Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
There is constantly tremendous pressure on you to perform opposing actions, and even making no decision at all will cause you significant mental stress and harassment, regardles of what the issue is.
You have to pick who you want to cave to, and to what extent, and no matter how good of a job you try to do, a lot of people will really really hate you.
This is even more apparent when you see that Reddit has been taking action against a lot more subreddits recently, some of which are listed in the article, and many of which clearly have little to do with the president. The attitude of some of these communities may be abhorrent, but they are still communities, and people do not react well to their communities being deleted, whether a company had the legal authority to, or was justified in doing so, or not.
It's very tough and I wish that we didn't have to go through these things to begin with, and could have more federated and decentralized platforms, or at least more client-side filtering inside of centralization curation. I can always dream.
I don't think people want that. The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc.
Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content?
I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. The sheer volume of users at its height seemed to involve a huge amount of brand new accounts you never saw again / never posted again (except when they show up as a group again), and etc. Or those without brand new accounts show up and post strange dishonest lead in type posts that sort of try to lead folks down a bigoted path ... that you can blatantly see in their post history.
So you'd be in your other community and one day they all show up and down votes and the vitriol begins... it was no mystery that this happened, it was spoken of openly in The_Donald for a time.
Who wants to deal with that?
Yea, I gotta say, having to previously deal with r/The_Donald brigades on another large subreddit was incredibly annoying and depressing.
Can't speak to spreading fake news, but massive influxes of r/The_Donald users spamming truly vile stuff in an ostensibly non-political sub really sucked (as a moderator, to clean up).
The only thing that works imo is fairly strict moderation, or extremely niche/small communities. Everything else just gets swamped by toxicity. Decentralized vs centralized isn't really the right dimension to look at I think.
And as soon as your small community grows... the trolls come a-knocking.
It was very clearly a real community, as you can see evidence from the fact that they migrated to thedonald.win when Reddit made it clear that they wouldn't be treated fairly.
> So you'd be in your other community and one day they all show up and down votes and the vitriol begins... it was no mystery that this happened, it was spoken of openly in The_Donald for a time.
> Who wants to deal with that?
And yet Reddit happily ignores vote brigading and other negative externalities from any subreddit that toes their party line, so it seems bizarre to single T_D out. And as far as I know that wasn't the reason Reddit gave, rather they said something about supporting violence which in my opinion was a pretty clear "we're fishing for a made up reason that lets us boot you guys"
Not directly; I'm increasingly thinking centralization is not the problem.
The problem is size.
The intersection of "things that everyone agrees are acceptable" goes to zero as the size of the community increases, and while communities have strong selection effects that prevent them from being anything like "a uniformly random selection of people slammed together", regression to the mean means that you get there as size goes into the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions.
I don't think there's a solution, because no matter what technical tools you put into place, you can't get around the fact the people don't agree about what's acceptable.
What we need is a diaspora back into a community structure where HN would be just about the largest sort of community out there, instead of still a relatively small one. Decentralized tools could help with that, but if "decentralization" just ends up building "decentralized" communities trying to contain a million people in the "same place" you'll just get the same problems again. It's kinda orthogonal. "Reddit, but once a community hits 10,000 people it becomes progressively harder to join" would quite possibly work fine, for instance. (I envision something like an exponentially-growing waiting list delay, such that getting to even 11,000 users would be difficult.)
Obviously, legislating some sort of limit here is virtually impossible. Somehow the technical structures need to support it and afford communities in the hundreds to low thousands, but somehow make it inconvenient to grow beyond that. Or afford more complicated structures where membership is not a binary status. (A social graph would work, if it wasn't being run by an entity that desires to aggregate people together more to more effectively advertise at them. Or more accurately, a set of graphs.)
You can join an instance with moderation policies that align with your ideals or even host your own instance.
This is very much a side note, but I do wonder what sorts of things would be enabled with more visibility into this kind of information. For example, average and median ages of all accounts in a thread or subthread. Per-user visualizations of posting histories (time of day, subreddit, etc). Information that would enable automated correlation (by time or subject) of posts from different accounts. Stuff like that. I'm sure they must have something internally that does at least some of the above.
What's wrong with a decentralized "platform" that works like the web?
Anybody, right now, can submit some bigoted trolling to HN. It'll get flagged and killed in ten seconds. And then people don't much bother because there's no advantage in immediate failure.
You can have a "platform" that shares formats and protocols and supports shared links but has independently-moderated subsections, and then the contents of each one is reflected in how it's moderated.
Kind of like how Bitcoin is decentralized but controlled by a handful of miners on China.
I don't think so? So if TD was a mastodon community, many others would blacklist their content, but unless members of TD go and make accounts elsewhere that'd be the extent of it, no?
The most important thing to realise is: This is ONLY happening because the internet is now centralised.
Put aside Trump. Put aside politics. Put away US culture wars, and all other mass politics. It does not matter who is banned or why. Understand that what is happening now is the INEVITABLE result of an internet concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
We have less websites. More natural tech monopolies. More points of failure: host, DNS, DDos protection, CAs. As any or all of these become centralised, website and communities are placed under the inevitable threat of censorship. Yesterday it was about copyright, today it is about politics, some day it will probably be about creed or race. When you give unaccountable power to the few, they will use it as they see fit.
