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Comment by tinalumfoil | Hacker News Reader

DNS isn't appropriate for filtering porn or ads. It's easy to get around and not fine-grained enough. In fact, the largest porn site in the world is unblocked.

    $ dig @1.1.1.3 reddit.com
    reddit.com. 298 IN A 151.101.65.140

And the largest advertising and tracking site.

    $ dig @1.1.1.3 pagead2.googlesyndication.com
    pagead2.googlesyndication.com. 262 IN CNAME pagead46.l.doubleclick.net.
    pagead46.l.doubleclick.net. 262 IN A 172.217.7.2

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I'm surprised Reddit hasn't gone the way of Google/YouTube and allowed a safe browsing filter via DNS. All NSFW subreddits are already marked as such (same with many individual posts) so it seems like it would be an easy filter to add if accessed via the "safe browsing" load balancer IP.

Edit: Someone below added more info on this for anyone curious: https://cleanbrowsing.org/articles/block-youtube-comments-re...

Reddit also has a flag inside of their api called `nsfb`: Not Safe For Brand. They'll let you post it, and they'll host it, but they don't want most people to know that they'd host it, so they hide it from public, not-logged-in sections of the site.

It's really shameful; they need to stop the hypocrisy and either become a content-neutral host and own the consequences, or censor arbitrarily, and own the consequences. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too, and it's entirely unfair, much in the same way shadowbanning is.

What is shameful about it?

It's a realistic approach to navigating the real world where there are bills to pay, Reddit Gold isn't going to cut it, and advertisers don't want their brand associated with random NSFW/NSFL content.

I don't get this obsession with browbeating every content provider not living up to these Stallmanistic extremes.

Reddit should not have to give up any sort of protection for allowing advertisers to not have their ads show up on certain subreddits, or censoring Nazis.

If Reddit of all sites is what we're calling shameful, there is no hope.

This isn't about NSFW/NSFL. Those are a different tag. This is about censorship of entirely-SFW stuff that Reddit simply doesn't like.

They have tons of porn. They just don't have tons of political variation.

It’s not stuff Reddit doesn’t like, it’s stuff advertisers don’t like.

In fact, iirc every single subreddit is “Not Safe For Brand” by default. How does that jibe with trying to avoid “political variation”

Subs get whitelisted for advertising with it. That’s it.

Signaling to advertisers something is a safe choice for ads or not is not censorship, and it’s not unreasonable.

What else can you do? They're happy to host communities they don't like but don't want them as part of their public image.

The kind of content that's quarantined (because nsfb is an advertising thing) isn't "political variation." They're absolute cesspools hate, doxxing, threats of violence. Were these communities gathered in a physical room I would genuinely feel unsafe.

Reddit actually has a good amount of political variation and opinion. A staggering amount of Redditors are authoritarian conservatives by their opinions given how often people say Reddit is full of bleeding-heart liberals, but they would never associate themselves with the Republican party or "conservatives".

as we've seen in recent years, social media is a highly effective platform for influencing people. in general, the platform is immune to legal repercussions for stuff that users post, because it isn't construed as the company's own message. this leaves the door open for a "neutral" platform to influence people through selectively moderating certain content.

people here aren't demanding that reddit (and other sites) let people post whatever they want. they are asking for sites of a certain size to actually be neutral as a condition of safe harbor protections. to me this seems pretty fair. if you have millions of users and exercise editorial control over the content, you should be on the hook for what's left.

While logged on to Reddit, I noticed a particular post would not load due to HTTP error 500. I didn't see anything about an outage on downdetector, so I copied the URL into ceddit and the page pulled up fine, and it was there that I noticed the NSFB tag. I've seen this same behavior on a few other posts since that time, which makes me wonder if this is intentional. At this time I've been unable to locate any reading that would back up that theory.

> Reddit also has a flag inside of their api called `nsfb`: Not Safe For Brand. They'll let you post it, and they'll host it, but they don't want most people to know that they'd host it, so they hide it from public, not-logged-in sections of the site.

I think you are confusing NSFB (brand_safe) with quarantining.

