Hacker News Reader

Comment by nothis | Hacker News Reader

I'm with you on the JS stuff, the redesign screams "I want to be an app!" so desperately, I'm seriously considering leaving after a good 8 years on the site as well. Everything has that Javascript-delay on it, like it takes 0.5 seconds to click anything, scroll anything, etc.

I gotta say though:

>increased censorship

That's ridiculous. They're "censoring" all kinds of bottom-of-the-barrel racist and disturbing shit which simply should not be on a mainstream website (which reddit simply is now). I don't see any idealistic reason to keep /r/fatpeoplehate. The "everything that's legal" ideal is cute for some edgy website you create out of college, but a platform of reddit's size simply gives too much room for content to fall on the wrong side of the line.

View on HN

> That's ridiculous. They're "censoring" all kinds of bottom-of-the-barrel racist and disturbing shit

They've also banned people legally arranging sales of alcohol, tobacco & firearms.

Because it isn't possible for them to make sure all jurisdictional compliance is there. Do they have an FFL? Does the person they're selling to across state lines also allowed to accept?

They're just covering their asses; it's not possible for them to watch every exchange so they have to ban all of it unfortunately.

I can't get those things at CVS either but I don't find it problematic. A business doesn't owe me any category of service that I want.

The reason to keep r/fatpeoplehate is simple. You cannot run a site where you censor things that some people dislike without falling into the hole of censoring all things.

Just look at cloudflare. The CEO did it out of spite and now they'll have to censor everything. It's already being used in court against them to force it even though they don't want to.

Once you're not just a host for discussion or not just a dumb pipe your job becomes to censor everything.

Personally, I think the censorship happens in a pretty biased way. There is still a lot of very problematic content in places like /r/The_Donald that just gets let slip because there are so many users and the mods are very influential. Other political subreddits like /r/socialism however, even if they have a lot of users, will get treated much more harshly by site admins if they are ever reported.

Similar things happen with discourse on facebook and twitter, where calls for ethnic cleansing by white people are often overlooked, while angry posts by people of colour that offend white people will get deleted or get users banned. It's really no wonder that US politics has gone the way it has when there is so much McCarthyism embedded in the moderation of these public forums.

Troll?

I think it's a matter of perspective. The BBC here in the UK aims for roughly equal complaints of bias from both the left and right, and reddit seems to get the same (e.g. /r/altright and /r/leftwithsharpedge both getting banned). I've seen complaints of both overzealous and permissive moderation by admins for all types of content which leads me to think they're actually reasonably balanced.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com