This couldn't happen in a decentralised web, with more sites, players, hosts, more places for communities and discussion, more places to go if the site-owner turns sour.
We had a web 20 years ago where everyone from a Nazi to a transvestite from transsexual Transylvania could have their own place on the web which no-one else could take from them. We have lost that. Now several people can take your place on the web away. A small number of centralised gatekeepers control what is allowed to stay online.
The member might see this as action to silence. This could make them even more angry and isolated. Reddit meanwhile will be a unreliable source of information to them.
One and gone spam servers are frequent and are dealt with through putting low trust in new servers and using heuristics to flag behavior that look abusive.
> Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content?
No, but I think people want equal, consistent, and predictable enforcement. Notably, lots of other communities are allowed to exist despite having much more and more overt bigotry including celebrations of political violence and even concerted attempts to slander people and get them fired or harassed. The difference is the groups they target and the transparently BS justifications for targeting them ("well actually, racism doesn't mean 'hating a person or group because of their race'" or something like that).
Like none one the cnn "news" stories on /world news aren't fake
I've been thinking about this a bit lately, and I don't see how. People are going to game the system, and decentralization just means they can play the game for longer, or in all new ways.
How do you establish a pattern of bad behavior by a person if that data is balkanized across a hundred independent nodes? They can feel out the line between ban-worthy and nuisance and if they happen to overstep a little bit a few times, they can still annoy 90% of the userbase. You have to have centralized moderation information and infrastructure.
People who don't want to be moderated, therefore, don't want this kind of decentralized system, and the maintainers would be fools to offer it. What they want is their own system, but someone else to do the work. An open-source Reddit engine, perhaps. When they discover how expensive it is to run, especially with people acting up, then a few of them may become self-aware.
There are some people where even just saying-- as a moderator-- "Hey, can you chill out and at lease pretend to treat other posters with some respect" will trigger a full on war against you.
There aren't many people like this, but it only takes a few because even a single obsessed person can spew a lot of hate.
I guess 3301 got things right with the Liber Primus.
Tolerance and respect does not extend to Christians or conservatives.
Was joking that a new method of insurance fraud is to simply put a Trump bumper sticker on your car and wait for someone to torch it.
I get attacked and threatened by racist instigators and BLM supporters alike because people feel that any moderation against them is solidarity with the other side. I point to the group rules violated and they still assume bias on my part. I AM biased (in favor of BLM) but still get treated like crap when I'm doing my best to moderate fairly, for free, in my spare time, for the benefit of the people treating me like crap.
Any platform with unpaid moderators tends to biased activism.
Facebook and Reddit are successful BECAUSE they are censorship machines. Facebook spends far more man hours on "curating" content compared to engineering.
Same with Reddit. Add up all the "moderation" time spent removing negative or controversial posts and I bet much more time is spent on content compared to programming the site.
You are not wrong, but even if a perfect decentralized clone existed tomorrow you'd only get young men and programmers to use it, the average TicTok users wants to see beautiful people doing stupid things, they don't care how it happens.
The lack of censorship was so bad Reddit used to have a lot of child porn on it and Reddit fought the US gov on it stating it shouldn't have to censor content.
I suspect The_Donald has been shut down primarily due to a lack of moderators. This causes drama to get escalated outside of the sub and the Reddit admins do not want to deal with it. Reddit is still very much anti censorship.
You could imagine a world where there's multiple apps that access the same decentralized platform, where the censoring happens at the application level. So if your favorite community gets banned in one app, if you want, you could switch to a different app. Not a perfect example, but it would be like how if Google Chrome decided to block somerandomcommunityexample.com you could just switch to Firefox.
Oh, and the plain spam. C1al1s spammers can fill your entire board if you let them.
Spam removal is the biggest element of reddit and FB. Unwanted content detracts from the original goal. (Also moderating in it's self does kill a community if done badly)
Well, but there is easy solution to this. Just do it in the exact same way the reddit does it, which is to have individual fiafdom communities that have self appointed moderators in charge of their own communities.
So, if a user doesn't like a certain community, with a certain moderation policy, they can stop reading that one, and instead go to a different community with a better policy.
> Facebook and Reddit are successful BECAUSE they are censorship machines.
Citations needed.
You kind of can, though. Sure, group X hates group Y and wants the admins to ban them. Group Y hates group X and wants the admins to ban them. The smart play would have been to be neutral and set out an explicit set of rules everyone has to follow.
Reddit instead did it the worst possible way imaginable. They laid out no clear rules, banned thousands of subs for vague "hate" reasons that you can't define, much less verify, and drastically reduced the scale and appeal of their site.
If you think group X will now be happy and stop complaining now that group Y has been banned, I think that's naive. The admins will still be pressured, but the goalposts will just be moved to ever more extremes until Reddit's such a niche echo-chamber that it appeals to too few people to remain financially viable.
