Reddit takes a new direction
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So when a post gets deleted by a moderator, people tend to think of it as a freedom of speech issue. There's a whole constitution out there specifically defending anybody's right to create a pro-Nazi subreddit, and to otherwise post anything they please on the site so long as it's not illegal, right?
Not really.
Not at all, in fact. Reddit is not the United States. It's Reddit. Online communities are not democracies any more than your back garden is a democracy. You pull weeds, plant seeds, and otherwise encourage the plants in your garden to comport themselves in a manner that ends up with a pleasing result. It's your garden, so you have the absolute right to pull weeds. The weeds get no say.
Reddit seems to have forgotten this for a while, and as a result they started sliding until they became, well, Reddit. The community we're currently discussing this in, on the other hand, has been a lot more conscientious in cultivating the type of garden it would like to see. And I think we can all say the result is a lot more pleasant than a less tended place such as Reddit or 4chan.
I am honestly not sure we can say that at all. I thoroughly enjoy both hn and reddit, for completely different reasons. Sure, from a strictly legal standpoint, it isn't censorship or a constitutional issue, but at the same time, the "anything goes" attitude in places like 4chan and reddit allow for a lot of creative gems and interesting discussion. People instinctively recognize that while you may have to schlep thought he muck to find those gems, it is still important to have an "anything goes place". People will feel betrayed when they put time and effort into making the community what it is, and suddenly the rules are changed on them -- all their effort has been co-opted or may be co-opted, for something they don't want. It feels slimy.
(yes we are all aware there is no contract or law or whatever, blah blah legalistic point missing, but the decency of it is still in question).
All that being said, I also like the curated, well organized topical community of HN, because sometimes I just don't want to wade through the crap, but that occasional preference switch doesn't diminish either form of community building.
It’s not so hard. Some people just want to be deliberately obtuse. The slippery slope is a fucking fallacy!
Besides, pedos wouldn't trade images on reddit, I really refuse to believe people would be stupid enough to trade such pictures through a US website which offers no anonymity.
The only thing that this move ended up doing was ensuring the use of private subreddits for this act. People aren't going to change simply because someone told them that what they already knew was wrong is now more wrong. The content will still be traded on reddit (even though I highly doubt that cheese pizza pm's actually happened very often), just not with a public pool to gather from.
Plus, all of this shit is still up on imgur.
Finally, even if somehow reddit manages to completely and utterly block all things they deem to be CP related, these people will just move to another, probably harder to track venue. All in all, this entire move is rather pointless action in response to people that want the feelgood sensation of "Protecting the Children."
It is ironic (I wonder if you can understand it) that, had the sort of limitation that you back were in effect on HN, comments like yours would have been deleted.
2. If you want to argue about fallacies, perhaps you shouldn't do so with a strawman. I never defended r/jailbait or any of the other banned subreddits. I was simply pointing out that there are differences between "anything goes" and "walled garden" approaches to community building, and that both have strong positive results, and one is not necessarily better than the other. The level of disingenuity of your reply is up there with "presidential candidate". Get off your moral high horse and reply to my actual statements.
3. I never claimed reddit would be radically different - again: I was discussing people's reactions, not claiming them as reflections of fact. Another strawman (thats at least 2 in one post!)
4. Who the fuck are you to be that condescending? What value do you provide to the world that makes you able to dictate what matters and what I should observe?
I never claimed you defended pedos. Where did I do that exactly?
I was stating that feeling betrayed by this change makes no sense at all. I cannot fathom how one can possibly feel betrayed by such a change. That’s all. Can you explain that to me? Huh?
However, now that I re-read it I can see your point, but your use of profanity and the general lack of civility in your comment obscured your argument. The tone of your comment was more like an accusation than a reasoned response, even if the content (minus the profanity) was not intended to be.
Sigh. I’m quite disillusioned about HN, actually. Not that it should surprise me, but damn. People here say the exact same things as on Reddit. If you squint a bit the reactions are the same. That doesn’t make me happy.
I do recognize that I can’t do many constructive things here (short of screaming at people) so I’m going to excuse myself from this thread. I won’t convince anyone anyway.
Then it would be a good idea to take a break, maybe go for a walk, until you can be civil.
Perhaps it's because they are correct and you are in fact in the wrong here?
Then perhaps you need to realize that some of the things people are saying have some merit and you're looking at them wrong. I realize ad populum isn't a valid form of logic, but when the great majority of people are telling you you're wrong, it could never hurt to re-examine your position.
Until it isn't.
Ugh. Here we go again.
The fact that the slippery slope argument can be a fallacy doesn't mean that all claims of slippery slope is automatically a fallacy.
People seem to think the fact that this word exists means they can use it in all contexts and be right.
[edit] And the slippery slope angle has materialized in this particular case. No sonner had the jailbait subreddits fallen did people start clamoring for the shutdown of /r/beatingwomen, /r/deadbabies, and various other reprehensible subreddits. This certainly hasn't been a we-banned-jailbait-and-now-everything-is-fine deal that people hoped it to be.
This time around there was a post on SomethingAwful talking about a few more subreddits, and they were all (including several that were explicitly 18+ content only) shut down immediately. For good or ill, we're not in danger of slipping down that slope any more, we're demonstrably sliding already.
If you say “slippery slope hurr durr” it is a fucking fallacy. You have to do work to make it one.
No slippery slope has materialized anywhere. That’s bullshit.
What if someone started a terrorism subreddit promoting hateful and inciteful behaviour. Defend that freedom America. We already know how that is working out. I doubt anyone would even bat an eyelid and this would be a non-story.
Seriously do not believe people are defending this "freedom" of speech. Total BS and people obviously have too much time on their hands doing nothing.
I do not think many people "instinctively recognize" this. What I do "instinctively recognize" is that as sites like this mainstream they uniformly clean up "the muck" and that any "creative gems" lost because the community no longer tolerates everything are a tiny price to pay. Whatever "creative gems" went on in /r/jailbait or /r/n*ggerjailbait we can only speculate...
"People will feel betrayed when they put time and effort into making the community what it is, and suddenly the rules are changed on them -- all their effort has been co-opted or may be co-opted, for something they don't want. It feels slimy."
What feels slimy is finding out the popular site you like is chummy with scum like Violentacrez the guy who started 90% of the worst of the worst subreddits. I got news for you, the tiny minority of pedosympathizers on reddit are not what made the site what it is. We aren't "coopting their effort", we're taking a break from construction to clean up a mess we didn't have time to focus on until now.
