reddit is that people are trying
#
to create authentic-looking accounts so that they can use those accounts later on when
#
a crisis occurs or they want to mold opinion.
#
So a lot of forums now have and a lot of subreddits have blockers.
#
They say that if you are not an authentic account with so many years of age and so many
#
comment points, you're probably a fake account, so you are not allowed to post.
#
You have to get your score up and then you can post.
#
It's just sort of a, are you human test?
#
So what they're doing now, these guys, they write a program, they look at maybe R-keto
#
or R-cooking, they see one of the most popular topics, they see what the title was, they
#
wait a little while, they recreate that topic because now they know at what time to post
#
it and whether that's going to get up and it's performed well before, so now when this
#
gets posted, it will perform well again, so they get a lot of points.
#
Then they look at whichever the most popular comments someone had written over there, whatever
#
the top most funny comment was, and they recreate that verbatim, they just copy-paste that.
#
So it looks like a really funny, insightful article by someone with a very funny, insightful
#
And people are like, oh, hey, that's really funny.
#
And is someone gaming the system?
#
And this could easily be Russian bots in the future.
#
No, it's just advertisers.
#
As a matter of fact, they have one bot make this, they have another bot come in and put
#
the funny comment, and then they have another bot respond to that comment.
#
And people just read it and they think it's two natural people talking to each other,
#
so they just keep upvoting it.
#
And they just farm enough credibility, copying human content or the most popular content,
#
regurgitating it, and people find it always funny, and they keep upvoting it.
#
And does this mean that overall the more serious-minded people stop taking part, that it's in a sense
#
a selection process for the crap?
#
So all the serious people end up moving on to more serious discussion forums, where the
#
topic is meant to be more slow or more handled in depth.
#
And you'll see a lot of those forums have far less communication.
#
There are fewer topics which are discussed, or people have fewer comments.
#
They tend to read or they tend to discuss.
#
Or there's a way to figure out people who are bullshitting versus the people who are
#
actually serious about the topic.
#
So for example, if you're talking about economics, there are forums where people can just bullshit
#
But then there's a certain sub-forum on just economics, where they spend all their time
#
arguing what is bad economics or not.
#
And over there, if you post something and you want to make your own post on it, you
#
have to give a reason with a full-fledged explanation as to why what you are talking
#
about is an example of bad economics.
#
And it's essentially a short dissertation.
#
And then people decide whether that actually passes the rule.
#
If so, your post is allowed to be kept, otherwise it's removed.
#
It's essentially this proof of intelligence test, which a lot of forums have to do now.
#
That's kind of a long tail of content in a sense, though, that even the very intelligent
#
will find their niche where they are comfortable and they are not crowded out.
#
But those will be very small niches and won't have an impact on the overall discourse.
#
Correct, because unless you knew it existed, you wouldn't go there.
#
And the topics are quite often over there are very arcane.
#
And they're discussing, for example, our bad economics will discuss the very fine-tuned
#
details about XYZ predictor of, let's say, the gender wage gap.
#
And they have a huge document on it.
#
And frankly, most people will never go through it.
#
So whenever the topic of gender wages come up or gender disparities come up, no one will
#
have recourse to that information.
#
And the conversations will be dominated.
#
The public perception and the popular perception will be dominated by the easier-to-consume
#
The hard ideological positions and the performative propaganda.
#
So if you have an easy way to package something or put an idea, that will dominate.
#
Whether it's right or wrong is a different issue.
#
If it's easy to consume and share, and it sounds right for the zeitgeist at the time,
#
that will usually work.
#
And what is it about, like, when did you see this change happening more and more, becoming
#
Like, I remember back from my days of blogging in the second half of the last decade, you
#
know, 2005 onwards, there was an oyster signal ratio problem and so on.
#
But things hadn't come this far.
#
Is there a point where you can say that, OK, this was a trigger?
#
This is when, you know, maybe when Facebook passed a certain critical mass or?
#
To be honest, I really can't recognize a point.
#
It just constantly feels that we've been iterating our way forward.
#
I can't find a moment where I can say, OK, this is disturbing.
#
I can see moments where new ideas were discovered, where new advances were done in design for
#
I can remember the point where people said, oh, we have to we should incorporate behavioral
#
psychology in our design for applications.
#
I can remember when people said we should A-B test websites to make them more interesting.
#
But the way conversations online has changed, I really struggled to figure out a moment
#
when I said this happened or this changed it.
#
There are many serious events which have happened online, in Facebook, on Reddit, where people's
#
But it feels that in some way we've been just inching forward, where teams of people
#
have been trying to figure out ways to deal with this problem.
#
They've been figuring out a patch, they've been deploying it, and then we deal with the
#
next problem we discover.
#
So as a civilization, we've kind of been bringing it in heavier.
#
Yeah, from a moderator perspective, it very much feels that we've been winging it.
#
And now, hey, here we are.
#
And everyone suddenly realized this is not necessarily a great place to be.
#
OK, so I'm now going to cycle into the specific and ask you some questions about your time
#
But first, we'll take a short 60 second break.
#
So it's been another great week on IVEM, where we try to get you the best podcasts that are
#
This week on the Prakriti Podcast, we have management and mint columnist Kartik Sashidar,
#
who joins Bhawan and Hamsini to talk about elections and voting.
#
On Junior One, we have Sameer Pittalwala, the founder of Culture Machine, talking about
#
streaming content online and at Creations of Tech, his journey with setting up Culture
#
On IVEM Likes, we have Abbas Janam and Naveen talking about the meme culture.
#
On the Vishal Gundal show, Vishal welcomes Vivek Bhargav, CEO of iProspect to Communicate,
#
one of the foremost digital advertising companies in the country.
#
On Keeping It Queer, Naveen interacts with queer filmmaker Pradipta Ray, who opens up
#
about what it was like to identify as trans in a culturally affluent household.
#
On Who's Your Mommy, we tackle the weird advice literally everyone gives to new moms.
