New highly unpopular Reddit policy bans popular beer, cigar, and gun communities | Hacker News Reader

New highly unpopular Reddit policy bans popular beer, cigar, and gun communities

reddit.com

31 pointslosvedir15 comments

I've always gotten a guilty thrill out of watching reddit's policy shitstorms, and often agreed with the criticism of their decisions, but this is the one that truly makes me want leave.

Discussing gun purchases is not only perfectly legal, it is also not even hateful as many previously banned subs were. I interpret this as a clear, intentional move toward pushing gun ownership outside the realm of social acceptability and associating it with illicit and toxic communities. For seven years I've treasured the freedom to find and freely participate in niche communities on reddit that wouldn't flourish in the same way elsewhere, and although I wasn't happy about the sanitization before, it now seems to have reached an inflection point where political wrongthink is also being targeted.

It could be schadenfreude to see all of these single-point-of-censorship sites (including this one) give us all good reason to favor having discussions on netnews (which is no panacea but far more free, by design, than any discussion website).

In my view, "moderation points" are censorship. Moderation points are censorship where the rules are even less clear than Reddit's. The rules for what's allowed are always changing, and no site has come up with a way to handle moderation point assignment in a way that is clearly distinguishable from capricious censorship.

What's legal strikes me as besides the point; the Internet is global so what's legal in one regime might be illegal in another. But since Reddit (and Hacker News, for all I know) are hosted in the US, it's worth pointing out that freedom of speech is trampled on in the US ("Defending Pornography" does a very good job of discussing how American law has double standards with sexually-related speech, for example, by offering censorship in ways Americans would not tolerate for nonsexual speech). Private organizations (such as Reddit, Hacker News, etc.) have no obligation to honor freedom of speech, they're allowed to be remarkably censorious. So whether state-based or private but hosted in the US, free speech is always met with some reaction like "I believe in freedom of speech but there ought to be limits..." and then we're off to learn where the limits are with this person, that topic, or this minute.

Usenet may just be the solution for the time being, especially for some of the displaced subreddits for interest specific discussions and posts. At this point a protocol looks like it will be the answer like email, IRC and XMPP, but for forum discussion instead. If IPFS makes some headway with having dynamic content, that may work better, but I'm not sure where that is at right now.

> Discussing gun purchases is not only perfectly legal, it is also not even hateful as many previously banned subs were.

And not nearly as hateful as a plethora of currently-active subs.

They are not banning discussions. They are "forbidding transactions for certain goods and services"

It's literally the first sentence of the post

Edit to add that the HN title is misleading, too. The post says nothing about banning "communities", only about banning transactions

Needs to be retitled- this isn’t about cigar/gun/beer communities - it states in the first paragraph that it applies to the /sale/ of those items.

I know the link title is supposed to copy the page's title, but I thought that would be confusing in this case. But I've since found news articles (e.g. [0]) that better contextualize what's going on, so maybe something like that would be a better link.

[0] https://gizmodo.com/reddit-bans-slew-of-communities-amid-new...

For those who haven't read the policy, what's banned is not the discussion of beer, tobacco and guns but discussion about buying beer, tobacco and guns (and other products or services) from private sources.

Clearly there will be some grey areas, such as a legal prostitute in Nevada offering sexual services. But my sense of this is that some authorities are leaning on Reddit, just as they have leaned on Craig's List and Backpage (and others) in the past, to deter dark web type activities.

An interesting decision. I guess they’re playing it safe but it’s hard to see how reddit could be held liable for people using their site to exchange beer.

Accidentally facilitating alcohol sales to minors.

If this is the direction reddit is going, expect niche subreddits like emulators getting banned

One sub closed where people would offer listings on OpenBazaar, /r/bazaarmarkets.

Most listings there were above board iirc. Not sure what their criteria was exactly.

Tl;Dr new us law means internet platforms are responsible for the content posted by their users

Which law is that? That would make sense to me as a reason, but wouldn't they say so in the post?

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2018/03/21/59...

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