Much in the same way that once we give the government a censorship filter on the Internet to 'stop child pornography,' they've got their foot in the door to censor other things as well. Building censorship infrastructure to shut down the websites of people we don't like might not be palatable, but once that infrastructure is already in place, all we have to do is add to the list of banned sites. It becomes so much easier to cross that line when we're standing right next to it, than if we make sure to give it a wide berth.
I'm not saying that I disagree with the shutting down of these sub-reddits -- especially since it seems to only make sense for consistencies sake since they shutdown /r/jailbait already -- but let's not act like this doesn't come with possible consequences.
You act like there's a real choice here. The other choice was Reddit goes out of business. Reddit made the obvious choice.
"there will be more and more calls from the community to make more judgement calls to increase the net and shutdown other types of sub-reddits that they disagree with."
Welcome to the real world. Oh you let kids in your site? Kids have parents. Parents demand standards for places their kids go. Want to startup a reddit clone with no standards? Have at it! Let us know how it works out for you.
"Much in the same way that once we give the government a censorship filter on the Internet"
It's also the case that once you set up an infrastructure to prosecute murderers it becomes easier for the government to move from arresting people for murder to hey let's just arrest some people we don't like for reason XYZ.
That's not a legitimate argument for not having an infrastructure to prosecute murderers though.
You know, perhaps it's ok for us to suggest the parents do the parenting, and let us grown ups hang out at the reddit?
Oh wait, right its actually just a strawman argument so you can be the morality police for the world. Sorry for the confusion.
It's also the case that once you set up an infrastructure to prosecute murderers it becomes easier for the government to move from arresting people for murder to hey let's just arrest some people we don't like for reason XYZ. That's not a legitimate argument for not having an infrastructure to prosecute murderers though.
It is however a fantastic reason to talk about the potential consequences of that infrastructure, and perhaps to arrange for safeguards against the unwanted scenarios. This is what some of us are trying to do here while you are clamoring to (extending the metaphor) put everyone in jail who may one day murder someone.
If your post were a New Yorker cartoon I'd have the perfect caption for it. I'm not the morality police, I'm pointing out that morality exists and reddit, as a community was not above that. I'm dreadfully sorry if you're only now finding out that community morality exists and that there are commercial consequences for for-profit private businesses who ignore that in the real world.
As has been pointed out ad nauseum reddit is easily cloneable. If you think all the world needs is a place where the timeless insights of the people that brought us /r/jailbait, and "how to rape your daughter" threads can shine without the "morality police" ever being called on the party have at it.
"This is what some of us are trying to do here while you are clamoring to (extending the metaphor) put everyone in jail who may one day murder someone."
Bullshit. Let me clear up this analogy. I'm saying we have a rule against murder and it's a good rule. You're saying it's a dangerous rule that will lead us down the road to serfdom.
We can debate whether the rule is good (not all rules are as clear cut as the one we have for murder). I don't think you will win on those merits though re: this reddit policy.
There's a rule at most community pools that you don't crap or piss in the pool. Somehow this hasn't led to widescale pool tyranny, it's pretty much just a rule not to piss in the pool. Just because there's a slope doesn't mean anyone is going to slip down it.
I never have said "this reddit rule is bad". Read extra careful, and you will find no evidence whatsoever of that, only evidence of me discussing human behavior in light of rule changes, and how it is a particularly sensitive topic in the "anything goes spaces". Further I am pointing benefits of those spaces, without actually taking a stance on them. This is how I know you are the morality police, you are choosing to invent words to put in my statements without actually bothering to read them. Those are not the actions of a reasonable person, but rather a lynch mob.
Bullshit. Let me clear up this analogy. I'm saying we have a rule against murder and it's a good rule. You're saying it's a dangerous rule that will lead us down the road to serfdom.
Again not sure where you get this idea... I am simply discussing how people react when rules start encroaching on free-form places, and discussing the consequences of them. This is not declaring serfdom or anything else nearly as dramatic. It is merely me not instantly jumping on a bandwagon. Sorry to be that guy you hate: the one who looks at the world around him and asks questions before deciding.
There's a rule at most community pools that you don't crap or piss in the pool. Somehow this hasn't led to widescale pool tyranny, it's pretty much just a rule not to piss in the pool. Just because there's a slope doesn't mean anyone is going to slip down it.
And yet, you see stories occasionally about how some toddler is banned from the kiddie pool for an accident. This is not tyranny of pools, but it certainly is someone overstepping bounds. Perhaps the public outcry over such things has something to do with it?
Anyway, you are now just tiresome to me. Good night, be well.
let's not act like this doesn't come with
possible consequences.
In general, I group this in with 'troll behavior,' but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and just assume that this is a very emotional topic for you (i.e. you see this as a black-and-white issue).
>They'll ban /r/trees when they pry it out of our cold dead hands.
You can imagine why it might be frustrating to people who would expect them to approach all content with as much vigor as they do in the defense of /r/trees.
The way I understand it, and the way it has been explained by the admins, is that policing the kind of content that is now not allowed had taken up a significant amount of their resources, and it was becoming unsustainable. However, a lot of users clearly see this as a sign that the admins are backing down as a result of legal pressure and also for the purpose of preserving the image of the community.
For users of old, this is a rather new phenomenon, and it is somewhat offputting. If it was solely a question of sustainability (how much time are they wasting policing the content?), that would probably be acceptable, but it's difficult to believe that it is the sole reason for the rule.
We see the point, we're saying it doesn't matter. It's been pretty obvious over the last year that this train has been coming down the tracks and there's ultimately only one way it could play out.
The spam rule was already there and it's not rocket surgery to realize that any content more objectionable then spam is also eventually going to be excluded.
Assuming that that event necessarily means the removal of the other subreddits seems contrived.
* VA, the guy who also created & mods r/picsofdeadkids, r/PicsOfDeadJailbait, r/incest, etc.
How was it not? Reddit exploded and started making money hand over fist. Anderson Cooper shined a light on the seedy underbelly for like 5 sec and they gave up the game. The past week's events are just ripples from that and Reddit coming to terms with the only possible decision they could have made.
Yesterday's announcement was merely a formalizing of that policy and application to a number of other subreddits in response to a second wave of negative publicity.
So yeah, following the second ban, you could see the writing on the wall.
[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/jkmx7/dear_reddit...
Do you have a citation for this? I was under the impression they were still losing money and the Reddit, Inc stuff was there to allow Condi to distance itself from reddit.