There really needs to be effective legislation given the importance of free speech for democracy. Unfortunately government agencies are so politically charged that I trust them with enforcement even less than social media companies.
Why does the narrative have to be about "caving" to someone instead of weighing principles against each other and taking the action which protects what's most important?
Life is full of dilemmas like that where it's not possible to make everyone happy, but content moderation is full of dilemmas where, no matter what you choose, a few very unhappy ones will hound you to the ends of the earth.
That's an anticipated cost of removing hate.
I would absolutely not going to a platform with no moderation. The quality of the content will be abysmal.
Honestly, r/D or something like that should just go to host its own website/forum, it shouldn't be Reddit's problem to begin with. Their presence brings toxic attention/traffic that is hard to monetize anyway
Granted I haven't been there in years but the content on the chans isn't much worse than Reddit once you've been there long enough that your brain stops registering the "nig" prefix and "fag" postfix they slap on every other word. Any place that is open to cross-polination from internet riff-raff from other niches is going to devolve toward a very low lowest common denominator (which is why HN is mostly unscathed).
I think that's basically what they've done.
If enough companies, groups and individuals do that, this sort of pressure will stop, since people will learn it doesn't work. Most people won't stop using a platform over this stuff anyway.
The Internet is rife with censorship. It just offends our first amendment sensibilities to call it that for some very specific categories.
Say you have a native feature where anonymous users or anyone will not see (by default) certain types of content by tags. The community might vote on which tags to require users to "opt in" to view. The only way to be banned might be, assuming legal speech in the first place, would be if someone posts content that fits within a community agreed upon tag, but the user fails to tag it.
I haven't given this a ton of thought, but I would love to see something like this tried.
If you could live without advertisers then maybe it would work.
1. nothing illegal (includes cheating at games) 2. no racism / homophobia / transphobia 3. no harassing other members 4. everyone has different beliefs and come from different parts of the world -- if you are offended, ask the offender to stop, otherwise see a mod
so far there are around 50 people in the chat and almost no issues even though we have members who are rep/dem/other, religions ranging from Christian to Satanist, and we regularly post political and religious memes and such.
I don't know how but thus far we've had no real issues.
50 people is 48 more members than are in my video game clan, so I can admire the community building. The problem space changes drastically when scaling up though.
That's not illegal. It's just not permissible on the services that run the games. Also, it used to be a thing in video gaming. (Game genie) For some reason, we've given up to video game companies who try to dictate how people should enjoy a product that they purchase.
Because you only have 50 users, which is nothing. It’s the same reason communism is such an appealing idea, in very small communities it works but doesn’t scale up to nation-sized ones.
While this is probably true in most cases, given the Reddit CEO's history with the_donald[1], this doesn't seem like it applies in this particular case.
___
If reddit was consistent in their application of rules, it would be nice. But we all know that is not the case. Some are more equal than others.
I find it hilarious that we have congresspeople whining about being “censored” on the very platform they claim is censoring them. I would think the first step of a competent censor would be to censor complaints of censorship itself.
(Not saying that's what's happening, just saying I disagree with the argument here)
It's called "closed loop hypocrisy" and the theory is that all negativity or opposition is inherently hypocritical (given we are all very similar in the end). But being hypocritical does not mean opposition is bad, if anything the issue is long loop hypocrisy where someone pretends to be righteous when really it's just hypocrisy with extra steps.
Most people solve problems with long loop hypocrisy and those who support them can easily choose to overlook the hypocrisy by focusing on the convoluted steps and rhetoric in between. Meanwhile, it's obvious to those being attacked just how hypocritical they are.
In contrast, closed loop hypocrisy is about applying the form of negativity to itself. It seems kind of dumb, but that's the point: to show how dumb X form of negativity is directly to X form of negativity.
It's a form of inception and it's hard to pull off, but there is a better way.
I'm not sure I entirely follow your explanation and Google is not bringing up much. Do you have a link to a longer explanation of some kind?
We did. They were called newsgroups and forums. Reddit is just 1000+ forums stuck together to build audience and make money.
For reddit, part of the problem is that everyone who isn't logged in sees the same frontpage, which means they see posts from these controversial subreddits and get angry. They should make it possible to subscribe to or block subreddits without making an account.
We should start a center to discuss and curate these ideas, a place where we could get together and define what it means to achieve decentralization.
We could call it something snappy and semantic like, say, the Center for Decentralization.
Twitter has been the ground digital war of the liberal-left and (some of the far-left) over the conservative right and (some of the actual far-right) and the right-wingers retreated to their own chambers with the former have Twitter under its control. As soon as 'the right' we're told to 'create their own platform' which they have done many times, cancellation was always the goal from those from the left.
Having echo-chambers creates one-sided discussions but unfortunately they are left with no choice given that cancellation is inevitable where-ever they go. If both sides are yelling, screeching and howling at each other they're both not listening to one another which is nothing like a reasonable debate.
Of course this hands off approach would get you hate. That is price you have to pay. Worth it in my opinion.
r/The_Donald - they shut down r/Fuckthealtright - open for business
And by open for business, I mean openly calling for killing conservatives.