Quarantining is used for subs which are borderline being banned. Subs with frequent racism, subs with very fringe ideas (like 9/11 conspiracy theory). You need to login to view them, so they don't turn up in Google search etc. Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/911truth (try that link in a private browsing window if you are logged in to Reddit)

I don't think the brand_safe field is exposed in the public API any more (I presume it probably still exists behind the scenes). But my understanding of what it means, it is supposed to mark subs which are not advertiser-friendly. For example, subs that discuss controversial topics such as politics or religion. Anonymous users can view these subs fine and they turn up in Google. But, Reddit will display their own ads instead of third-party advertiser ads. Most companies don't want their advertising to pop up in the middle of a debate about whose religion is more correct, or what the Bible/Quran/etc has to say about sexual morality, it is bound to create a bad association in someone's mind.

You know, you can run your own DNS which points at that one, and implement additional rules. That seems like less work than just using your ISP's DNS and needing to implement more rules.

Reddit isn't a porn site in the sense that if you go to "reddit.com", you're automatically shown porn. It's a diverse site that has adult content areas.

Reddit has profile settings like:

[ ] NSFW content hide images for NSFW/18+ content (Don't show thumbnails or media previews for anything labeled NSFW)

[ ] I am over eighteen years old and willing to view adult content (required to view some subreddits)

Needless to say, these are implicitly off or a visitor to the site who does not have an account.

Still, Reddit will not prevent visitors from seeing "adult content" in a more general sense:being exposed to adult discussions that can touch on any sort of topic from any angle.

If we're talking about protecting kids, I think a whitelist of allowed sites will be better than a blacklist, which is intractable.

>Reddit isn't a porn site in the sense that if you go to "reddit.com", you're automatically shown porn. It's a diverse site that has adult content areas.

and

>DNS isn't appropriate for filtering porn or ads

So, if you're trying to filter porn out, dns doesn't work because of sites like reddit.

DNS is passive, network wide and works extremely well overall. It isn't iron clad, it isn't 100% and it isn't the only thing you can use. That doesn't mean it doesn't work.

It's not going to work if you think that a black list will do it, and the problem isn't sites like Reddit, but actual porn sites (and such). You cannot have a complete, accurate black list, let alone maintain it that way.

For kids, a whitelist of approved domains should work. If you don't think Reddit should be on it, you don't add Reddit. No brainer.

The problem with DNS is mobile devices; your custom DNS runs only in your own intranet, not whatever devices connect to.

Undoubtedly there are hacks for that, but they are mucky compared to the pure DNS solution, which can be perpetrated entirely externally to devices.

Again, this is one element that is very easy and extremely effective for the amount of effort it requires. You can still change DNS on individual devices if you want. You can still use local adblockers. You can still make individual devices use dns whitelists.

Do you do all of the your movement with a car? No, it doesn't work well for very short or very long distances. That doesn't mean it doesn't work.

What about Google? Google Image search? Are you going to whitelist those or not?

Hostname based blocking can never be accurate.

Google indiscriminately caches questionable material, so it could never go onto a whitelist.

Fine-grained filtering of content within Google domains doesn't seem tractable in any way shape or form.

It absolutely doesn't work if you can trivially bypass what you're trying to block with one of the most popular sites on the internet.

Plus a lot of other family-friendly sites for the edification of your kids:

    $ host www.stormfront.org 1.1.1.3
    www.stormfront.org has address 104.22.6.143

Most HN users would prefer that site isn't blocked, so bad example.

A better question might be how much harder perfect is: this will block a ton of stuff quite reliably and with almost no setup effort, and that includes a lot of sites where I’d worry about malware (remember when people were getting rooted by free video players?). Filtering something like Reddit requires installing invasive software with a history of security and privacy lapses on every client.

Any filtering system can be circumvented. DNS filtering is just one measure to prevent accidental exposure to unwanted content.

And very easy to apply. No software needed, no need to alter router settings.

Of course, you can highlight exceptions.

But, the growing availability/awareness/popularity of such DNS-driven solutions should incrementally increase the likelihood that firms like Reddit choose to segregate/label their sections by IP address.

Gotta get the ball rolling somehow!

Yup I was just thinking "where could you easily wander into NLS content" and my first thought was Reddit.

That's not a problem with DNS, that's a problem with outsourcing control of your DNA data

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