But reddit specifically said create your own subreddit and post what you want (as long as it is not spam). That is why this is such a big issue.
A big issue? They updated the minimal set of rules the site runs by. If users don't like it, they can go elsewhere.
There's no issue here, just Redditors doing what they do best: creating a tempest in a teapot.
The reaction at reddit has been OVERWHELMINGLY in favor of this ban, the last four days has been top post after top post asking for it to be banned.
Every tiny thing a single redditor does is grounds for dismissal and condemnation of the entire site by many here and it really just baffles me.
I used to really like Reddit. But I loathed the fact that each subreddit sank into a lowest common denominator appeal as it grew: memes, linkbait-y headlines, groupthink. To be fair, these are problems with groups of people in general: they get dumber and dumber as they get bigger. But the total hands-off nature of Reddit meant that this sort of intellectual race to the bottom was not only inevitable, it was expected and allowed to happen, even if a vocal minority made their points coherently. They were drowned out by populist voices who are quick to decree that the voice of Everyone is worthwhile because, well, damn it, it's Everyone.
And that's bullshit. I prefer a site where people at least pretend to discuss things instead of rushing to post "tl;dr" anytime someone writes a paragraph of text.
I think moderators can approve spam so you can even post spam to your own subreddit if you wish.
It's hard when an issue comes up where the game-theoretical approach produces a bad result. The current Reddit structure works well when it assumes that good content is the paramount rule, but now we have a new paramount rule: obey the law. The site structure and the ranking algorithms don't meet the new requirements, and as a result, manual pruning is required.
First-amendment speech is only a subset of free speech. Unfortunately people seem to hear "freedom of speech" and think that the ONLY place that freedom exists is under the scope of the 1st. Its not.
The Bill of Rights only says that our government can't take it away. Other people are still free to take it away. But when they take it away (and are within their rights to do so) it is a free speech issue. The difference is the argument is not a you can't or you shouldn't be able to, its just a you can but shouldn't.
What people are railing against is not that that reddit, or whoever, has decided not to adhere to the restrictions placed upon congress, but that they've fundamentally changing what it means to be reddit. This is the article's "Very Serious Discussion About What Sort of Community We Are".
It's your garden, so you have the absolute right to pull weeds. The weeds get no say.
Yeah, reddit has complete control. But unless they're happy exercising that control by disabling all user submissions and posts, or actively banning anyone who they don't like discussing the nature of reddits rules, they have given their flowers a voice about the weeds.
Perhaps, when you say that people should STFU and take it, you might be interesting in hearing the thesis of (reddit co-founder) Ohanian's TED talk on social media: "You No Longer Control the Message, and That’s Okay"
Well, it is a free speech issue, but whether one should or not is debatable. I'd prefer they didn't, but I don't know if it's fair to ask that from them.
I think this is more a function of the community's size than anything else. Once you get a broad enough appeal, you need some pretty fancy clustering algorithms to avoid everyone's experiences shifting to the norm.
This site is akin to a Reddit subreddit.
The community here is great, clearly amongst the best of the Reddit subreddit communities.
Is this community better than the Reddit community? Honeslty -- no. This is a place for tech news, and that's it.
The Reddit community has done a lot of wonderful things, for each other, for others, and for society in general. This community can make almost none of those claims.
Many people who frequent both look at Hacker News as if it were the real /r/technology.
But I didn't think people compared communities in general -- this place is tiny compared to even many of the subreddits!
http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/
Reddit's "slide" is a result of their respect for freedom of speech? Where's the connection there? The "spill over" of pedophiles (or non-CP closet pedophiles, whatever) from jailbait subreddits has caused the deterioration of /r/programming? ha.
Also, to be perfectly honest, there's a lot I could say about HN that would not be particularly flattering, not least of which is its superiority complex when comparing itself to other sites.
5-6 years ago, Reddit was exactly the same as HN is now.
The terms CP and pedophilia are being thrown around without much thinking, the same way the general public thinks all who are on torrent sites are pirates and "hackers are baad and steal your CC numbers". This sort of blunt scare mongering demagogy is commonly used to create support from the masses, I am amazed that the HN crowd is also susceptible to it.
Here are the facts as I believe them, please point out the ones you think are wrong:
1) Some of these subreddits may have contained CP, the illegal ones were being actively removed by admins.
2) Calling pictures of 16-year-olds in bikinis CP is not very useful and dilutes the term.
3) What is legal and morally right usually does not overlap 100%. Law may say one thing about CP and people may feel another thing. This is OK. Also different cultures, of course, have different attitudes.
4) In light of (3), to me there's "definitely bad CP" and "tolerable CP". The moral distinction is not clear cut and the law does not differentiate these. The situation is similar to the 55 mph speed limit, people break it everyday (avg speed on I-90 is more like 75mph) but if you do 85 the police will get you. So there's a tolerable zone and to me (2) falls in that category.
5) One has to be very careful with these outcries because they have the effect of ratcheting the law machine ever more tightly. Remember, no politician will put relaxation of sex offense laws on their ticket.
But, please THINK A LITTLE AND RESEARCH before you pick up the pitchfork, e.g. read this (http://www.economist.com/node/14164614).
ADDENDUM: For (2), also consider the widespread use of young girls in advertising and movies, e.g. the Vanity Fair topless photoshoot of Miley Cyrus who was 15 at the time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miley_Cyrus#Controversies). This is just one that came to mind instantly, many more examples can easily be given.
Don't forget child beauty pageants. That stuff is IMHO often borderline pedophilia.
I've seen a lot of people say "we need to protect the young girls in these pictures". What about the 1-5 year olds who are being dressed up and paraded around by their parents?
Where is the similar outrage over sites like imgur.com (which retain most of the images hosted in a sub-reddit even after its deletion) or TV shows like Toddlers & Tiaras?
This is the key issue that almost NO ONE here understands and it's evidenced by high profile HN members calling people they disagree with "disgusting" because they don't understand that morality is relative and that slippery slopes are only absurd until they come true.
I, along with most everyone here it seems, have no desire for peoples' children to be posted online for other people to fap to. That having been said, reddit has historically deferred to the law for making decisions about what IS and IS NOT allowed.
With this decision, they're asserting that their feelings of morality are now grounds for moderating content. HN always surprises me how anti-drug it is. Would HN call those opposed to shutting down other subreddits "repulsive"? What if reddit decides to shutdown /r/drugs where discussion of "hard" drug use occurs. There is a morality argument that can be made.