Decentralization simply leads to the creation of echo-chambers, except with no one to keep the toxicity in check.
Why should platform owners decide what's right and what's wrong? If something is legal then why should we censor it just because it may seem hateful to someone, or somebody feels offended? So what if a post offends somebody? They can deal with it like an adult. Ignore the trolls, and discuss if there is a discussion, offending or not.
If people want a safe private place with no intruders, then they can create a closed/invite-only group and moderate it themselves.
Because they made the platform. In some light, it’s the same logic that allows businesses to refuse service, or homeowners to defend their property.
Other larger banned subs include /r/GenderCritical (anti-Trans) and /r/ConsumeProduct which was ostensibly for criticism of consumerism and product promotion, but hid a large strain of antisemitism below the surface in a similar though less-direct fashion to previously banned /r/clownworld (barely-veiled antisemitic and racist cartoons/commentary). Also banned is /r/chapotraphouse, notably the biggest (only?) left-leaning sub on the list. Its users were known to be relatively cantankerous and tended to kick off a lot of brigading on Twitter and such; though some will say its banning was a "both sides" maneuver from the management.
In my own opinion this was a long time coming, and Reddit has long since shown that the original hands-off model is woefully inadequate in the face of communities that are willing to expend the effort to argue continuously in bad faith, organize to influence and control opinion in other communities, and attack the platform itself in their campaigns for hateful speech. Just ask /r/BlackLadies if you think these users "stay in their containment areas". Hopefully Reddit is turning the page to better empower its communities to protect their users and keep hate off the platform.
Social media has a trolling/brigading/hive mind problem in general across all platforms and I would add solving this problem to Paul Graham’s list of “frighteningly ambitious” ideas.
This is not a fair portrayal of that sub.
Reddit can do what it likes about banning political subs but the banning of r/gendercritical is quite concerning, in my opinion.
Genuinely curious what the link to antisemitism is. Is the thought that consumerism = big business, and big business = "the jews"?
Edit: I made this comment early in the thread, before others started to weigh in on why this subreddit was banned. I'm willing to engage in a discussion if you reply instead of downvote.
> Could it be the Chosenbergs? Although a small group, they seem to control the majority of US record labels, as well as the news outlets, the pharmaceutical companies, the bank institutions, the pornography industry, the entertainment industry, ect.
(9 points, replying to "I wonder who runs these record labels?" which was setting up that reply)
https://web.archive.org/web/20200620202415/https://old.reddi...
All this will do is push these folks out to different platforms where they will organize brigading and bad faith participation in the dark. There are gobs of matrix/discord/irc rooms where people organize the manipulation of social media, and this move just removed visibility of it from reddit.
"At reddit we care deeply about not imposing ours or anyone elses’ opinions on how people use the reddit platform. We are adamant about not limiting the ability to use the reddit platform even when we do not ourselves agree with or condone a specific use. We have very few rules here on reddit; no spamming, no cheating, no personal info, nothing illegal, and no interfering the site's functions."
(I call this "I'm not touching you Fascism", after the popular children's pastime. The goal is to enrage people without ever crossing anything that might be considered a clear line. Most systems evolve a meta-rule somewhere that "pushing the boundaries of the rules is itself against the rules". At the very least "ban evasion" is itself bannable.)
Spamming the r/all homepage due to eliminating downvotes certainly interferes with the sites functions
I'm not sure I see where the joke is - this was inevitable.
The bad content isn't going to go away. It's just going somewhere else. imo this is the start of a diaspora The only question is where will everyone go?
They got in hot water not for supporting Trump (there are plenty of pro-Trump subreddits) but actively breaking the most basic rules of Reddit, maybe you should actually look at their history.
Spamming the same images to the subreddit, interfering with other subreddits, trying to out whistleblowers in federal cases, gaming the content discovery system with sticky posts.
I'm tired of this narrative that The Donald was banned for censorship reasons, they were banned for being a virus that was infecting Reddit.
They could have been supporting the Dalai Lama and their behavior would have been against the basic expectations of Reddit, and that's exactly why they were quarantined/banned
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#History
In true fashion of people trying to push a made up point, every reply is nitpicking over which one of their many incredible misbehaviors was the deal breaker, from doxxing people to brigading other subreddits, instead of actually providing a rebuttal
It doesn't matter which one broke the camels back, anyone who can read their history of behavior and pretend Reddit didn't have a reason to take action, even by those 2012 rules, is in denial.
https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/acc...
> Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families.
> While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.
The majority based on what? An individual state? The US? The west? The world? Men are the minority in many countries but the majority world wide. White people are the majority in the west but a minority world wide.
Does that mean people can attack white people with impunity, even though they're a global minority? Can I crap on women to my hearts content because they are a majority in the UK? Can people in California shit all over Hispanics because they're the majority in that State?
Will they assess a users state/country/continent of origin before deciding whether or not they're being hateful towards a specific group?
We are watching Reddit die. Aaron Swartz, the cofounder of Reddit warned about this a decade ago.