#
On Cyrus Says, we have Gauri Devi Dayal, an ace entrepreneur responsible for starting
#
several awesome restaurants in Bombay.
#
On Sonology Sonology, a unique agony and call in show, Sonu helps his listeners on how to
#
party train their dogs.
#
It's been a great week on IVEM, and we hope that you can check out as many of these shows
#
And now let me get you onto your show.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm with Nikhil, a moderator at Reddit, who is not only talking to me about the evolution
#
of human conversations online in his experience as a user of forums like Usenet and later
#
Reddit, but also from a point of view of what it's doing to us as a society and us as individuals.
#
But Nikhil, let me take you back to the sort of the granular details of your life at Reddit.
#
What is a moderator's day like?
#
I wish I was on Usenet, but sadly, I didn't have internet at that time.
#
Day to day life on moderator.
#
We are the janitors of the world and unfortunate and very strangely, very powerful janitors
#
according to a lot of people.
#
So our first set of rules, which we came up on our forum was generally don't do harm.
#
So a lot of it was sort of going through a bunch of posts and a bunch of comments.
#
And if we saw someone say something which was genuinely hurtful or untowards or basically
#
hate speech or racism, we would remove it.
#
And then if that person was a repeat user, if they did it once or twice, we would have
#
So there is a way to see if the person has that comment deleted before or is it a repeat
#
So at the infancy of Reddit, when moderating really started off, there weren't really a
#
So a lot of very interesting things that happened as a result of this.
#
There was one of the really cool things about subreddit.
#
One of Reddit is subreddits and I think that's one of its great contributions to how we talk
#
So you can have a subreddit called rpictures and rpictures has a lot of people and they
#
were sharing everything and a lot of people started sharing cat pictures or memes and
#
those ended up dominating.
#
So then what someone did is they created a separate subreddit for memes and that took
#
off and then the people at rpict said, if you're putting a meme, you can't put it here,
#
That split the load and that's a really fascinating thing, which made it very easy for these guys
#
Before that, you couldn't really do it as easily in a forum.
#
You didn't have, you either went to a different forum to discuss cat pictures and a different
#
forum to discuss memes or you came to sub or came to Reddit and then someone made a
#
new subreddit to discuss these memes in general and you could go there.
#
You could go and just see all of those things and this actually happened.
#
So rpicts split up into other meme subreddits and those meme subreddits in turn split up
#
There's from there, there's actually a subreddit just dedicated to the insanity wolf meme.
#
And there's another really interesting feature, which used to be allowed initially, which
#
was when people were not very happy with the moderators, they could just make another subreddit
#
and then move en masse there.
#
So this happened, if I remember correctly, it happened very famously to our marijuana.
#
So some reason the moderator out there had some issues and the team and the users who
#
were going there weren't too happy.
#
So they moved en masse to our trees, which is why anytime you go to our trees, it's not
#
It's about a very specific type of herb.
#
So what happened to the tree lovers?
#
They moved to our marijuana later on, if I remember correctly, as I recall, I think that's
#
So for a newcomer to Reddit, this is all very confusing that you love trees and you want
#
to go to our marijuana.
#
But isn't this also like on the one hand, this is very benign and very useful in the
#
sense that, okay, you go from pigs to memes and from memes to eternal wolf or whatever.
#
But on the other hand, it can also sort of drive people to ideological silos, which is
#
something that's kind of happened in the broader internet.
#
And so all of this possible, even the movement of people to our trees happened because we
#
did not have a lot of moderating tools at that time.
#
So this is an example of one of the tensions which occurs for the need to be able to moderate
#
and stop people talking about or harming each other online and the freedom to expand into
#
Not all things are benign.
#
I am generally in favor of moderating tools out of necessity.
#
So one of the tools which we ended up, which people, not we, but moderators in general
#
ended up creating is a tool which helps them go through all the comments which are posted
#
There's a feed where you can see the newest comment and it will check for very specific
#
For example, well, niggers or other words, which would be very clear cut attempts at
#
So that way you would be flagged immediately that, okay, someone out here in your forum.
#
So you only look at what's flagged.
#
Initially, we would try to look at, we would participate in a lot of things, but at a certain
#
point of time, we just had to just look at the queue.
#
You have to look at what's flagged either by users or based on watch lists for obvious
#
keywords like I'm going to kill you or die and so on and so forth.
#
And of course, racial slurs and so on and others, similar words.
#
So it's always about looking at that queue and quite often a lot of forums don't even
#
have enough moderators to manage that.
#
If it's a topic constrained forum where generally people aren't going to be talking about incendiary
#
topics, you should usually be able to manage the workload.
#
The higher the barrier to entry in that conversation, usually the better the conversation because
#
to get in, it's not that easy.
#
You have to know what, if you're going to talk about, let's say a very complex game,
#
The only people who can play that game are people who've passed the barrier, have the
#
time and willingness to indulge themselves in a certain level of effort.
#
Everyone else out there is also spending the same amount of effort.
#
So it's very easy to make out a faker or a poser or someone who's just talking about
#
it but doesn't know what he's talking about.
#
So the conversation out there tends to be on topic and very neat and that has a very
#
nice sense of community.
#
The other subreddits which tend to work out are ones which have very heavy moderation
#
Ask History has a dedicated team of volunteer people with backgrounds in specific parts
#
of history and they are educators, teachers, master holders and PhD holders on those topics.
#
So anytime any question that is asked and only as far as I remember, only questions
#
can be asked, the first response has to be a qualified and informed response with sourcing.
#
So you can ask whatever question and you will usually get a good answer.
#
If you go in there to just make jokes about, oh, you know, well, the pyramids were made
#
by aliens, comments like that disappear.
#
They immediately removed and the only thing which remains is high quality conversation.
#
So in the sense they are also doing what my friend Manish used to do at Sepia Mutiny,
#
they're banning for stupidity, that particular subreddit.