The problem is that the bright-legal-line has been broken and from now on censorship becomes a question of appealing to the reddit admin's sense of morality.
I agree with you, but you are going to have a really hard time making that argument with a lot of people. In fact, I believe John Paul II called moral relativism the greatest evil of our time or something like that.
CP was posted in the same subreddits. The admins were tired of spending their time determining if reported images were illegal or not.
>2) Calling pictures of 16-year-olds in bikinis CP is not very useful and dilutes the term.
A 16 year old in their swimsuit at the beach isn't CP. A 16 year old posed in their swimsuit like a porn star in a bedroom is CP. The latter is what was posted in these subreddits.
This isn't an issue with unfair application of sex offender laws or the vilification of accused sex offenders. This is Something Awful forum members forcing reddit admins to finally remove at best objectionable content, at worst illegal material.
We're not talking about some kids playing in the sand. This was seriously perverse stuff.
These weren't candid shots of the beach. These were posed children. The reason I'm not describing them well is because it's making me uncomfortable to continuously describe them to people who are coming into this discussion with no idea what was posted. You have no idea how queasy I feel typing "child's genitals".
Back when there was usenet, everybody could post what ever they wanted (some news servers might not have carried the group, but there was no policing the source).
Same with blogs: You wanted to post content the masses dislike? No problem. But you want to post that same content to a centralized platform like Twitter, Facebook or any of Google's properties, now the masses (and/or governments) dictate the content you are allowed to post.
To really make use of the internet's capability of providing an incredible freedom of content you can create and publish, you cannot use a centralized platform.
While sites like reddit or facebook might make it easier for other people to find your crap^Wcontent, they also make it infinitely easier to have it removed again.
NNTP is still alive. : )
(I ran a Freenix-competitive server in the '90s and hacked on INN).
(Disclosure: it's sad it took Reddit this long to apply this rule, and more than a little repulsive to see people up in arms about it.)
Agreed. Equating free speech with the ability to trade in sexual images of children is about the low-water mark for political philosophy applied to communications tech.
All that being said, I miss the pre-AOL usenet.
> sexual images of children
There are several possible discussions here that you can't just sweep under the rug by declaring those opposing you as 'repulsive' beforehand. Here's a simple question: should they also ban the lolicon subreddit? The children's-pageant subreddit? The bikini subreddit, because it allows posts of children? Almost everyone agrees child porn is repulsive. Not everyone agrees that means you have to ban /r/jailbait. Read the article, linked in the OP, by Neil Gaiman and please respond civilly instead of inciting a flamewar. Your dismissiveness is unacceptable in a reasoned debate.
I couldn't be less interested in discussing Gaiman's take on the subject. What drew me into the thread was a comment about NNTP. NNTP is a sore point with me; the repurposing (more accurately: abuse) of NNTP as an "anonymous binary publishing system" killed Usenet.
And that's where a great many people have gotten confused. Child porn was already against the rules and already reported to authorities and the perpetrators banned. That hasn't changed.
What has changed were the subreddits like /r/jailbait - where there was absolutely nothing illegal going on. Creepy and skeevy perhaps, but not illegal.
Let me repeat this again: This is not about child porn.
Comparing the content of /r/jailbait to child porn is akin to comparing the sights of an average day at the beach to the set of a hardcore porno shoot. It's completely bogus.
This isn't about /r/jailbait. This is about the other subreddits which much worse content e.g. /r/preteen_girls and /r/asianbait.
The content posted to these subreddits was, for the most part, child pornography. The rest was absolutely child erotica. To compare what was posted there to children at the beach is a gross misrepresentation.
Allow me to be blunt: Bullshit.
I saw plenty of creepy things, but I never saw anything that could be remotely classified as "child pornography".
> I am repelled by any argument that suggests
> that it is unfortunate that Reddit is cracking
> down on child pornography
They are now banning things like teen/preteen girls in bathing suits. Whether or not these things are 'child pornography' is more more up in the air than photos of children having sex, or being raped.
Trying to group this in with children being raped comes across as disingenuous because it implicitly claims that anyone that takes issue with this is somehow automatically in favor of child rape.
In fact, they did ban the lolicon and respective male version along with the jailbait subreddits.
Isn't this an exaggeration? There is a lot of room between "everything goes" and North Korea. Stopping exploitation of kids is one notch up from "everything goes".
I don't think a sane person would suggest that exploiting children is acceptable, but the answer then becomes -- to what degree to we sacrifice our autonomy to satisfy the regulator's thirst for a censored communications.
In reddit's case, "think of the children" is a perfectly legitimate cry when the policy specifically is designed to stop exploitation of children.
I have no idea what your point here is. You seem to be implying that because someone may dishonestly use a "protect the kids" argument, that others then shouldn't really try to "protect the kids".
If that isn't what you are saying then I have no idea what you intended to convey.
"to what degree to we sacrifice our autonomy to satisfy the regulator's thirst for a censored communications."
WTF are you talking about? reddit had bad shit on their site, and they took it down. There is no boogeyman here.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120213/13212017749/canadi...
But at the same time, everyone still felt like redditors, even if you were on /r/investing or /r/TwoXChromosomes or /r/trees or /r/nudecycling. In fact, you could unsubscribe from all the default subreddits, and join a bunch of weird unusual ones, and so you'd probably never even see a redditor who belongs to the "mainstream" community, but you'd still call yourself a redditor.
Unfortunately, we now see the downside of that group identity, because it didn't stop the reputation of the "bad" subreddits from bleeding over and tarnishing the group's. The subreddit boundaries failed, in the end.
(I saw a post from a sixteen year old boy describing himself as a "ephebophile" because he liked girls from school. It's just bizarre that kids are learning this sort of inside jargon and using it describe completely normal behavior.)
From a broader community perspective, there's no reason to hang out a sign saying "creeps welcome here". They'll show up on their own, and its not as if Reddit needs their traffic.
You might say that this is all inconsequential board drama, and it is; but the arc of it ends with admin involvement. Until now, the admins have explicitly let mods handle their own subreddits.
The general public did not use Usenet; the audience size was small, relative to what we see today on the WWW. Same goes with most personal blogs. And back when Reddit was not well known, they did not have to have a policy like this.
I don't think centralization has anything to do with it--if your public blog suddenly got as popular as Reddit, I bet it too would be the subject of campaigns about its content.