Wow. Like, holy shit wow. So racism and hate is ok with Reddit but only as long as it's directed at "the majority"?
What the hell is the "majority"? I'm white. Yet I live in a city where blacks are the majority. Am I still the majority, meaning it's ok to harass me and send me hateful racist insults on Reddit, or would Reddit grant me honorary minority status? This is legit sickening.
Indeed in most EU countries, Reddit steps over the line into hate speech by allowing it against certain groups. There is an important caveat as it still would not allow violence, harassment or bullying.
I supposed they might have changed it, which would be good to hear, since that wording is obviously misguided
The Wikipedia article seems to agree with my understanding:
> In February 26, 2020, Reddit administrators removed a number of r/The_Donald moderators "that were approving, stickying, and generally supporting content in this subreddit that breaks [Reddit's] content policy" and called the remaining moderators to choose new ones from a list of Reddit-approved individuals.[77] About the same time, Reddit placed r/The_Donald in "Restricted mode", removing the ability to create new posts from most of its users. Since then, the subreddit's community has moved to thedonald.win, an independently hosted site based on Reddit's old user interface.
Which all sounds fine to me, but the article's quote "We’re not the ones who shut down the community. The moderators are the ones who shut down that community." seems disingenuous to me.
What's wrong with just saying that it's their platform and they have the right to set the rules?
1) They don't want to alienate people who care about free speech. 2) A lot of people liked reddit because it was user-driven, and don't like it when the content they see is selected by admins and mods. They want to keep the illusion of being user-driven as long as they can.
If they're getting banned now it's for something that was done months ago.
I think this is wrong, IIRC it was the mods who chose to do that, not Reddit admins. The mods wouldn't choose other mods even though the rules made sense, like having a certain karma threshold in t_d etc.
I think Reddit is trying to avoid appearing capricious when it banned subreddits. Reddit users do want a rythme or reason to Reddit admins actions, otherwise, there'd be further user discontent.
That would be a major shift in strategy for the site. It has always been billed a freewheeling place that belonged to the users, with the company that owns it being something of a benevolent overlord that keeps the lights on. That is what attracts users and content. But of course that version of the web is dead. Any website that relies on advertisers for revenue will necessarily be limited in its tolerance for controversy.
In the end, though, I doubt it matters too much for the site’s revenue. Reddit has been dying for years according to many of the posters and yet it sees growth YoY.
Because the admins still need people to believe they're the "good guys". And we all know the good guys don't censor people. That's what evil fascist governments do.
I would routinely visit the_donald. It was definitely a ruckus pro-Trump circle jerk, but it was hardly racist or abusive. It was mostly just silly pro-Trump memes. There's far more black Trump supporters than most people realize. The media does everything they can to hide them, so a lot of people would love to post photos of them with funny captions like "Oh look, another white supremacist Trump supporter!"
The admins couldn't have that, but they couldn't outright ban them without appearing draconian. So they instead tried just banning most of the mods, hoping the remaining mod would agree to the admin's terms of appointing only admin-approved puppet mods. Of course, the mod balked at that and just locked the sub and forwarded everyone to thedonald.win, the backup site.
So the admins ended up with the worst of both worlds. They still looked like the bad guys who shut down a sub on a whim, but now there's still a huge trove of funny non-racist pro-Trump memes sitting on their site for any Google searcher to stumble upon, which will only reinforce just how draconian the admins have become. By banning the sub outright, all that content gets deleted and hidden from search engines, so now when they vaguely label it "hate", you can't refute it.
Orwell nailed it. We've always been at war with ~~Eastasia~~ Eurasia.
It looks like it is no longer possible to make a comment containing "thedonald.win" on Reddit. To be clear: Reddit isn't just censoring links to that site, it's censoring mentioning it.
This appears to be a new change as it was retroactively applied to comments from a few days ago.
I always wondered what the actual population of that sub was, I felt like I saw some strange patterns where whole hordes of users would appear, disappear, mob another sub and so on. It felt like a very non organic community in many ways.
The issues surroundings that sub weren't just some folks who had a sub to talk to each other, they were very busy mobbing / taking over other subs and etc.
Like most of those subs that leaned right it seemed like a front for sort of a rabbit hole of fear, hate, open bigotry, and blatent calls for violence / division and etc.
Wouldn't that match the claims that it was largely just full of bots?
[0]: https://www.redditstatic.com/banned-subreddits-june-2020.txt
"Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families.
While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate."
Centralized corporate means to communicate (like, say, this one we're using) always go bad eventually. It's the natural lifecycle of online forums. Once money involved it's only a matter of time before the profit and drama-avoidance incentives of the corporation win over the wishes of the users. Reddit hasn't been usable since 2013.
We all know reddit leans a bit left, but the ban also included /r/chapotraphouse which is a leftist subreddit that was also notorious for rule breaking. Frankly, it seems reddit went out of its way to accommodate the_donald for a while now.
Do you have data that backs this assertion? Because it seems to run counter to the stated reasoning for the removal of the subreddit.