#
Or to put a finer point on it, they're banning noise.
#
They have a very clear-cut definition of signal and there's a very easy way to say this is
#
signal because it's a very limited topic.
#
Generally when you have a limited topic, you can do a good job.
#
For example, you're talking about music and you're talking about a specific type of music
#
or how to play a specific instrument, that would usually work a lot better unless you
#
suddenly got into a war about which musician you like over the other.
#
But even there, the moderators can step in and say, we are not going to really have a
#
You can move it to someplace else.
#
So it seems to me that one of the real problems with the moving away from Reddit for just
#
a moment because the question occurred to me is that this becomes a problem at scale
#
when you don't have specific subjects.
#
For example, with Facebook, I imagine how the moderation is that everyone who flacks
#
something that goes into some kind of queue and they have some call center somewhere where
#
they have 1,000-2,000 people just sitting at comms and one after the other, these images
#
flash up and they're all general, they're not specific.
#
So it's not like a knowledge-based thing like Ask History where the guidelines are clear.
#
You ban this, you don't ban that.
#
And they have to make subjective calls based on general guidelines and there is often very
#
little recourse available because if they delete something, they delete something.
#
How does that work and what are the ways around that?
#
So I completely agree with you where the more subjective it is, the more difficult it is.
#
And when we're talking about subjective at Facebook scale, we're talking about what's
#
subjective in one part of India and what's subjective in America.
#
And India and America alone have very different concepts legally about what is free and what
#
Like the term chinky eyes would be interpreted differently by someone here and someone in
#
And what you tend to see is that there's a sort of cross-pollination that if you're using
#
any of those words, you tend to say, OK, maybe that person is racist, it is quite often.
#
And now it's the du jour to assume that's racist.
#
So while back in the day, maybe it was not, now it is.
#
So there's also a sort of effect where people are learning what cultural norms exist in
#
other places and online is sort of being transplanted also to other nations and other countries.
#
Sometimes for the better, sometimes just it's an alien entrant.
#
Because what I'd imagine is from what you describe of Reddit is that the way the moderators
#
work on different subreddits and so on is something that's evolved over a period of
#
many, many years of learning and discussion.
#
And tool creation, we did not like.
#
So basically people end up blocking mentions of certain subreddits.
#
So if that old moderator on that particular subreddit or marijuana had these tools, he
#
could basically block all mention of art trees.
#
So no one would know it would exist.
#
So it would have to be done through various roundabout methods, it would be much harder.
#
So it's a lot harder for people to move with their feet.
#
And this is an example of where there's a tension between the creation of tools to make
#
it easier for people to deal with basically assholes and how those tools end up inadvertently
#
stopping expansion into other spaces.
#
This is something that's evolved over a period of time into a kind of science at Reddit where
#
you have all these years of collective experience and you've reached certain ways of working
#
and certain norms in the moderating community at Reddit.
#
But what companies like Facebook and Twitter and so on are having to do is just to set
#
rules on the fly and just deal with shit on the fly without having these years and years
#
Oh no, I would say that making shit up on the fly is basically the rule.
#
If you have the time, you go read up on the rules of what free speech are or like what
#
some court cases, you go and educate yourself.
#
But in general, everyone's making this shit up on the fly.
#
And at the end of the day, I think what's deciding it is what works.
#
So for a lot of people, they can't manage conversations, they just remove it.
#
For a lot of other people, it's just constant banning and removal of conversations which
#
do not match the stated purpose of the forum, which results in what you'd mentioned, silos.
#
So for example, there's a very large forum dedicated to the current sitting president
#
of the United States of America with the Donald.
#
And for a very long time, they figured out ways in which they could make sure that their
#
topics showed up on the front page so that everyone else on the forum had to watch it.
#
And they were quite pleased with being able to do that.
#
Eventually Reddit changed the entire way their front page algorithm works to prevent users
#
from ganging together and gaming the front page.
#
So one of the issues over here is that the Donald, which is the name on the subreddit,
#
over there, if you are critical of the president, they remove you.
#
Conversely, other subreddits now notice if you have posted in the Donald, and then they
#
remove you for just interacting in that space.
#
So even if it is a question innocuously stated that, you know, why is he doing this?
#
You will find yourself banned from several other subreddits.
#
They will just say you are not allowed to speak here.
#
It's a very strange evolution of group warfare which has occurred because of this echo chamber
#
I don't even know how to explain or understand this particular issue.
#
So social scientist Cass Sunstein coined the term group polarization.
#
And what they did was, I think he and his colleagues did a study where they got a bunch
#
of Republicans and Democrats kind of together and they took their positions on a variety
#
of issues and then they put them together with like-minded people and they also put
#
them together in mixed groups.
#
And they found that those who were huddled together with like-minded people, all of them
#
tended to grow more extreme in their opinion.
#
You know, than the other groups.
#
And what this did was that it, and when we form echo chambers, we essentially then interact
#
only with like-minded people whose ideas already match ours.
#
The confirmation bias kicks in where we ignore all ideas from outside and we only take in
#
the news that conforms to our biases and these groups get further and further apart.
#
And finally, you find that in society, we are not talking to each other anymore.
#
We are talking past each other, we are abusing each other.
#
I mean, one of my constant complaints is that why political discourse is pretty much finished
#
on social media, especially Twitter, is that all argument comes down to attacking the person
#
On the one hand and on the other hand, virtue signaling to raise your status within your
#
own in-group rather than honestly trying to engage with the other side.
#
So, it's a lot of just throwing headlines at each other and you are not really talking
#
You want to show to the rest of your team, look, that guy is an idiot.
#
That's generally the point.
#
So the echo chamber effect is very insidious and this is something which, again, this is
#
about the frontier constantly moving.
#
As we improve on our tools and improve on our ways to deal with communication, we find
#
new and new effects which we didn't intend.
#
So Reddit had a really simple way back then.