The top voted comments on threads about censorship are mostly 1 to 3 months old users. And now reddit (had to) surrender to a decadent SOPA-supporting forum and a bunch of trolls from /r/ShitRedditSays (wich starts to look like a *chan long troll instead of a bunch of ultra-feminists).
Sure, a lot of questionable/creepy subreddits shouldn't be there. But where's the line? And who draws it? Also, isn't this an ongoing process? Those subreddits can reopen in minutes with more subtle names. The censorship whack-a-mole is pointless.
It's weird how reddit was a bastion for resisting SOPA/ACTA but fear mongering in US can take over a site. It seems that's the real frontier and we are losing. Next up /r/trees and /r/atheism.
Like so many times before it's time to move on. I wish the best to the owners/admins, they were cornered and probably had a tough choice. And I sincerely hope the new users enjoy this new reddit.
I think the admins are sending the right message - This subject is blanket banned because it's too hard to sort out the shades of gray, and it brings a unique risk to the community that other things (drugs, racism, etc) just don't.
I agree that they'll be playing 'ban the sub' whack a mole, but that will happen to any UGC site of scale, the important thing is (ironically) not to let a community coalesce around the subject that's big enough to get reddit targeted by the media or some zealous prosecutor trying to score political points (See craiglist's adult section...)
It would be nice to see them lay down some firm rules that say "OK: These things are blanket banned, these things are fair game just don't break US laws; these things are open season". It would be doable to segregate Jailbait / Trees / Atheism along those lines and remove some fears.
* Edited for grammar, typos, wording of first sentence.
The philosophy degree in me screams that there's something wrong with that phrase.
Wiki calls them 'Conditional or questionable fallacies', which is a bit less punchy. Do you have a better name?
Not arguing with you on the merits of the OPs argument, but a slippery slope argument is not necessarily a fallacy.
It's only a fallacy if one doesn't logically connect the first event with each subsequent event in the chain.
You can check wikipedia if you'd like some examples of fallacious and non-fallacious slippery slope arguments.
The stuff that was allowed on reddit would get you an instant, permanent ban on pretty much every website on the internet.
Do you even know what SOPA, PIPA or ACTA do? Reddit has voluntarily taken the stance they won't allow the trade and index of child pornography on their website.
That has got nothing to do with DNS takedowns for linking to copyrighted material. It was a private decision made by a private company.
And good. The idea that people would support the exploitation of children because they have somehow wrapped it up inside of "free speech" is completely disgusting and embarrassing. Yes, you have the right to free speech, so long as it does not infringe on the liberties of others.
No one argues that illegal content should not be removed, and uploaders banned. Which was already being done. Child pornography was never allowed on reddit, and was removed as it was reported.
This is not preventing 'exploitation of children', it's just a majority censoring topics it finds inconvenient/disturbing.
It's preventing the trade of child pornography. How on earth do you not see this as exploitative?
>It's weird how reddit was a bastion for resisting SOPA/ACTA but fear mongering in US can take over a site.
That has nothing to do with SA.
Production of child pornography is exploitative for sure. Trade? Not really, but I accept it should be illegal because it provides incentive for production. However this is not about explicit child pornography, which was never allowed on reddit and was being removed as soon as someone noticed it. Nothing changed there - it will still be banned as soon as someone will notice it. No gain from the change of stance. What has changed, however, is the banning of content that is not illegal, but that some people find disgusting/creepy.
Well then you are incredibly naive. Do you understand what "exploit" means? They're exploiting either the naivety of the children taking these photos, or the naivety of the people who posted them to the internet.
The damage isn't finished being done after the photo has been taken. The damage happens in the way that these photos are then used. Imagine doing something foolish in school and then being teased for it. Did the damage stop happening after the original act was completed, or is there damage happening in the act of teasing as well?
The fact that there are people who think that this should be protected ("this" being: the exploitation and sexualization of children) is a embarrassing to anybody [read: most people] who believes in free speech.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
please.
>Do you understand what "exploit" means? They're exploiting either the naivety of the children taking these photos, or the naivety of the people who posted them to the internet.
I'm not sure what kind of pictures are we talking about here. Child pornography or teenagers in underwear posing to a mirror? If the first, then it is the act of taking the photos that is exploitative. Whatever happens afterward is only immoral because it incentivises more production.
>The damage isn't finished being done after the photo has been taken. The damage happens in the way that these photos are then used. Imagine doing something foolish in school and then being teased for it.
I don't find anything wrong with a teenage girl being teased about a photo she posted to the internet. Teased, not bullied - but bullying is wrong whatever the cause, so we do not need new rules for this. No real damage done, and the embarrassment might teach her to be more careful on the internet (same with boys, of course - but there is less social pressure on them, so not as much teasing I would guess).
>The fact that there are people who think that this should be protected ("this" being: the exploitation and sexualization of children) is a embarrassing to anybody [read: most people] who believes in free speech.
If sexualization of children is so wrong, why are all the 'miss 6 year old' shows legal?
Well that's telling.
Perhaps we have a different understanding what it means to tease someone. For me it means (and the free dictionary seems to agree) to annoy, make fun of, mock playfully without degrading the person.
More to the point, you are misunderstanding the stage at which the girl is victimized; when she is ridiculed. You are definitively blaming the victim if you think it's her fault that people other than her traded the photo around for whatever purpose leads to the teasing.
Kids kill themselves over this stuff, it's not so simple as, "deal with the consequences."
But of course it's easier to blame 'those paedophiles on the internet' than 'my little innocent boy'
/r/trees is not the same, and I hate slippery-slope arguments predicting its demise. Exchanging actual marijuana is illegal in many parts of the United States. Exchanging information about marijuana is not. You could download kiddie porn on /r/jailbait, and the fact that those images are actually hosted on imgur is unlikely to convince any court. But you wouldn't download marijuana on /r/trees, would you? If /r/trees or /r/atheism ever gets banned, it will be the result of a completely different kind of pressure. It won't be a straightforward extension of reddit's current policy on kiddie porn.
Reddit may or may not be dying, but its latest change of policy on kiddie porn will probably have little to do with its fate.
And there's a lot of rules broken on /r/trees so it's far from safe. Like meetups to exchange or people giving tips. That's not legal in US and happens quite often there.
Same with /r/atheism, a lot of their content can be labeled hate speech under US law. (IANAL)
There are (dubiously) "hate crime" laws, but they pertain to violent crime.