I am not a radical feminist, nor was I particularly welcomed there as a man, but I found the sub interesting to expand my perspective.
Much more significant IMO is that the ban also includes r/ChapoTrapHouse, which is a "left"-leaning subreddit accused of much of the same stuff r/the_donald was.
Maybe its because I don't live in a city like Portland or LA, but I have never talked to a white person in real life one on one who agreed with the typical narrative on places like reddit of, "you can't be racist against white people". The more time I spend on reddit, the more I realize is that the people who comment are getting less and less human. Back 5 years ago, reddit actually felt human. Now it feels like it is just filled with either bots or seriously mentally ill people. I think its about time for me to stop going on that site entirely.
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...
This is my main problem with Twitter. The standards aren't consistently enforced. I've seen so many leftist blue checkmarks justifying violence that get a pass.
And on the racism front, Sarah Jeong comes to mind.
Here I am old school just thinking the color of a mans skin should have no more significance than the color of his eyes...
I don’t believe in the oppression olympics and that hate is ok because group A has it worse than B.
Edit: HN 2020, ideals of Haile Selassie are rejected in the name of “tolerance” I guess? What a wild ride!
The rights of social media companies are so vaguely defined now. Can they escape this crisis without anti-trust litigation or a Supreme Court ruling on the fundamental rights of companies when hosting content online?
I would hardly call those issues "extreme left". This change is actually from the conservative view point a lot of the time, especially as it comes to speech about sex. See cases against Backpage or Craigslist and prostitution.
Once a company is criminally liable for user speech, you're going to get this situation where it's easier to just ban speech that even approach the line. But I don't think anyone is going to say that a company should be willfully blind to pedophiles on their platform. So this is the world we get.
Extremist subs and their brigading were the biggest treat to free speech and creativity in the site.
The 'extreme left' has little to no political power compared to the president telling companies to either obey him or risk having their site go down in flames.
It is now ran by people/corporations with a political agenda.
It remains to be seen whether or not this will bury conservative thought or cause an underground resurgence.
This isn't "the left" this is liberalism.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/29/21304947/reddit-ban-subre...
There is a significant shift going on that people aren't realizing. The days of the "platform" being a monopoly over users is coming to an end. The cost of running a website, even a bandwidth heavy website is going lower. As major social networks and platforms crack down on controversial content, these communities don't vanish. They simply move to some other place. In the conservative community this idea of "censorship" is increasing to the point where it is becoming a serious movement. Many alternatives to mainstream media are actually gaining a decent userbase. Here is what is going on that I can see:
Twitter is replaced by parler
Youtube is replaced by bitchute
Reddit subs are replaced by thedonald.win (you can get your sub hosted by them now)
Twitch is replaced by dlive
Just to show you the growth of some of these platforms. Just look at the growth of thedonald.win. Apparently it is ranked at something like 1,250 for the USA by Alexa. That's staggering considering this website is only a few years old.
If you are a web entrepreneur, take note because there is a growing market for "conservative" or "censorship-free" social media now.
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/thedonald.win
I have never heard of the other sites you mention, so I can't speak to their popularity. But as far as I can see this all seems very fringe for lack of a better word. There doesn't really seem to be a groundswell of movement towards alternate platforms because of censorship.
For all that I'm concerned, if Reddit shadowbanned every user with a history of mostly political comments and posts, nothing of value would be lost. Political discussions online do not have any positive effects on anybody, neither on the people doing it nor on the poor bystanders who have to endure all these "campaigns" and the constant attempts to manipulate public opinion.
As a European, I'm particularly tired of the constant flow of politically-motivated garbage posts coming from the US. One reason why I'm mostly on HN is that political topics are usually flagged. Kudos to Reddit if they go the same path.
Money.
Forcible silencing of opposing views is a central tenant of actual fascism (not the kind of "fascism" that kids on social media accuse people of just for disagreeing with them).
History repeats itself, it would seem. This is a modern day book burning.
So Spez claiming TD has been continuing to post rule breaking content is literally a lie.
Hell he directly edited the comment database on the_donald one time
See the current top post there which is absolutely crazy but hey it fits the agenda.
Yet they always stay around.
The direction reddit has taken is absolutely abhorrent, but at this point it's hard to avoid adopting a fatalistic outlook on things. What else can be done?
Anybody in the upper echelons of reddit who is responsible for the direction the site has taken over the past few years should be absolutely disgusted with themselves. Was the hundreds of millions (billions?) in VC funding not enough? You were given an extremely important position of stewardship over the internet, and have utterly betrayed all of us.
1. t_d would not be banned as long as it was moderately active (it's basically been dead for months)
2. If it goes, ChapoTrapHouse gets banned as well.
The big thing here is that Chapo served as a clearinghouse for the "dirtbag left" and was incredibly active. The expectation that it would be banned was increasing even before the anonymous warning over the weekend. It was common for users to get warnings/3 day bans for "posting violations of content/upvoting violated content" without specifying the specific post or rule that was alleged to have been violated.
It's clear that including Chapo was a weak, "both sides" move.