#
You could just upload a topic and you would see lots of interesting conversations.
#
And now, because so many people ended up using that for their own gain, so they would create,
#
they would try to spam or they would try to control conversations or they would just try
#
to be power users or just be the one to make the funniest comment.
#
There were constant rules and changes to the way the algorithm works to make it more complex.
#
While that has had positive benefits, one of the side effects is that now it's just
#
enhanced the echo chamber effect.
#
You tend to go to your group and then in your group, you only argue about the things which
#
you have already decided and any time someone else says something different, that person
#
is immediately chucked out.
#
It's really creating a very disheartening situation.
#
And would you say that this is not something necessarily brought about by the internet
#
or by technology, but this is a human characteristic that is amplified by technology, like technology
#
amplifies both the best and the worst and it enables both our best and worst instincts.
#
And this tendency to think tribalistically and to form these sort of silos is something
#
that is inherent, but that is now being enabled by technology and therefore it becomes problematic
#
and complex to give it a moral dimension and to say that no thing should not be like this.
#
So I think I don't remember the full argument.
#
My personal gut take is that this is because of technology, that inherently this is a new
#
way for human beings to be with each other and the problems it caused are inherently
#
So I think this is a much faster cycle.
#
You get your comments, you get your responses a lot quicker and it's also very context
#
So like when I'm talking to you guys and I can see all of you all, I can see whether
#
you're interested, bored, tired, cold, it gives me a lot of information on what your
#
But if I'm and by making eye contact, I can also figure out, I can also understand your
#
body language, you can understand mind, you can show so many things, our brains are really
#
well designed for dealing with other people, our music, our dance, our entire cultures
#
But online, you just see what's written.
#
You don't know the tone, you don't know the background, you don't know whether the person
#
is a angry person, sad person and he's had a bad day, whether someone has beat him up
#
You don't know any of that.
#
You just take that concept and then you try to interpret it.
#
And in a context poor system, we tend to put a lot more other information on it to try
#
And that tends to cause a very different set of interactions and behavior.
#
The other aspect is that this stuff is fast.
#
It's like the worst combinations sometimes of having a book and having an argument.
#
A book you can open up and you can always read that page.
#
You can close the book, go back and forget it.
#
A conversation you can have once or twice and then you can say something in anger and
#
then leave and everyone will forget it.
#
But an online conversation, you can say something angry and you can put it out there in that
#
moment of anger and then everyone will read it like a book and they will come back to
#
And this is actually something which people would use to remind people, oh, you said this
#
And then they would bring that post up and they would say, don't listen to this person
#
because once upon a time he said something which was bad about X, Y, Z person.
#
This is a screenshot culture on Twitter where you'll put up a screenshot from 2012, which
#
is sometimes useful in the case of politicians because you find that most of the best criticisms
#
against Modi, for example, have been made by Modi himself back in the past on questions
#
of principles and not talking to the press and so on and so forth.
#
But that's also another aspect about change.
#
All of us say something which later on we can regret or we can change.
#
But because of the nature of the written word and the way we are used to, at least the older
#
generation is used to looking at it, is that it's something more final.
#
But over here, it can be quite often the worst of both worlds.
#
And also I forget where I read this is one of these social studies, one of these behaviorally
#
I forget exactly which study it is.
#
But the thing is, if you can get someone to commit to something in writing, they are more
#
likely to carry out their promise.
#
For example, if you, you know, and it strikes me just thinking aloud that if someone for
#
whatever reasons ends up saying something in a moment of anger, just because it's there
#
currently, they then feel compelled to double down and defend it.
#
And that changes a character itself.
#
They become a different person because of what they might have said in a moment of anger,
#
which they would otherwise have forgotten.
#
So this is why, like as to your point, whether this is just human tendency, I think that
#
this is not just human tendency.
#
I think this is very much the new world we live in.
#
And it's very much because of technology and because it's been designed, let's not forget
#
that all of these systems are designed for maximum engagement because just because if
#
you don't have people on your forum and you don't have people on your website for long
#
enough, you're not going to have enough advertisers, you're not going to have enough people being
#
And this is related to the previous problem where we had our news cycles being very fast
#
or if anyone's seen Indian television, you'll know what the news cycle is on steroids.
#
Everyone is shouting at each other for no reason.
#
We may all argue and we may all at the same time hold the same opinion, but we will fight.
#
Boss, what kind of guy are you?
#
You're moderating Reddit comments by day and you're watching Indian news television by
#
Well, how are you saying this?
#
But no, I can only take so much of dangerous cancerous objects at a time.
#
But yeah, that's generally the trend.
#
What was okay in our previous world of television and books and arguing, it's not okay online.
#
I'd actually say now, sure, technologies enabled all this and turbocharged all this, but I
#
Enabled is, I think, the wrong word.
#
See, I'll tell you what.
#
I mean, one thing, for example, I think you'd agree with me is that the world is becoming
#
And we've always, in terms of instinct, the tribalistic instinct has always been there.
#
It's only now that technology has brought it about so that we find more and more of
#
these finely honed sort of tribes which nevertheless have scale because we can reach out to anyone
#
else in the world, for example, who may hate mongoos.
#
So, you know, and so all these echo chambers-
#
All the people who hate our keto, down with our keto.
#
Yeah, I mean, I've had heated arguments online with people about keto and, you know, which
#
is on the face of it completely bizarre because, you know, you eat what you eat.
#
I mean, would you argue in real life if someone in the Reddit party?
#
I think there's so many stupid things which are, so the amount, the ability for stupid
#
topics to become massive points of fracture is absurd.
#
I'm actually seeing in some forums that there's a growing North-South divide between India
#
itself with something which I didn't, I literally saw grow out of nothing.
#
And now because it's there, it's online, there's data which can back up both opinions and people
#
who are angry about something, it's going to grow.
#
You give a fracture point and you allow people a topic on which they can have different opinions,
#
the internet will go to work helping separate those groups and make those new echo chambers.
