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How soon will reddit follow? The great purge has started. Guns removed from YouTube and reddit. Now meet up portions are being nuked.

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They’ve already started banning all the subs about escorts, prostitution, sugar daddies, etcetera today in response.

Also subs like BeerTrade, BazaarMarkets , and other marketplaces. Say goodbye to an era.

I’m sure many more will get the axe over time.

I do wonder how long until they start banning amateur porn subs like gonewild, they facilitate cam girl advertising there with no controls for age or trafficking status.

I doubt reddit is happy about the popularity of porn on their site in general. Look at /r/all with the NSFW filter off and it's like 10% porn. That can't be good when they're trying to attract advertisers. I agree it won't be long until they start cracking down on it, probably using possible child pornography or sex trafficking as an excuse.

gw groups are the only thing keeping me on reddit at this point.

decentralized network can't come soon enough. I foresee YC, Reddit, Youtube, FB, and alike get supplanted by technology that has no ownership.

Every single decentralized version of those sites has died a death due to a) being pretty awful b) attracting completely terrible users as it’s base c) terrible user experience.

What do you see changing?

> What do you see changing?

As the internet becomes a resource that is completely boring and out of touch to 15-40 year olds people will flock to a less restrictive system. As eyeballs move over people will invest time and effort into making those systems usable.

This happened with the internet and can happen again with decentralized systems.

The internet is pretty much as decentralized as things get while remaining accessible and available to the general public. There is room for some tweaking here, but even if a parallel "NewNet" rose up, it'd come to suffer the same set of problems.

"Decentralized", "peer-to-peer", and "distributed" are not just magic words that make the whole world better. Consider BitTorrent as a case study. Probably the largest "decentralized" tech success story in internet history ... and it depends on a central core of pre-baked trackers, safe DHT bootstrap nodes, and search engines to be usable.

The internet is plenty decentralized technically. The problems we have are that big companies want to get paid and they want to make sure little companies won't threaten their ability to do that. So we get shameful abuses like the CFAA and the RAM Copy Doctrine.

The further problem is that governments and other establishment power brokers want to control narratives. They've been able to do this pretty well for the last 50 years, as your average Joe on the street couldn't just start broadcasting video and competing with the television broadcasts from FCC-approved speakers. But with YouTube, the average Joe can. That is a huge threat to the power brokers.

People are working overtime to make others feel that so much as grunting a sound that sounds similar to the word "Tor" means you're an evil traitor. I don't think that the young, who know little besides the status quo by definition since they haven't experienced much yet..

To save the internet, get out there and teach people about the value of an open forum and free dialogue, even if it makes them uncomfortable. Work hard to counter-influence the negative and evil influences. Abolish the CFAA, revamp Copyright to something sane.

Just whatever you do, don't spend 10 years reinventing the internet just to make us go through this show again in 15 years when Netv2 gets the same treatment.

Pre-edit: literally falling asleep while typing this, excuse any errors etc. Going to sleep now. Goodnight.

> People are working overtime to make others feel that so much as grunting a sound that sounds similar to the word "Tor" means you're an evil traitor. I don't think that the young, who know little besides the status quo by definition since they haven't experienced much yet..

Hey, only one part got FUBAR'd. Relatively coherent for semi-consciousness! Fixing:

People are working overtime to make others feel that so much as grunting a sound that sounds similar to the word "Tor" means you're an evil traitor. I don't think that the young, who've experienced little beyond the status quo by definition, can be expected to automatically defy and overcome this.

Preserving/rebuilding the internet as a free space will take a much more intense effort than just lobbing the ball across the fence to the next generation and crossing our fingers that they'll figure something out.

>Probably the largest "decentralized" tech success story in internet history ... and it depends on a central core of pre-baked trackers, safe DHT bootstrap nodes, and search engines to be usable.

I get the feeling you're not very involved in the private tracker community.

I've been using private trackers since OiNK was small. I still tend my HDBits account, which is over 10 years old at this point.

Private torrents are even more susceptible to these problems than public torrents, for several reasons.

a) They have the private flag set instructing the client not to use DHT to find peers.

b) They have the user's token embedded directly in the torrent, making it unsafe to share the file. Stripping the token will make it safe to share the file, but can't actually use it, since private trackers won't serve peers to a client without a token.

c) The torrents rely on a single tracker. Public torrents can throw on a handful of trackers that accept all comers, granting extra redundancy when outages occur.

d) Private trackers are the only search engines that index that specific corpus of data, and they typically have rules preventing users from sharing "internal" or "exclusive" content.

You're right that I'm no longer really "involved in the private tracker community" because I find the invite swapping tedious and mostly just stopped caring (didn't do anything to track down and get an account at "the next What.CD", for example), but private trackers only emphasize BitTorrent's dependencies on centralized brokers.

