Reddit has broadened its anti-harassment rules and banned a major incel forum | Hacker News Reader

Reddit has broadened its anti-harassment rules and banned a major incel forum

theverge.com

19 pointsTomte11 comments

Reddit politics aside, good. The incel movement seems to live in false-defeat than actual truth. The reality is that (their) personalities and approach can be as fluid and evolve as the intrigues of a woman.

The original post on r/announcements:

> Changes to Our Policy Against Bullying and Harassment

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/dbf9nj/chang...

A key highlight for Reddit readers, or “TL;DR” as the parlance is:

What should I do if I see content that I think breaks this rule? As always, if you see or experience behavior that you believe is in violation of this rule, please use the report button [“This is abusive or harassing > “It’s targeted harassment”] to let us know. If you believe an entire user account or subreddit is dedicated to harassing or bullying behavior against an individual or group, we want to know that too; report it to us here^.

^ https://www.reddit.com/report

Another regrettable decision by the idiots in charge. Keep banning people left and right for ludicrous reasons and then act all surprised when they radicalize/implode. Marginalized persons need access to the mainstream, not further banishment.

“Ludicrous reasons”

These words are doing a lot of work here considering the change is:

“anything that works to shut someone out of the conversation through intimidation or abuse, online or off.”

Maybe having to stop and think how their actions affect others is a step in the right direction.

I could apply this to many other default subreddits though.

The things I see on /r/politics and the stuff I saw on /r/the_donald when it was on all are often quite similar, but only one of them got quarantined.

Reddit politics in general are cancer.

/r/politics affects every subreddit with it's overzealous members having to do outreach to ensure we always know the truth. Pics regularly has political posts as do other default subs. I've found nothing but the most hateful racist vitriol on politics than I actually ever saw on the_donald.

It's so incredibly toxic and I've even seen it on HN albeit much more limited in scope.

So where do I go now?

Outside.

How dare a private megacorp whose business model relies on eyeballs watching ads do whatever it takes to avoid driving said eyeballs away.

A common pattern I've found among the HN or 'liberterian' crowd is that they correctly point out a problem then come up with the most absolute wrong 'solution'. In this example, the problem being 'maybe we shouldn't have surrendered public speaking places to a handful of adtech megacorps that only care about maximizing engagement', the correct solution being 'we should abandon and dismantle these platforms for federated or decentralized alternatives', and the solution most people on here come up with being 'actually they should just unban Nazis'.

Well, because building a decentralised Reddit is really hard. Decentralised user accounts and reputation alone is a research-level problem, let alone questions like "who will run nodes", "why would anyone run a node" and so on.

There was an attempt to do this once. It was USENET and it's been abandoned because nobody was incentivised to improve it. We may argue about whether or not Reddit's more and more activist moderation activity is an improvement or not, but, nobody can deny that the structure of a (supposedly) for profit company was great for incentivising them to add features and maintain the site.

here is an interesting website to take a look at that i stumbled on last year: notabug.io . there are like a handful of people that use it.

last i checked there are some complaints about the voting system, which is PoW-based, and there were people hardware accelerating that for GPU's. the owner, goldf1sh claims that when the site is the size of reddit, vote manipulation will be more difficult. that's to be seen. i've also seen a couple soft exploits related to unicode usernames (which are called 'aliases' because you can post anonymously)

as you might expect from a reddit clone (voat, etc.) the userbase is mostly those that got banned from reddit for whatever reason. notabug is mostly the libertarians/Aaron Swartz worshipping kind.

the website has some sort of subreddit system called "spaces", which I don't understand, but i'm told is very well implemented.

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