Film studios lose bid to unmask Reddit users who wrote comments on piracy

But there is something to be said about having the censor cabal out in the open for everyone to see. Compare that with Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, where there is no record of who is determining what is and isn't ok to say.

The 'proof' is a screenshot of a post that was called '92 of the top 100 subbreddits controlled by the same 5 people' that got removed. Why did it get removed? Who knows?

Do better. If you want to be better than reddit don't do the same dumb shit that it does and check your sources.

There's value in any information-sharing they do in that they share trends across subreddits that reddit themselves are opaque about, but the subs still operate autonomously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard

I still think it has devolved into one of the biggest tire fires on the Internet, but it was a cute idea. Maybe the next attempt will suck less.

Specifically, I really like the way Slashdot provides more categories for rating comments. '+5 Funny' vs '+5 Insightful' is a very useful distinction. '-1 Off Topic' vs '-1 Flamebait/Troll' is a useful distinction. I don't want to read off topic spam, but I often do want to read unpopular dissenting opinions. Slashdot let me read the "trolls" (dissenters) without having to wade through the literal spam. Great system, HN and reddit would be better if they had something similar.

Dedicated forums for particular topics were generally tiny. A forum with 10k+ people was a sizable forum, and not many where that large. Small communities got very little attention from spammers, and while they had their own trolls giving problems they were much less rarely subjected general trolls unless something like 4chan or whatever came before it picked up on them.

The internet is also huge and has zero degrees of separation in most places. I could post a link to a tiny forum here and 1000 people may see it. I could post it to reddit subthread and a hundred thousand people could see it. Or I could get a front page post on Reddit and a million+ people could see it. And with it tons of trolls, spam, and general idiots will follow and quality goes to trash.

This barely has anything to do with Reddit/Facebook itself. It's the power of network effects congregating people. Facebook was always going to happen, maybe in a slightly different flavor, or slightly different form, but once we got the computing capability to have millions of people at one place at once time, someone was always going to build it.

Video game producers are starting up fan discords that also have the troubleshooting/bug reports channels for the game on them. Video game mod communities are moving to discord.

Its going to really suck when a few years go by and a company closes or moves onto a new game and shuts down their discord. A lot of community sourced info is going to be flushed down the drain if people don't archive it.

Piss off the admin and you might be insta-banned with no recourse. You'd even lose connections to the other users on the forum and would have no way to reach them. You didn't have the option of opening a competing forum where all of the old users already had access like you do with opening a new sub. You'd also lose access to the posts themselves and any content you found useful for the private forums.

You were reliant on the admin to keep the site running. Most had extensive downtime. Things would often break. The admins would have to run charity fund raisers to keep things up and many would threaten to take everything with them if people didn't pay up.

They banned a load of female-centred subreddits too, a couple of years back. The moderators of these subs then set up their own Reddit-like forum at https://ovarit.com, with a mission to uplift women's voices, especially on topics where they had been censored on Reddit.

Reddit also discriminates specifically against homosexual women, in similar ways: /r/lesbians is a pornography forum dedicated to the male gaze, while /r/actuallesbians is filled with men pretending to be women. Any lesbian subreddit that is created exclusively for actual female women to use gets swiftly banned, and similarly for comments that support being exclusively same-sex attracted. This sort of 'progressive' misogyny and homophobia is increasingly common in other forums too, not just on Reddit.

The common theme of all this banning and censorship is users not toeing the line towards a particular set of US-centric political viewpoints that are currently popular amongst those who call themselves 'progressive'. Though in reality their views and actions are regressive and authoritarian.

Once you have accepted an opinion as your own, however, you have had to believe that you understand it to the greatest extent possible and spending more time learning about it is going to be unfruitful. As such, there is no remaining value in talking about the opinions you actually hold.

Only the opinions you don't hold are those you are going to share, as those are the ones that are still out there able to be learned from. They are merely hypothetical, and are likely to be contradictory as you explore different angles.

Indeed, you may come to hold those once-hypothetical opinions in time as you learn more about it. As that happens, the value in sharing them will diminish. There is good reason why we don't spend our days sharing that we believe "1+1=2" and "the sky is blue". One's own opinion has no communication value.

So, what is to be gained by censoring a hypothetical opinion that may not be held by anyone and certainly not you? If it were your opinion you wouldn't have to worry about censoring it because there would be no value in sharing it in the first place.

It's more of a "you might not be able to". Even with all the archival things that target Reddit currently, plenty of accounts who purge their comments squeeze through just fine.

If you post on the internet, yes, you do need to understand it's not sitting in one database table somewhere. It doesn't mean it's futile to try and clean up though.

That said, our stories are nowhere near representative of why it's important to be able to delete comments. ;P

Of course these days with AI able to do analysis of everything we've ever wrote, duplicate our speech, and mimic our look, we may find out that leaving all this information in public was a foolish mistake.

- Cardinal Richelieu

This was going through my head when I recently deleted 15 years of Facebook data. I am not the same person I was when I was 18.

People's ability to preserve their own safety and identity is important. Obscure knowledge can be reproduced; people cannot be.

>I would much prefer comments here to automatically delete after some reasonable time period (a week?)

you're more than welcome to build that and release it to see how much traction it would get. but it's also weird to think that the responses to questions that are valid to post now would not still be relevant in the future for people to come back to (or find for the first time via search). if your response is truly not worthy for future reading, i would have to ask if it is really worth now. if you're that concerned about having that response associated to you, then i'd again say maybe it is best not being made at all.

Orange, not grey.