Decentralized is the ultimate tech fantasy. It never happens at mass consumer scale. There isn't a single example of that in the last 25 years of the Internet. The reason it never happens, is because most people with a heavy tech-tilt don't understand normal users at all. They fail to understand that they're an extreme minority in terms of product behavior.

You can dig back a decade or whatever on HN, it's a non-stop talking fest about decentralized, everytime anything negative happens, whether this or Facebook or whatever. And yet, ten years later, nothing. Everything mass consumer tech is centralized.

Email is decentralized! The web is decentralized, though many platforms built on top of it aren't. And it's not such a stretch for ordinary people to build websites directly - remember Geocities?

botcoin did happen though.

So it is not that unimaginable

There's at most a dozen big miners, three big pools and a hand full of exchanges.

(b) might flip. Naturally, a majority of people using decentralized solutions were looking to circumvent something, and that something used to be things like drug laws. But the more things get taken away on the "public" internet, the more reason there is for everyday folks to start going dark.

If my mom wants to go on a date, and Craiglist, Tinder and OkCupid are all shut down - why wouldn't she use a service that's still around due to it being Dark?

Ordinary people wanting an alternative, would, I imagine, change all three.

They will want an alternative but there’s no compelling (to the average user) reason why it has to be a decentralized alternative.

> What do you see changing?

The amount of people being removed from mainstream sites and looking for alternatives. At the very least these growing numbers will solve b and may have a significant impact on a and c as well.

The problem with a decentralized network is that bad actors with disproportionate resources can flood the system.

Consider Russia & Cambridge Analytica - they would put hundreds and thousands of people on creating propaganda. There is no "solve" for well resourced bad actors usurping the decentralized system.

A lot of the drug related subreddits were about harm reduction, especially finding reputable suppliers for psychedelics. This is book burning, plain and simple. It starts out with the unsavory books.

If you mean Reddit's Personals, a major difference is that the posts don't use pictures--and it's not like the posters use their first and last name as their username or anywhere in their post--so hopefully that'll keep it safe. After all, the main personals section has "148,372 readers" and right now, as of 11:57 PM Eastern Time, "1,946" are logged in. https://www.reddit.com/r/r4r/

"If you mean Reddit's Personals, a major difference is that the posts don't use pictures"

Craigslist did not require ads to have pictures, and there were plenty of ads that didn't have them.

Curious here, how does lack of pictures or first/last name have any bearing here? From what I understand, any of these reasons could also apply to reddit as well.

Guns removed from YT and reddit are totally different. They're corporations choosing to ban certain content from their own platform.

Craigslist is responding to a change in the law, which isn't comparable.

It's comparable insofar as, in each case the sociopolitical temperature of the moment has resulted in a reduction of the content available to users, even if the actual dynamic varies in the important ways you point out.

But one is through mandated censorship, the other is voluntary. YouTube decided to stop serving certain content to better serve it's customers, that is it's perogative as a business. Nothing is preventing a competitor from hosting such content.

its hard to see that its anything but censorship when these platforms hold a pure monopoly on the space. If Gutenberg prevented anything displeasing to him from being printed, we would rightly see that as censorship. Further, censorship takes place in many ways only a small number are the result of state actors. In Mexico reporting on the cartels will cause them to target and perhaps kill you.

If you want to argue that a good defense against censorship is to prevent a single entity from having too much power, I agree.

One is mandated, other is voluntary, but they both reflect the same phenomenon happening in the society - that more and more topics are becoming "not acceptable" and thus get eliminated from popular areas on-line.

I can never understand how can Reddit's subs, such as girlsgonewild, not require proof that the participants are indeed adults who are not being exploited by others.

On the other hand it might be better a better deal for a number of people to perform webcam "modeling" instead of being constantly exploited as a sex slave.

I wonder if this is why they axed all of their "firearms sales"

https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/21/reddit-bans-communities-...

     The social site has updated its policies to ban
     the trade of firearms, explosives, drugs (including
     alcohol and tobacco), services with "physical sexual 
     contact," stolen goods, personal info and 
     counterfeits. Accordingly, Reddit has shut down 
     numerous subreddits that either directly traded 
     in these goods or were clearly meant to enable those 
     exchanges, including r/gunsforsale, r/stealing (yes, 
     it existed) and r/darknetmarkets.

Perhaps they were taking a broad interpretation of something in the legal language.

What gun vids were removed from Youtube? I heard about this controversy yesterday, I just looked up "Glock 19 safety tips" and there were over 200,000 videos.

They are getting scrubbed in April. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7667605?hl=en

That rule seems fairly narrow to me. Selling certain accessories, modifying the guns, etc. I am hoping the ones I've watched on Youtube about people firing and reviewing different guns will not be affected.

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