#
Well, I'm just going to say that Bombay is out of this North-South debate because we
#
get the worst of it, the South thinks we are in the North and the North thinks we are in
#
So no one gives a shit.
#
Bombay is broken up between North and South.
#
We've had that running feud going on since when?
#
So like another aspect, which I think is an aspect of human nature, but the internet amplifies
#
is a performative aspect in the sense that we are all putting on an act for others all
#
the time and we're trying to show ourselves as noble or knowledgeable or whatever.
#
Every action of ours in some sense is an act of signaling and the internet allows you
#
to do that on a massive scale to the point that I think everyone on Twitter today is
#
No one's actually communicating.
#
I want, from what I see on other people's Facebook, I want their Facebook life.
#
I don't want their real life.
#
Everyone's birthday is remembered.
#
The food is the greatest.
#
And you only show up when you had a great day.
#
And I think the mistake people made, I think, was it, there's a great book called Everybody
#
Lies by Noah Stevens Davidowitz, if you've heard of it, where he talks about where he
#
essentially looks at millions of Google searches and social media searches and all that and
#
finds out what people are really like aside from their performative aspects.
#
And there's a very striking line in that.
#
I don't know if he's quoting someone or he's saying this himself, but there's a very striking
#
line of how people tend to compare their real lives with other people's Facebook lives.
#
And it's a source of such pain and angst.
#
It's like keeping up with the Joneses, but on steroids and it's not just the Joneses
#
It's the Joneses you've known all through your life, everyone.
#
But the flip side is I've gained new skills.
#
I am officially the best selfie taker in Bombay, which would never have happened had there
#
not been a performative site to me also.
#
But to get back to this, I mean, this is really a subject far more serious than I think either
#
of us even know how to express, because what is happening in the world is that politics
#
everywhere is becoming more and more tribal.
#
People have stopped talking to each other.
#
All news is in some way or the other fake news, in a sense.
#
We are all living in our imagined universes and feeding whatever...
#
Basically, there's so much information coming.
#
At which point do you just give up and say, forget it, let someone else make the decisions
#
because I really can't make out the signal from the noise.
#
Or what can mitigate this?
#
Because even just discussing this topic, there's so many things being left out about changes
#
and in the way even a simple site like Reddit works.
#
I think the only thing that mitigates this is what one of my friends did.
#
So he's a really balanced chap.
#
He's got a great sense of humor.
#
He's generally, as a person, he's a really good person and he's still not a pushover
#
He's just generally very nice.
#
I spoke to him one day.
#
I was like, dude, do you know what's happening and so on and so forth?
#
He basically said he's cut off.
#
He's shut down all interactions on Facebook.
#
He's off of social media.
#
He really doesn't care what his friends are doing and he's spending his time practicing
#
guitar, doing his work.
#
And that was the first time I saw a ray of hope on how to deal with this.
#
But that's strength from one individual.
#
I think most of us are frankly just addicted to the dopamine rush of the next notification.
#
And it takes a lot of willpower to cut off and most people just go with the flow and
#
Well, we're going to have to figure something out because as you said, it's a dopamine rush.
#
But at the end of the day, the other analogy to look at all of this interaction on lines,
#
it's like going to gym.
#
It's about healthy conversations and healthy habits.
#
And how many of us eat healthy and how many of us at the start of the year decide we're
#
going to go to gym and we're going to be the best person, version of ourselves we can be.
#
I'm going to make sure I'm disciplined and I'm going to make sure I'm better and happier
#
Those are the same issues which you find online.
#
It's not that everyone generally, a lot of people don't really happy when they abuse
#
I mean, at the end of the day, they may say, okay, that guy deserved it.
#
And then another aspect is that I would rather have constructive conversations or I would
#
rather be part of constructive and educational conversations and not either waste time or
#
eat intellectual junk food.
#
Now, so the question is, one, eventually when does everyone recognize that there is a certain
#
sort of gym for the mind or certain habits which we have to inculcate as normal users
#
of the internet in the way we interact so that we don't cause harm to ourselves.
#
We have good conversations and we make others around us happy.
#
And two, when are we going to find the self-discipline to do that?
#
So you know, I know your earlier question about new year resolutions was rhetorical,
#
but this new year I made a resolution that I would, I do a life hack basically and in
#
the four months since then, thanks to a certain subreddit and I think you know which one I'm
#
I've lost 15 kgs since the start of January, we're in May right now.
#
So the keto subreddit on, though I don't particularly go there much, but I think it's an incredible
#
subreddit and I'd heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to get their lives together.
#
But again, one like there's a guy called Adam Alter who wrote a very good book called Irresistible
#
about how people are hooked to technology all the time, including a lot of social media.
#
And there are apparently apps you can download, which will tell you how often you look at
#
And the average person picks up their phone every seventh minute, once every seven minutes
#
of the waking day, not when they're sleeping.
#
And most people don't realize how hooked they are to all of this.
#
And therefore these constant distractions of these notifications prevent them from doing
#
any kind of deep work, deep thinking, introspection, discovering other offline joys.
#
We've all kind of become slaves to the internet and it's easy enough to understand this at
#
a rational level and say that, yeah, I'm going to uninstall Facebook, but it's very hard
#
You always keep putting it off.
#
So as someone who has repeatedly failed using these apps, my sincere advice is that they
#
will cover time when you actually genuinely want it, only download the app then.
#
Because eventually what will happen is that when you use these apps, you figure out a
#
way to work around these apps.
#
So when you're serious, download them and use it for the first time.
#
Because once you figure out a way around it, then the charm becomes a lot, their charm
#
decreases and becomes a straight up test of willpower.
#
Anyway, that particular insight aside from someone who has tried and failed.
#
I think there's a lot of, what you have done is very positive.
#
In general, if you are self-directed and you are able to focus, then yes, there's a lot
#
of stuff you can get online.