In a similar vein, I'm not so sure about your legal analysis about "arranging meetups" and "providing tips" on marijuana forums. The reason mj forums don't want people arranging meetups probably has more to do with not creating an easy venue for sting operations.
(Disclosure: it's sad it took Reddit this long to apply this rule, and more than a little repulsive to see people up in arms about it.)
On this particular thread, I'd like to make sure my comments are as clear as I can make them: Reddit did the right thing, and the only complaint I can make is that they took too long and their reasoning wasn't great.
I don't agree with the decision because it's apparent that it was a simple reaction to pressure from, well, lots of different places. I disagree with it because there isn't a solid brightline defense of this decision in light of other subreddits that they not only tolerate, but openly endorse.
To write a post discussion the speech implications of this decision and to end it with "repulsion" of those who disagree is insulting.
But breaking rules in a subreddit is different from having a subreddit where the only possible means of participation is to break the law by posting links to CP. If everybody obeyed the rules in /r/trees, that subreddit might still contain interesting content. If everybody obeyed the law in /r/jailbait, that subreddit simply could not exist. It's a fine difference, but it makes all the difference.
Also, FYI, the U.S. Constitution offers very strong protections for hate speech. It's not like some other countries (cough Germany cough Canada cough) where you can get fined for uttering racial slurs.
That being said, none of the jailbait subreddits had any CP on them. Those who claim that this was a move against child pornography and child exploitation are being disingenuous. There was no child porn nor exploitation. What there was was suggestive pictures of minors. The content was distasteful, not illegal.
Now, I firmly support reddit's right to ban those subreddits on whatever grounds they choose. What's more, I think it was the right move to make. I am disheartened, however, to see people conflate the content that was removed with child porn. The images on those subreddits were largely pulled from facebook and the like. Yes, there were a couple subreddits devoted to the so-called "model" agencies where clothed children were photographed in suggestive poses, and I find that creepy and distasteful in the extreme, but it is not porn, any more than the Victoria's Secret catalog is porn.
It doesn't do anyone any good to use disingenuous language to conflate the issues we're talking about. Reddit got rid of about a dozen creepy and distasteful, but fully legal subreddits devoted to suggestive pictures of clothed minors. Despite my misgivings about censorship and free speech, I support this decision. That does not, however, mean that I am willing to use dishonesty to make those subreddits seem worse than they were, or argue that this was a decision about preventing child exploitation. It simply wasn't. This was about removing subreddits that the majority of redditors found distasteful and a black mark on reddit. It was about avoiding another PR boondoggle like the one that followed Anderson Cooper's report. That's all. It need not be any more than that for it to still have been the right decision.
Never once have I seen this. I've seen ONE meetup and it was in a state where medical use is legal and even then, there's no law against conspiring to meet up to talk about and or consume marijuana. "conspiracy to get high".
Give tips about what? Stupid ways to make a bong out of a gatorade bottle? Scandalous!
>Same with /r/atheism, a lot of their content can be labeled hate speech under US law.
I just spit onto my keyboard a bit. Besides the fact that hate speech is not illegal, I can't think of anything that is purely hateful enough to be deemed hate speech in that subreddit.
Still, I strongly suspect this isn't purely about legality. Reddit has come under fire (first, in the press regarding jailbait, and more recently by somethingawful users) for having content that's not necessarily illegal, but rather just creepy. Most of the top comments on this post share this interpretation, and most seem to approve of banning creepy content. If other commenters are to be believed, it also appears that many of the banned subreddits contained fairly "standard" pornography and either had strict "no minor" or "no nudity/sex" policies.
What a subreddit's policy says is less important than what actually gets posted there and/or what people expect to find there. Would you go to /r/truejailbait, /r/lolicon, or /r/preteen_girls expecting to find pictures of adults in non-revealing outfits? No, the expectation is that those subreddits will contain child porn or something similar.
> What a subreddit's policy says is less important than what actually gets posted there and/or what people expect to find there.
What's the line? What if someone posts a single nefarious link on /r/nsfw, or for that matter, something completely unrelated like /r/askscience? It seems like you're proposing that outlier illegal content should result in the banning of a subreddit if the subreddit is "creepy," but not if the subreddit is "normal."
> the expectation is that those subreddits will contain child porn or something similar.
You're hinting at the important problem of defining child pornography. Are pictures of minors in swim suits child pornography? Sure, it's creepy to think about adults surfing for those pictures, but is it even borderline illegal? I don't think so. I think reddit has every right to ban whatever they want (although it seems to go against the stated purpose of their site), but it seems a bit disingenuous to claim that it's at all about legality unless it truly is.
But I still don't think this means that reddit from now on will readily bow to public accusations of creepiness. This time, illegality, administrative burden, creepiness, and moral principles all happened to coincide. I don't think the same set of circumstances will easily obtain with respect to /r/trees or /r/atheism, which @alecco worries about. Illegality alone would not justify blanket censorship of "grey area" stuff. Creepiness alone, or moral qualms alone, would not justify censorship, either.
From the announcement: We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal.
When somebody else says things like that, we are often sceptical about that, and for good reasons. But I think reddit admins have earned enough trust among its regulars over the years to merit a more charitable reading. I doubt that they would ban entire subreddits for a small number of nefarious links if the subreddits themselves had other legitimate purposes. Maybe they'll tell the mods to take better care of their communities, but delete them unilaterally? Unlikely. That's the point I was originally trying to make; sorry for the diversion.
Yes, the good reason is that this announcement is doing exactly what that sentence promises they won't do. Of course, they have the right to do whatever they want with their site, but that line is a blatant lie without the added clause "except for this case."
The administrative burden excuse seems half-hearted and almost a throwaway line. Also, regardless of the reddit admins' views, the views of many top commenters is that this is an appropriate moderation whether or not it's illegal.
Except for that now the Obama administration is trying to charge anyone who speaks out in favor of drug reform under the RICO laws, which carry a possible death penalty. Some Montana legislator was just charged a couple weeks ago.
Apparently she hasn't been charged yet, she's currently being investigated, but it seems that RICO is the framework that they are considering using to charge her.
You've extrapolated from a single question from a single investigator to a nonexistent death penalty case and pinned it all on an imaginary Obama administration mandate to charge everyone involved in medical marijuana advocacy. That's not the story here.
I've heard of the same thing in /r/trees; Eg. seed exchanges and more.
FWIW, that's just speculation. I think a more plausible explanation is the bad publicity from CNN.