The majority of the time people's arguments get heated enough that a mod has to step in and tell someone to cool it, the topic is politics.
And the majority of the time the argument starts with obvious trolling/baiting, typically racist stuff.
Straight up racism is quickly spotted and flagged down, so the new technique is to go on a roundabout monologue and imply racism.
Reddit admins themselves sometimes step in to remove things as well, but it's rare. Mostly for illegal things they spot first, e.g. trying to buy/sell drugs.
AMA if you want to know anything else.
They had a choice to leave it up and locked, but instead chose to erase it from the Internet and that's no accident.
This is the guy that retweeted a video of someone yelling white power in support. This is the guy who called COVID-19 the “Kung flu.” This is the guy that said there were “fine people on both sides” where one side was neo-Nazis. This is the guy that encouraged both police and rally-goers to get violent with the “wrong“ type of people.
Trump is deeply, unacceptably racist, and pro-violence, full stop. Trump is on the side of Christian white nationalism and there are plenty of people who voted for him who don’t even recognize it.
The fact that your typical upper middle class white suburban family with generally moderate views might have voted for this guy isn’t normal. They just can’t hear the dog whistles and have been, amazingly, convinced that that the alternative is worse.
For an individual, set up your email on your own domain. Even if you use some other service to host it for you, as long as you own the name, you can move it wherever you want.
If you host a community, have it on your own domain. Maybe initially it just redirects to a reddit subreddit, but your users should get in the habit of going to MyCommunity.tld instead of reddit.com/r/my_community
If you make videos for a living, have at a minimum a website that has a list of your videos and always tell your users that that is the canonical place to find your videos.
Own your online identity. Don’t lease it from a social media company.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/hh1pjd/redd...
Not that many subs get banned...
One very clear class of weird is people who only post 1-2 sentence posts. If you scroll down, they may post 10-100 posts per day and they are always some short unoriginal emotionally loaded statement of the world situation. If they are not banned the posting history can go on for years, with just endless stream of short sentences.
Discussing for them is just saying opinions. They take everything against them personally. If you try to engage them into discussion, they really can't.
Partisanship doesn't contribute to this aim, so, how is their killing a discussion board newsworthy or surprising to anyone?
Ironically, /r/The_Donald highlighted a key flaw in reddit's system: moderators.
Moderators in reddit's sub vary from being totally absent to all-controlling. /r/The_Donald's mods were at the very far end of the controlling spectrum. For example, back in the early days of the sub, before Trump was even elected, one of their posts showed up on /r/all (Anything highly voted on any subreddit can show up there). Somebody was gushing about "The Art of the Deal". I replied to them that they should check out some of Tony Schwartz's other books and was immediately banned from /r/The_Donald for life. The post in which I said this was removed. People went on gushing about the brilliance of Trump.
Moderators on reddit are not selected or paid. They "volunteer". They have absolute control over who posts and what is posted in their sub. There is zero transparency. Users can't see what moderators are doing. The end result is that a sub is as biased as it's moderators. The thing is, reddit subs are like communities. People who post in a sub regularly get upvotes for conforming to the sub's biases, downvotes for struggling against them, and see only what the moderators let them see. Pretty soon their views conform to those of the moderators. /r/The_Donald allowed some pretty crazy people to polarize a lot of other people who were probably a lot more balanced in their political views before Reddit came along.
For this reason, I no longer post in or read Reddit's political subs. Most subs seem better than /r/The_Donald, but you simply don't know what the mods are doing to shape your views. Personal experience has led me to believe /r/Canada also has some really bad moderators right now, and you can see the tone of that sub gradually changing over time. It's simply unacceptable to place this much trust in people who are totally anonymous.
So, where do I get my political news from? Newspapers. I read several sources distributed from left-centre to right-centre on mediabiasfactcheck.com's ratings. Dead tree media may have corporate biases and a host of other problems but, at least, you can begin to get a handle on who they are and what their biases are. Also, by removing the upvote system from the mix, you don't have meaningless internet points serving as both carrot and stick to make you subconsciously conform.
Bottom line, Reddit is for cat gifs and people smacking each other in the nuts. It is not a safe place to get your politics from.
I wanted to see their viewpoint on at the time "the hot topic" and confirm my suspicions that I truly don't consider their viewpoint rational or valid. It's like they start from a conclusion and work backwards to excuse it.
When you cross that point, it just becomes another channel for propaganda. No different than what you'd see in actual dictatorships.
But that kind of culture / behavior is not unique to T_D, every time someone posted anything remotely critical of Bernie on /politics, they'd get downvoted at the speed of light. Same with pro-Biden threads before Sanders threw in the towel.
But T_D is probably the worst offender. It just functions as pro-Trump worship, and "owning the libs" memes. Everything else will get you banned.