#
But other than that, the internet is designed in many ways to deal with our weak spots in
#
our mental heuristics, like in the way our brain works.
#
We know a lot of research.
#
We know even before modern like Google and everyone else showed up, we already knew a
#
lot about how people behave with colors, with stimulation.
#
And we'd done like the first basic piece of research found that if people are not on your
#
website for more than a few seconds, they're gone.
#
Like if you're not engaging them in the first few seconds, they're gone.
#
And so even basic websites back in the HTML days, from that time onwards, they have been
#
constantly evolving to be so lovely, so just genuinely smooth, buttery smooth on your phones,
#
quick, responsive, pleasant to look at.
#
All of these things just so that they can engage you because, and here we can discuss
#
the economics of it and whatnot, but let's just focus on how these websites are designed.
#
Websites and most of the programs today are using a full arsenal of psychological and
#
technological tools to keep you there.
#
I frankly think most people are unaware of it and I don't think most people are prepared.
#
I'm certain that in any one kilometer, 10 kilometer radius around you anywhere in the
#
world, there'll only be maybe 0.1% of the people who know what tools are being used
#
So let me pose you a thought experiment with two questions.
#
Supposing somebody, I've heard some version of this, perhaps from Robert Nozick, I forget.
#
So I'm afraid I can't attribute the original because I've just forgotten.
#
But supposing someone creates a pleasure machine, right?
#
Now the pleasure machine, end of humanity is there.
#
So the pleasure machine is an advanced machine which puts electrodes in your brain and everything.
#
And then you're no longer in the real world.
#
You are in this artificial world which is one of your own designing where only good
#
things happen to you and you're 24x7 for the rest of your life, you're in this extremely
#
pleasurable experience and you can design that experience, it is whatever you want it
#
One, would you say that that's a good thing for society if everyone has one like that?
#
And two, would you yourself opt for it?
#
And an honest answer because the obvious answer if you're being performative, if you're being
#
performative, the answer is no, I want to live the real life, main khet mein jaana chata
#
ho and so on and so forth.
#
But what are we after as human beings?
#
I have an active imagination from my child.
#
So any fantasy world I create will be extremely meticulously created to keep me very happy.
#
I think you put that thing on my head, once I'm done building it, you wouldn't get me
#
I would fight for my life, for my right to be completely and utterly befuddled and why
#
You've just described heaven.
#
See, the only thing limited what will happen is that, fortunately, I don't think anyone
#
can create a machine of that level of sophistication, because that level of detail will always be
#
But what you'll have is your brain will give the detail you you'll just everything I know
#
about basically about people's ability to be very precise in defining the world is poor.
#
But what will happen instead is that people will start with the first Minecraft like worlds,
#
then they'll share it with each other and then someone will start and over a few months
#
and years, you will get worlds of increasing sophistication.
#
And finally, all of that, the community of those creators will just go inside and never
#
That's a perfect world.
#
And isn't that the world being created for us?
#
It's not exactly a pleasure machine, but it's more like a numbness machine where, you know,
#
people can browse Facebook for hours or look at it.
#
So different perspective on this is I'm a gamer.
#
And one of the reasons why I'm aware of a lot of these tools is because they've increasingly
#
been put into games, but there's one gaming company, Nintendo, which builds games for
#
the very different with a very familial focus, a focus on the family and how to interact.
#
And a lot of the games are a lot they feel healthier, like they created the Wii initially
#
and that was a different way to interact with games.
#
I mean, generally speaking, people don't like playing, getting up and moving around.
#
Your calories are used in your thumb anymore.
#
And why the hell you could just go out to a dance class.
#
But they built that because I assume at some level, they felt that would be an interesting
#
way to get people to work together.
#
So there is a certain sort of outlook and mindset you can have in designing these products,
#
which is not built on the old Silicon Valley network effect, or you must absorb everyone
#
into your network, which is more human and humane, or at least that's my hope.
#
There's a way to look at it and say that, you know, I'm going to prioritize values,
#
which are more about interacting and making it easier for people to interact.
#
So maybe the material will be slower.
#
Maybe the material will be less flashy.
#
Maybe it won't use the fastest engine in the world or the fastest chip.
#
And it's not going to be that maybe it's not going to be made out of magnesium and chrome.
#
But I'm focusing on meaningful ways for or tools for which with which people can interact
#
and build their own stories and their own things.
#
I think at this point of time, we had to discuss a little bit about the dynamics of the economy
#
behind a lot of the large firms which are influencing us.
#
Fortunately, a lot of these firms like Google, Facebook, genuinely at some level want to
#
Unfortunately, at some level, they are not going to because they need to deal with their
#
shareholders and they need to compete.
#
And that means keeping people on their platforms.
#
What would doing good with the world mean in the context of Google and Facebook?
#
Make their products less addictive?
#
I think in their terms, it would be one, you could say make their products less addictive,
#
but that doesn't really solve the problem because then that will just bring someone
#
else up and say, hey, you know what, look at my new Shami Addictive app.
#
So then it would be about the next step of responsibility, which would be deploying the
#
amount of people and work required to ensuring that this is customized for a lot of things.
#
And frankly, I think that's beyond the scope of most firms and beyond the scope of what
#
most markets and most shareholders really expect of their firm.
#
That's quite often a role for governments and for people to decide.
#
And I think the aspect of it, which I have sort of difficulty in reconciling, I'm not
#
sure how I feel about it, tell me what you think, is that here are you and I sitting
#
and making a judgment of these kinds of behaviors on the part of firms are bad for society.
#
But then the point is that as long as all actions are voluntary, if there are a million
#
people sitting in their homes who want what Facebook is giving them, who want that numbness,
#
who want that addiction, who don't mind that, who don't mind their being in echo chambers
#
and not communicating with the rest of the world, then what right does someone have to
#
get in the way coercibly?
#
So I think let's move back a lot ideologically.
#
So this ideologically speaking is I am an individual, I have a choice over my right.
