Comment by piotrjurkiewicz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by piotrjurkiewicz | Hacker News Reader

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piotrjurkiewicz

It is clear that Reddit is facing some problems with scalability. I often get server errors during peak hours. But I think that politically-based censorship, which is being enforced by many moderators (with the help of Reddit admins), will kill this service sooner than scalability problems. Users will simply left Reddit when they will become censored. Many users I knew already did that. Moreover, moderators of many subreddits want to have more powers, including ability to see user IP address, ban users basing on IP address and ban users globally (not only on subreddit they moderate). Granting them these privileges will accelerate the decay.

https://np.reddit.com/r/Leakeverything/comments/3c0d9e/some_...

It is no coincidence, that /r/europe mods are the ones who ask the most loudly for more powers. They massively ban users on their subreddit, for variety of reasons, but the most common last months is criticizing current EU immigration policy. Some users create new accounts and come back after few days. That's why they want to have the ability to ban IP addresses. It is much harder to change IP address.

Exemplary user stories:

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/3b86ws/mods_of_reur...

https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/374s5i/thi...

There is no need to bring reddit intra-site politics here. I doubt readers could care less about SJW vs anti-SJW factions on another site. Furthermore, the actions of certain moderators have nothing to do with this staffing announcement, so you are doubly off-topic. It would make me happy at least if we could contain reddit politics to reddit itself.

Readers already pointed out here lack of IP banning tools as one of the technical challenges Reddit is facing. I wanted to bring up the context of such demands.

Reddit's response to the community woes has been "we are building technology to respond to these concerns.

The hiring of a new CTO is likely designed to address these concerns.

So airing these concerns here seems pretty on topic to me.

What are you referring to you when you talk about politically-based censorship? I was increasingly turned off by the growing racism, misogyny, and hate that I saw daily on Reddit, and am quite happy to see many of the most disgusting subreddits finally done away with. I suspect that for every free-speech absolutist worried about Reddit refusing to sanction such vitriol there are many more that will be happy to find a more inclusive, welcoming Reddit. I know I'm one of the latter.

Advocating against censorship and arguing against banning subreddits is not equivalent to supporting those subreddits. Basic, undergraduate-level logic.

The fact is that there are plenty of hateful subreddits explicitly supported by admins and mods (e.g., SRS) but the hate is pointed in the 'right' direction (i.e., +SJW).

And the point of the above is that there is clearly bias shaping the site's content from the very top. This stands in direct contradiction to the founders statements years ago about creating a "bastion of free speech".

The article is about hiring a CTO to take on scaling challenges, which only matters if they plan to grow. I don't see any evidence from any recent statements that they're prioritizing ideology (of any kind) over growth and profit. If keeping SRS and banning everyone else gets them growth, that's what gets them growth.

> Users will simply left Reddit when they will become censored. Many users I knew already did that.

I wonder if there are actual statistics here (reddit probably could compute them, but may not want to release them publicly). I'm an avid redditor, so I obviously disagree with this, but most non-redditors seem to have the impression that the place is disgusting filth and needs to step up its censorship of racism and the like. And I think there are way more non-redditors than redditors.

If you want to argue that it's the right business decision for reddit to be more of a bastion of free speech, as opposed to simply a moral imperative, that needs to be backed up with an analysis of potential new users as well as potential ex-users.

Yeah, it's kinda sad to see this happen to Reddit... I feel like there is so much potential to create unique revenue driving efforts beyond the standard ad based concepts that Reddit should be exploring..

No, this canard keeps getting brought up over and over again. /r/europe has a serious problem with racists posting all kinds of hate speech. A couple of years ago, the moderators started cracking down on the racism and banning the racists, and now the racists are all crying censorship because a popular subreddit now has a policy against hate speech.

And /r/subredditcancer is a subreddit that exists for hate groups to complain about getting banned from the rest of reddit. Hell, one of the moderators there, KrustyKoonKrackers (username is a KKK reference and contains a misspelled racial slur) used to be a moderator of /r/coontown (good riddance to that hellhole), and another ex-coontown mod, /u/DylannStormRoof (named after a racist mass murderer), is very active on SRC. I've seen SRC repeatedly lie and distort facts to claim that they're getting banned from places for no reason, and every time, it turns out that there's a very, very good reason, and the poster was just lying for sympathy. I can't believe anything anyone says on SRC.

Only if you consider information about terrorist attacks as a 'hate speech'.

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/3b86ws/mods_of_reur...

(This post was delisted many times by mods, despite the fact that its author is Turk, so he cannot be racist against himself.)

Moreover, /r/europe moderators explicitly admits their practices:

>Censure or visible islamophobia. One has to choose.

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/3b6fgi/mégathread_a...

In the first thread, it looks like the mods admit to making a mistake.

>It is much harder to change IP address

Turn on and off the airplane mode while on 3G or 4G data - and you will have a new IP address. It's that simple, takes 5-7 seconds.

From experience, legitimate users with a dissenting opinion will leave after an IP ban. Determined trolls however who want to deface the service will change IPs and come back with vengeance.

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