Hacker News Reader

Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me why this dedicated but unpaid volunteer is trying to keep Reddit compliant with SEC regulations? What other company on the planet would shift that burden to its own users???

Happy to discover I’m not understanding the situation, but that seems absolutely bonkers to me. Does Reddit not have any lawyers?

View on HN

Because Reddit's answer would be to simply ban the entire community. There's not much choice on the mods' side.

Yes, Reddit would have other options of course. But they all cost money, so they wouldn't do it. Spez would just nuke WSB and move on with his day, secure in the belief that he saved Reddit from an SEC fine or whatever.

Reddit has two approaches they use. One is to target the sub itself with bans or quarantines as you say. The other is promote / demote mods.

They could also just ban SEC and NYC IP addresses instead. Ultimately information wants to be free.

> They could also just ban SEC and NYC IP addresses instead. Ultimately information wants to be free.

Because someone at the SEC can't use their home connection? Or their cell phone?

Also, there's not exactly a list of SEC IP addresses anywhere I'm aware of, and they could easily add/remove addresses at will.

Information doesn't want anything - it's not sentient. Humans wanting information to be certain things is a bit different.

Not so sure about that. WSB buys a ridiculous amount of awards. Reddit might be willing to spend a little too keep them up.

I'm curious to see if there's publicly available data about award usage per subreddit.

I tried quick searching for "award usage per subreddit stats" but can't find anything.

You would need to scrape data via the api

Scraping data via an API? You either scrape the website or query the API.

I think you knew full well what the writer meant :)

Correcting people helps preserving the precise meaning of words rather than letting them drift into thingy words. Donate to the endangered word conservation fund today!

Maybe the API only returns HTML ;)

And the last thing you want is Reddit moderation involved.

It’s more arbitrary and poorly due processed than Google,PayPal,FB etc.

> Does Reddit not have any lawyers?

Reddit's lawyers are probably the reason why it's framed as Reddit hosting "a community" whose users can have moderation ability instead of framing them as "Reddit moderators", RE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program#D...

Reddit would be happy to ensure it is compliant with SEC regulations, by banning the subreddit if necessary. Since WSB mods don’t want that, they take steps to ensure their subreddit is compliant, and doesn’t pose a legal risk to Reddit.

Reddit is not a financial market participant, the only SEC regulations it needs to remain compliant with are along the lines of "don't lie about Reddit in SEC documents and other communications to Reddit's investors". That and promptly responding to any subpoenas for user information and other related legal requests the SEC requires.

What the others said (reddit would enforced by banning) plus wallstreetbets are a group of people cooperating to make money. Our volunteer is helping the group make money and so helping himself/herself/etc-self.

IE, the "look how much reddit is exploiting these people" implication is unwarranted.

I think it comes back to the roots of reddit being a free alternative to phpbb with an easier onboarding process.

Reddit's approach to dealing with this is to ban the sub-reddit unless the sub-reddit sufficiently moderates itself. WSB moderators working so hard is what is preventing WSB from being banned.

Why would Reddit want to expose themselves to the risk when they can hide behind Section 230?

Think of subreddits as modern analogies to local clubs (chess, fencing, etc.). Just because it's happening on the internet doesn't mean the members (and especially organizers) don't have real world interfacing responsibilities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com