#
What right do you have over deciding?
#
And I think this is a great ideology if you live alone, especially in a country like India,
#
So if you had like infinite life…
#
It's an irrelevant ideology if you live alone, but if you live in society, this is the only
#
ideology which can actually safeguard everybody, if you pay attention to consent and if you
#
I think we are lucky to be in India in that sense, because while in India you very clearly
#
live in a society where that's not the founding father's intent, belief or system.
#
And there is such a massive amount of ideology online and words online, which find roots
#
in the old school American types, well not old school, modern thoughts which permeate
#
America or used to permeate online conversations, if you are within that particular subset of
#
So I think I've grown to appreciate how you can manage to have speech, have a working
#
functional marketplace without having to go for massive and utterly completely unfettered
#
Leaving speech aside for a moment, once you agree in principle that the government should
#
be able to impose certain preferences on people coercively, then how are you to decide what
#
preferences those should be?
#
Then it comes around to you saying that hey, you know, Amit and me are wives and we will
#
decide and these things are bad for society and why not someone else?
#
I know better than you.
#
It comes around to that.
#
It's much better to let individuals make their own choices.
#
While once upon a time I would have been sitting on the other side of this conversation, the
#
point is that someone is making that decision anyway.
#
You don't decide it and you don't have responsible people and a judge, jury, laws behind it,
#
then some random dude in a suit is going to make it because they have to and that decision
#
is being made by me and many other moderators every day because it's necessity.
#
It's a part of your volunteer work.
#
What you and your fellow moderators do is in no way an issue for me.
#
It's not even a free speech issue because Reddit is a private company.
#
So that's a distinction based upon a very, see if we forget about private and public,
#
those at some point of time, they're useful as solid concepts and sometimes they're just
#
They're just sort of a superficial fig leaf.
#
When we're actually looking at the mechanisms, not always, not always, but if you're actually
#
looking at the working of that ecosystem, if you're looking and seeing how whether actual
#
ideas get across, I am bothered that in some ways moderators, if they go rogue, can end
#
up shutting down entire portions of discussion.
#
I can do a lot of harm, but I'll tell you what, I mean, I look at the world through
#
the prism of consent or the other side of that coin coercion.
#
Now the thing is that if a Reddit moderator bans me, if I say something, then it's bye-bye.
#
Yeah, yeah, then it's bye-bye, but it's fine.
#
I can go somewhere else.
#
But if the Indian government strikes down on my free speech, I can't go anywhere else.
#
I mean, that is absolute coercion.
#
I go to Reddit out of my choice, but I am not under the Indian state out of my choice.
#
There is coercion there.
#
And that's why the whole question of private and public is not a semantic issue.
#
It's an issue that goes back to first principles.
#
For me, anything that involves coercion is wrong.
#
And if something doesn't involve coercion, then the question has to be asked very seriously.
#
Is it just your judgment?
#
So there's two problems with the way the current internet is laid out for that particular thing.
#
So one of them is competition.
#
You know about the network effect, right?
#
The basic value of a network or a group of people is whether they have, how many people
#
That tends to mean that most Snapchat, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter are one of a kind.
#
There's no competition.
#
So if you're not on that place, you're nowhere.
#
That means that fundamentally, your opinions have been silenced.
#
Yeah, but the counter view to that, which in fact, if you heard my episode with your
#
namesake Nikhil Pawar, where he brought up the same point and the counter view to that
#
It seems in terms of a social network, there's only Facebook.
#
In terms of a certain kind of forum or community, there's only Reddit and there are behemoths
#
and it's a network effect at play.
#
But on the other hand, they are all competing.
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They are all competing with everything else a person may be able to do with their time.
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So if I feel after a while that Facebook is wasting too much of my time or they're not
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giving me value, I can read a book.
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I can go out and play cricket.
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Well, all of these things are optimized as, again, that comes back to the point of what
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they're optimizing for.
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All of them are using basic reinforcement schedules.
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You will always get a dopamine hit now, you'll have a random period of time and you'll get
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They're all designed to make sure that your interactions are of a certain nature, which
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is generally fast and smooth so that it gets to that particular sector.
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So even if there's competition, it's not really competition for hearing that.
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It's not that you're going to be heard.
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You're saying they've turned us into sheep and we don't really have a choice.
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So the whole concept of, I mean, the consent really doesn't apply here.
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Is that what you're saying?
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I'm saying that consent, that's a very hard statement to take and considering how subtle
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these effects are, it's very easy to make that statement.
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It's very hard to back it up with hard facts.
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No, I'm not even disputing it.
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I'm not asking you to back it up.
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No, but if you're going to be honest about our positions and if you're going to make
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that effort to go to that mental gym, we have to start with making these really fine distinctions.
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No, but here's the thing.
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I am completely okay taking what you say is what I say that yes, we are all manipulated
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and we are, in fact, I don't believe in free will, but that's a different philosophical
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But the question is that yes, we are being manipulated and we are much less in control
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of actions than we think.
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The tough question to me, which I can't get around, and I'm not even saying that A is
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the answer or B is the answer, the tough question to me is that I am fundamentally against coercion
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because I think coercion is toxic to society and you don't want to give anybody that power.
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And the thing is that if you want to solve this, the only solution that people keep coming
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up with that Nikhil came up with, for example, was the government should step in and it's
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almighty wisdom and regulate these companies and that's the only option.
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I think that's the worst possible option because you can always assume that the government
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will be taken over by interest groups of one kind or the other and I think there has to
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be some other way forward.
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And do you see hope of some other way forward emerging in the sense that after this Cambridge
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Analytica scandal with Facebook, a lot of people, though possibly it's a selection bias
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on our part because we know those kinds of people, but a lot of people did a quit Facebook
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thing and uninstalled it.
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Do you see something like that happening over a period of time as people realize that it's
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harming the richness of their lives or do you think that it's a fait accompli?
