People are going to reddit looking for borderline-underage porn | Hacker News Reader

People are going to reddit looking for borderline-underage porn

alexa.com

22 pointsJonnieCache19 comments

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r/jailbait has had a long and storied history on reddit. It's non-nude, and certainly a lot tamer than stuff you can find with a GIS. It's a grey area morally, but it's legal. violentacres is the mod of quite a few raunchy subreddits [1], and jailbait is one of the more kosher ones. He works closely with the admins to keep illegal content out, and apparently has a fairly good working relationship with them. Hell, there's more illegal content on r/trees than any of his subreddits.

Reddit's made it pretty clear that they don't intend to censor legal discourse, although it is their right to do so. Censoring r/jailbait might make some people, or even most people happy, but it's a slippery slope. Once the admins start deciding which legal (non-spam) speech is and isn't allowed, it ceases to be a website whose content is dictated by the community.

Personally, I'd like to see http://www.reddit.com/r/niggers gone, but I don't want the admins stepping in and deciding what is and isn't acceptable. Short of illegal content, they leave it to the mods to decide what they want in their respective subreddits. I'm fine with that system.

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/violentacrez/comments/apofz/reddits_...

Hmmm... I had a look now at 3-4 entries in /r/linkbait, and it contains erotic images of underaged girls. Yes, technically it is non-nude, but if a girl has a barely-visible panties, it doesn't feel kosher to me. I must admit that I wasn't aware reddit went so close to underaged porn.

I'm not a prude in the slightest degree but I agree with you. Those girls are very young and the pics are sexual, clothed or not.

Made me feel creepy. That kind of activity is just asking for trouble.

I sort of see the point, but reddit is dangerously close to dying. Already, it's a hotbed of misogyny and bigoted atheism. At the moment, there is one link to actual information on the front page (Seth Lloyd lecture), and one link to a new movement (BoA). Aside from that, everything is imgur, video games, videos, self., or other stupid junk. You need to be increasingly careful not to click on porn by accident.

Declines in on-line communities tend to be sort of exponential. Stupid people come. Content gets stupid. Smart people leave. Stupid people leave. Ghost town.

If reddit doesn't engage in some sort of censorship, I'm not sure how long it will continue.

It's already growing exponentially. Unsubscribing from the larger subreddits solves most of the issues you address.

The fact is, there is a preponderance of pictures, videos, and gaming news because that's what the majority of users want to see. You may not like it, but that hardly means it's dying. Facebook isn't limited to the Ivy League anymore, and there's a ton of crap on it. Yet it seems to be doing alright.

Reddit is no longer a small, early adopter community. Censorship of the form you seem to propose, that is, getting rid of the stuff you don't like, would be suicidal. They're growing because more and more people are finding things they like on it.

Seriously though, subreddits. You'd find a huge difference in the level of discourse in any of the following:

http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/ http://www.reddit.com/r/DepthHub/ http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/ http://www.reddit.com/r/coding/

There's dozens more. Yes, pics, funny, gaming, atheism, politics, wtf, worldnews, and a bunch of the other hotbeds of stupidity get the lion's share of the traffic, but there's still tons of great content on reddit. There's far more great content on reddit than HN, simply by virtue of size and diversity. You just have to look for it.

"Censorship of the form you seem to propose"

It would not be censorship for Reddit to do this. Censorship is something that a powerful body does (such as a government).

I disagree that removing jailbait would cause Reddit to die. For example, Netflix does not provide pornography and is not dying because of that.

"Jailbait", in the 4chan and reddit lingo, typically refers to non-pornographic images of underage women, often culled from social networking sites. If it was porn, it wouldn't be "jailbait", it would be "CP".

It's not "borderline-underage" (it's definitely underage), nor is it porn, so the title is rather misleading.

It's not (borderline underage) porn, but it's definitely borderline (underage porn).

It doesn't have to be fully nude to be to some extent erotic. But we're arguing semantics here.

I didn't want to put "People are going to reddit looking for jailbait" in the title as that would imply that people are going to reddit to find actual jailbait girls in some kind of "to catch a predator" style scenario.

The Dost Test is the relevant American case law here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dost_test

The biggest headshaker for me is the implication that this section isn't NSFW:

Even though they're not nude, this reddit is marked '18+' (NSFW) so we don't have to hear about it anymore.

From my perspective, even though there is no nudity, this is far more NSFW than generic porn.

What does NSFW mean? To me, that means something that is potentially offensive to somebody shoulder surfing accidentally.

By that measure, this channel meets that in spades.

Even more importantly, I believe that this channel is closer to being illegal than generic porn is. The legality of generic porn has been repeatedly tested in court, whereas this channel falls more into the "probably legal" category. Individually, any one image is almost certainly legal, but as a collection the images are obviously sexual in nature, and the legality could be questioned. Probably unsuccessfully, but IANAL.

The other test: would surfing the channel be considered a firing offense in some companies? Almost certainly.

Surfing Maxim or FHM would be a fireable offense in many companies.

"Even though they're not nude, this reddit is marked '18+' (NSFW) so we don't have to hear about it anymore."

That would be violentacrez. He's a well-known mod and troll. IIRC, he made r/jailbait NSFW because people complained that it showed up when they clicked the random link.

remember that many redditors themselves are underage. 16 year old boys wanting to look at 16 year old girls isn't morally reprehensible imho.

Its hard to believe alexa as most of the people browsing reddit won't have alexa toolbar installed

It's no mystery, r/jailbait is the 7th result for "jailbait" on Google. The people who go to r/jailbait from a Google search are just hitting the first link that looks like it might be what they want.

But from this viewpoint it makes sense that most people with the alexa toolbar installed go to reddit for jailbait...

Does that mean webmasters over-represent the people on reddit who are interested in underage porn (okay, borderline)?

This makes me very uncomfortable. I'd never been to this sub-reddit, but take a look at a sample thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/jailbait/comments/gav7p/by_the_pool/

The picture shows three young girls and the comments are veiled but pretty clear in their intention. It surprises me that Condé Nast allows this type of content to remain on the site.

I can't help thinking there must've been some 4chan trolling involved here..

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