That's not what they did. What they did was to say that suggestive content featuring minors is prohibited. I feel like a broken record, but I guess I need to keep reiterating this: Romeo and Juliet is suggestive content featuring minors.
> You could download kiddie porn on /r/jailbait
No you couldn't. Nothing pornographic or illegal was ever allowed on /r/jailbait. It might have gotten posted a few times, but the submitters would have been banned.
Yes, it would be easier to not take a stance on things like this, because then we could argue from the superior position of "I've never censored anything (well except posting personal information...)," but that would make us complicit in the trading of child pornography.
So, instead, I say we accept that we now have the harder job of drawing lines and judging what is and not allowable. Accept that the harder thing is to go "I am against SOPA/ACTA in all its forms, but am against being complicit against the trade of child pornography and will ~censor~ it if necessary" because life isn't about black and whites, and sometimes we have to make compromises for the greater good. (EDIT: spelling, grammar)
At the very least can I be told what my post did wrong and/or what norms I have broken to get this reception?
Further, the legal definition for child pornography is, in many cases, not what people expect. The EFF has a primer that touches on this: https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/adult
If reddit begins cracking down on protected speech like you'd find in /r/trees and /r/atheism, you've got a point. But when reddit (finally) decides to crack down on something that is plainly not legal speech, you're fear mongering with the best of them.
Inside your link it says, for something to be considered "obscene":
>The Miller test stems from Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973), in which the US Supreme Court held that material is obscene if each of the following factors is satisfied:
>1) Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
>2) Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable law;
>3) Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
So, by law ALL THREE of the "obscene" criteria have to be met for it to be considered obscene. I want to focus in on #2, because I don't think pictures of children in bathing suits is sexual in nature. If it were, then taking your children out in public wearing said bathing suit would be illegal too... Now, people looking at those pictures may be sexualizing these images in the head, but the images themselves break no laws and show no nudity. So why exactly is reddit drawing the line there? Also, why is Toddlers in Tiaras fine? (there's a subreddit for that too). I don't understand what makes it so different to you (and to reddit admins).
I kept reading and further down in your link it says:
>Child pornography is any visual depiction, where "(A) the producing of such visual depiction involves the use of a minor [under 18] engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and (B) such visual depiction is of such conduct." 18 U.S.C. § 2252 The law prohibits knowingly possessing or transmitting (including by computer) child pornography.
I'm positive that children in swimsuits does not constitute being sexually explicit, so I'm still not getting why you are considering it illegal...
Finally, you say >when reddit (finally) decides to crack down on something that is plainly not legal speech
Yet, based on the legal definition that you provided these subreddits, for the most part, are participating in legal, albeit creepy, speech. Anything illegal has been removed and delt with according to law. Not sure who the real fear monger is here, but calling pictures of children in bathing suits "not legal speech" is disingenuous at best.
No, it's not only on their head. It's written right underneath the photos by redditors, ie: "my d* is so hard right now". So the picture by itself may be harmless, but the post as a whole puts children in a highly sexualized context.
To make matters worse, threads sometimes include links to fully illegal material on some download server. The bikini photos sometimes are just the thumbnail...
I doubt that's the case with Toddlers & Tiaras.
The Dost test establishes if an image depicts lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area. If it does, it's considered child pornography.
Read on the six Dost factors. Note that it's not a bright line test -- you don't need all six to be true for an image of the genitals to be considered lascivious.
The Wikipedia article on the Dost test is quite apropos:
>Concerning the lascivious display of clothed genitalia, the Department of Justice described use of the Dost test in child pornography and 2257 documentation regulations in a 2008 rule, writing that the precedent United States v. Knox, 32 F.3d 733 (3d Cir. 1994) did not prohibit ordinary swim team or underwear model photographs, but "although the genitals were clothed in that case, they were covered by thin, opaque clothing with an obvious purpose to draw attention to them, were displayed by models who spread or extended their legs to make the pubic and genital region entirely visible to the viewer, and were displayed by models who danced or gyrated in a way indicative of adult sexual relations."
The distinction is not nearly as clear as you claim it to be.
Check out http://www.reddit.com/r/depthhub where they take a different approach: it's a meta-reddit where they link high-quality discussions from the various niche subject-specific reddits. A random example that's on there right now: /r/ludology discusses the tension between plot and choice in games.
They, at best, misunderstand the issue at hand.
and
>Sure, a lot of questionable/creepy subreddits shouldn't be there. But where's the line? And who draws it?
The way to deal with a dilution of community quality is communicate and enforce stricter standards. Ban more stuff. Not because of a moral panic, but because the trolls, spammers, pornographers, etc.. can trash your site with force disproportionate to their numbers. You can't fight Eternal September unless you lay down some serious boundaries.
Of course, before the internet, communities were a more-or-less involuntary phenomenon. They were defined by geography, history, a common resource, or a common industry. Contrast that to online communities that are largely viewed as self-directed, voluntary organizations. This is the view, I think, that will eventually have to change.
This view is poisonous for two reasons. First, as we see here, if anyone, anywhere in an online community (no matter how large) does something offensive, objectionable, or illegal, the knee-jerk reaction of society today is to allow that bad apple to spoil the bunch. Second, this makes it very difficult to form heterogeneous communities online. If I associate with people randomly online, I am a Google search away from being associated with a potential thief/pervert/whatever. The end result is that online communities become insular, or they can only function well under a banner of anonymity, but anonymity has its own problems.
Reddit, it seems to me, struck a useful middle ground: partial anonymity with history (I can create an identity that does not lead back to my real life identity, but can still build up a reputation). Unfortunately, Reddit is still a business. It seems to me that something like Reddit, but based on a distributed model, is what we need.
Let's call it...usenet
hueypriest (Reddit admin) says:
/r/trees isn't in remotely the same legal area as CP stuff. Not even close. They'll ban /r/trees when they pry it out of our cold dead hands.
And yet, facilitating a drug transaction is almost definitely illegal. Posting torrent links is at least legally dangerous. Sure, these things haven't become problems yet, but neither were the other things a couple years ago.
What the Reddit admins are saying right now is that anything goes, as long as it doesn't represent a plausible legal threat that can be waged against them. This is fine. The problem is that Reddit doesn't know that they're saying this. They think it's about CP, but it's not, it's about legal threat.