I had never actually heard of that, so looked up the bill to see what it proposed. I posted the summary from congress.gov in case anyone else was curious too:
> Flag Protection Act of 2005 - Amends the federal criminal code to revise provisions regarding desecration of the flag to prohibit: (1) destroying or damaging a U.S. flag with the primary purpose and intent to incite or produce imminent violence or a breach of the peace; (2) intentionally threatening or intimidating any person, or group of persons, by burning a U.S. flag; or (3) stealing or knowingly converting the use of a U.S. flag belonging to the United States, or belonging to another person on U.S. lands, and intentionally destroying or damaging that flag
Banned for posting anti-Trump material.
Before that, I used to believe right wingers were a bunch of homophobes and what not but if that was the case, why would would they be the only one discussing and sympathizing with the families of the victims?
Why was the supposed homophobic and violent sub The_Donald the only ones which were allowing stickies for blood donations towards the shooting victims while the /r/news sub deleting any comment which talked about blood donations to the victims? PEOPLE LITERALLY DIED and for all the virtue signaling Reddit and the front page subs did, they didn't care about the victims?
https://web.archive.org/web/20160612232812/http://i.imgur.co...
https://web.archive.org/web/20160612215205/https://www.reddi...
https://web.archive.org/web/20160612215019/http://reddit.com...
https://web.archive.org/web/20160613172842/http://reddit.com...
Here's people literally pleading mods of /r/news to not delete blood donation comments:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160612212229/http://media.brei...
When people called out the mods of /r/news to stop censoring, the mod told them to "kill yourself":
https://web.archive.org/web/20160616024508/http://imgur.com/...
Here's mods of /r/news deleting a comment about a missing friend:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160920213229/https://i.imgur.c...
This made me re-think about whether my side was the bad guys? Since I am a brown immigrant myself, I was always told right wingers hate me and other minorities. I had never looked deep enough. The Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting which killed 50 gays made me re-think. Why is the side which supposedly hates minorities the only one talking about blood donations to the victims?
This also made me question why was "/r/rightwingLGBT" banned? Are gays not allowed to be conservative?
Since then, I started browsing The_Donald more often and despite whatever media says, there can sometimes be tongue in cheek memes and comments on there but they are not evil people as media and Reddit makes them out to be. There's a huge community there with gays, hispanics, blacks and every minority group which media claims right wingers hate. When hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico 3 years ago, The_Donald was the only sub where people were sharing how a lot of the FEMA supplies were going missing. Everyone else was calling this a conspiracy theory but there were people literally sharing videos of garbage trucks and warehouses filled with perfectly well and brand new supplies. It was quite sinister. Then the truth finally came out earlier this year that they found 8 warehouses full of FEMA supplies which were rotting away and never given to the Puerto Rico people who were literally starving and dying. These are the types of incidents which have changed my mind since then that there's evil in media and many people who are actively willing to let people suffer and die if it makes right wingers look bad.
I might get downvoted for this comment but I hope few people pay attention to what's happening and dig a bit deeper than what media and big tech are telling them. I used to be a liberal - I am still a liberal on most things but I can no longer identify with the current left. It breaks my heart on what people have become.
r/Consume Product r/ClericalFascism r/Smuggies r/Debate Alright r/bruhfunny r/ShitNeoconsSay r/soyboys r/imgoingtohellforthis2 r/AltRightChristian r/TheHonkPill r/topnotchshitposting r/TheNewRight r/DarkHumorAndMemes r/Gender Critical r/ChapoTrapHouse r/rightwingLGBT r/whitebeauty r/The3rdPosition r/CumTown
This, however, may cross a line for me. I'm not a Reddit user, but it's my understanding that this is a discussion group about a person. I'm less OK with restricting the discussions of topics.
It reminds me of something I heard in a forensics class years ago: Attack the problem, not the person.
I need to think about this one for a bit.
What is hate, anyways?
The fact that he's President really is going back to the founding fathers' intention, and why we have an Electoral College in the first place:
So that underrepresented voters would have a say in who the President was. And they did, so he is. And now he's pretending that he's the voice of our country, when he so clearly is not. The People spoke, and they requested someone else.
A reasonable person would look at his election results and create an agenda from there, but not Trump. I am hopeful that is his downfall. I'm not holding my breath about it, though.
Or even concepts like "one person one vote" force systems to converge towards a few stable establishment parties.
It would still be democratic if voter could grade candidates and the winners were chosen by some appropriate statistical measure, or if voters could select arbitrary subsets of okeyish candidates and the winners were those with most votes, or any combination of many other systems.
The real objective of most democratic electoral systems is governability and meaningful representation. Pretending that popular vote is the only meaningful way to elect representatives is naive.
it’s really devolved.
As a jew, I support free speech for hypothetical Hitler. Stop using these lazy arguments.
As I commented in a previous discussion of reddit's policies (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23601595), the "quarantined subreddits" half measures were clearly too tame as a middle point, where reddit decided to both moderate which communities are wrong and at the same time not ban them (worst of both worlds).
I wonder if the discussion there was read by people at reddit, though it's probably not relevant opinions to them.
TD was pretty much in zombie mode since they replaced all the mods and the users moved to other conservative subs. I also think many of the more extreme/active users graduated to 8ch. This is probably just reddit getting ahead of the election to be extra sure they can keep it advertiser friendly as it heats up