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I think the way the question is laid out is very easy to answer.
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I think it's very easy to say it's a fait accompli because I think everyone who's listening,
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everyone who's used got a mobile phone has Facebook installed and they know how many
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times they're going to look at it or how many times they're going to go on WhatsApp and
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see the same forward come around.
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According to Adam Alter, they actually underestimate how often they will look at it, but they know.
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So, I think that it is fait accompli because you are on that little black piece of metal
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you have in your pocket, there are lists and sits, the collective ability of every marketer
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that has ever lived, every psychologist that has ever lived, every programmer that has
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ever lived, and it's there to find your mental weak spots, to find that moment when you are
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willing to change an idea, when you're willing to engage in something else.
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I think that device is built by people smarter than you, who have been paid to be that smart,
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and it's designed to beat you, or not necessarily beat you.
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It's designed by people who are hoping to help you, but unfortunately our way of defining
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this help so far has ended up having lots of unforeseen or foreseeable side effects
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which people went ahead with anyway.
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So, the private industry as a whole has followed the incentives correctly and has explored
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this new territory, and we have found that what genies we have left out of this bottle
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are not going to go back, and that leaves very precious little behaviour which we can
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So, in the same way which we today look at obesity and we look at junk food, I think
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eventually, sooner rather than later, we are going to have to deal with this.
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The question is whether we have to deal with this in the manner which we talk about junk
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food, or whether we talk about it in the manner we discuss cocaine.
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Now the problem is that cocaine and junk food are on a very simple spectrum, stuff we ingest.
#
We are talking about news of fake material put out there to affect the way countries
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function, which is the most recent thing, but before that we were talking about harassment.
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There's been a very innovative way which moderators were harassed recently for when Avengers released.
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People started putting spoilers of Avengers, Infinity War, all over the place.
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That will always hurt moderators more, because the moment you see it, you're like, crap,
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But every mod who comes back to that thread will see the spoiler, because while it's blocked
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for normal users, everyone else, all the other mods can see it.
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They can see all the other comments which have been removed.
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You can always review what's happened.
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And for all the users who didn't know you could do this, you've now told them, well
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We shall censor this portion.
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But we were broadly talking about online conversations and the way we as a society, the way we interact
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with each other has changed because of, changed actually in front of our eyes in our own respective
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So I'm going to end the episode by asking you two questions.
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You've struck a note of despair in this, but the two questions I tend to ask my guests
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before they leave in the context of the subject is, what makes you hopeful about the internet
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and what it can do for society and what makes you despair?
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Most of it makes me despair.
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Is there anything that makes you hopeful?
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Let's move on to the slightly more hopeful part.
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So there are paths which work, and these are almost always the paths which involve curation
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So one of the subreddits which works really well is change my view.
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And change my view is a very neat subreddit because they have a bunch of rules and they
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have a very constrained format.
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And the format is that you must ask a question, you must state your view, and you must want
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and be relatively genuine in wanting that view changed.
#
And the first response in general has to be someone making a serious stab at attempting
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This is sort of the part where, this is what remains of what our hope for the internet
#
was because instead of being this really large place where everyone gets together and meets
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and shares ideas, it's become this very large set of fragile eggshells where people go inside
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and they stay there and look outside and look at other people and abuse and say everyone
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who's inside that egg is horrible.
#
Change my view is this place where people, the few people who actually have an open mind
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or actually may be willing to have their minds changed, show up and they say, okay, I am
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in a position in my life where I am thinking about this thing, give me a way to change
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my attitude or change my thing.
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And that's the place where I see what remains of what we actually intended or hope the internet
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Is there a correlation between on the one hand, the level and quality of curation and
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on the other hand, the popularity?
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Well, if you say quality of curation and popularity for sure, because it's very, if you have a
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good topic and you have a way to say that this is how we're going to curate for it,
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quite often you'll have decent amounts of popularity.
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So yes, in a way they are related, but then you can also be a very good curator on a very
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boring topic and no one will come there.
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And also that's within Reddit.
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Reddit already is a self-selected community of people who have come there and registered
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because they want to interact and they want to engage while people on Facebook and Twitter
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and so on are just passive consumers or whatever is being fed to them and often in very manipulative
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ways like you pointed out correctly.
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And the Facebooks and Twitters of the world are way larger than even Reddit.
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Reddit is not on the radar for a majority of people and frankly, Reddit is notorious.
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It quite often shows up for all the wrong reasons, which is another reason why a lot
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of people want to have restrictions on free speech.
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There used to be old subreddits like Jailbait, which literally had pictures of people of
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children, well let's just say borderline images of young people, which were borderline pedophilia
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that all went down in a bundle of flames eventually when people said, this is not okay.
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But that's the sort of side of free speech.
#
So in fact, that thought comes to my mind that I'm not hinting at something about you
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here, but isn't being a Reddit moderator the perfect job for someone who likes child porn
#
because they'll get to see a lot of it, even if they have to delete it, they'll get to
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No, fortunately Reddit at this point of time and generally because of its attitude of consolidating
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information has managed to always keep people in silos.
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So unless you were interested in that, you would not find it in the first place.
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I was just pulling your leg.
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Nikhil, thanks a lot for this conversation.
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You've given me a lot of things to think about and hopefully curators like you can keep making
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a difference in our world.
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Thank you very much for having me.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, do go over to sceneunseen.in to browse all
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And if you have any of the problems Nikhil spoke about, like obesity or you eat too much
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junk food, go to the keto subreddit, it'll solve all your problems.
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Thank you for listening.
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As you can see, we have a podcast listener in his natural habitat.
#
Billions of years of evolution have led him to this point.
#
He's on his way to work and listening to podcasts makes his miserable day better.
#
He will now head to work and use all his knowledge to communicate with other colleagues and possibly
#
You can find more of his species on ivmpodcasts.com, your one stop destination where you can check
#
out all the coolest Indian podcasts.