Contrast, as you seem to want to, with /r/trees. How many posts in /r/trees get taken down due to their questionable legality? How many posts in /r/letstradetorrents (apocryphal) get taken down due to their questionable legality? None and none. The nature of CP on the Internet is unique, and not viewed similarly to anything else on the Internet. Reddit isn't saying "as long as it doesn't represent a plausible legal threat that can be waged against them", they're saying, "as long as it's not CP, and as long as it's manageable through an ad-hoc process."
Due to the SomethingAwful attack, or due to some other, unknown reason, the volume of CP was too high to continue to deal with it on an ad-hoc basis. That is all.
Contrast, as you seem to want to, with /r/trees. How many posts in /r/trees get taken down due to their questionable legality? How many posts in /r/letstradetorrents (apocryphal) get taken down due to their questionable legality? None and none. The nature of CP on the Internet is unique, and not viewed similarly to anything else on the Internet. Reddit isn't saying "as long as it doesn't represent a plausible legal threat that can be waged against them", they're saying, "as long as it's not CP, and as long as it's manageable through an ad-hoc process."
I agree that it is not yet a problem. Reddit has not yet been taken down by the FBI because of widespread drug trade on r/trees. Nor have they been sued because of torrent links. What I question is how long it will take before these things become issues?
What I'm asking is: what is it about CP that makes it the only possible legal threat that Reddit can face? Reddit is still a maturing community that can evolve in many different ways. Reddit's policy is not about CP specifically, it's about credible legal threat. This is not what they say, but what they mean. If you think otherwise, I invite you to tell me what they will do if a non-CP related legal threat comes along.
r/trees -- come on. They're currently walking a very thin line but it's just a matter of time until people start crossing it. Case in point: http://www.reddit.com/r/NYCtrees/comments/mw8h0/someet_up/
It was one cautious commenter away from being a thread all about where to meet up to do and buy illegal drugs. You think that just because you say "share" with a wink and a nod everyone's immune from prosecution?
Even the second comment is how to be safe and not attract too much attention. The third top comment suggests that it be a "treeless" meetup.
In the interest of fairness, I've never been to /r/nyctrees before and it's certainly a different style than trees. I'm still not sure anything there looks like dealing and again, I don't really see "hey, let's get high and meetup in [some] park" as being that dangerous or scandalous.
I ran a community once, with around 30k active users. Definitely not big, but we faced the same problems. Our solution was simple, aside from adhering to the law: "Mods delete what looks icky".
We felt that automated systems would always fail (users would use "4" instead of "a"), and strict policies always led to debate about whether something was allowed or not.
Instead we tried to recruit mods that knew the community, the direction it was heading and were able to keep a level head. Sure, someone went overboard once in a while and deleted o.k. stuff, but we'd just remove their mod privileges and reinstate what they deleted (thinks were removed from the database 14 days after they were marked as "deleted").
We were never accused of harboring pedophiles, or going overboard with removal. Those that complained about free-speech were always radical political groups well outside of "acceptable" for most communities.
The key is to find moderators in line with the community, in a benevolent dictator way. No idea if reddit could find enough of those, but it worked well for us and should scale with community size, as reddit has a larger pool to recruit from.
Sure reddit has overall mods but they do not usually get involved and communities manage themselves which usually leads to a lack of coherent policy in regards to what is acceptable and not.
Is the issue just that Reddit is run by a smaller team than these larger companies?
So I woud say they have decided to live woth a certain ongoing level of shitstorming as a cost of doing buiness.
I would like to see a lot more emphasis be put on the decision between serving the will of the users, establishing a set of ideals that Reddit chooses to run things by, or a mixture of the two.
So either the small group gets to do things that may damage the larger site (and be illegal), or the larger group squelches the smaller group's freedom by singling them out. It's a lose-lose situation from a purely community standpoint.
Realistically, I support the message that they're sending - That child sexualization is blanket banned because it's too resource intensive to define and monitor shades of gray, and it's a unique issue. The very active marijuana, racism, or even black hat netsec communities may support illegal/gray-area things, but are far less likely to get the site branded as a kiddie-porn hive, which would basically be a death-penalty to the community, or attacked various governments.
Sometimes admins just have to make some executive calls to protect their business, even if they're hypocritical from a strict standpoint. I'd say reddit's defacto bill of rights is still pretty strong for a web community.
Instant account creation, plus complete anonymity, plus groupthink inside of subreddits...
The first "community police action" of reddit would probably be all the Battlefield 3 fans removing all the Call of Duty subreddits.
:)
A Rape in Cyberspace
How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society
First published in The Village Voice, December 23, 1993
What has set Metafilter apart from slashdot, K5, Digg and Reddit was that after the initial burst of building a good community it became $5 to join.
That keeps out the morons and pays for moderators to get rid of the asshats.
If HN wants to keep up the quality before the hordes arrive it'd be a good move here too or it will be a matter of time before the idiots kill the place.
WUT NET WUZ THIS GUY ON? K5/adequacy/early slashdot/b3ta/whatever... nothing like the internet of today. the volume of users alone leads to emergent (gross) behavior that before was drowned out in an invisible minority. USENET, IRC, same thing. You could find shady things if you looked for them, but no one (I knew of) actively did. Occasionally gross stuff would pop up in a listing of newsgroups, but you just didn't click.
No one envies reddit, but they should've changed their policy earlier. Better late than never.
If they already made a decision why would they not act on it at the same time /r/jailbait was banned?
This whole thing smells like they got their hands forced, which is what worries me.
This traffic report isn't accurate, but the trend is right (from what I've heard): http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com/
Nothing that got banned was "basically child pornography." That's why there is blood in the water.
You're full of shit if you're trying to tell me otherwise.
Of course, people do overreact sometimes, but I think this is our instinct for a very good reason.
Don't get me wrong. If my son was a victim I would probably want nothing but hell for the person who did it.
But I also sometimes can't help but feel that society and the media is actually making matters worse, than they already are.
The worst part is this emotional response is so easy to exploit. It can be "think of the children" laws with unintended (or intended) side effects. Or, like in this case, it can be used as a weapon to attack a person or community (even if I agree with the outcome, this particular instance feels like SA attacking Reddit either out of genuine outrage or, more likely, for shits and giggles).
The hypocricy is strong in this one.
My point? Reddit began banning political opinion long before it banned kiddie porn. Reddit's admins don't give a damn about freedom of speech and opinion.
Furthermore, Reddit is a private organization, and they don't have to give a damn about freedom of speech.
> Reddit is a private organization, and they don't have to give a damn about freedom of speech.
Agreed. They should stop acting like they care when they don't.
I don't know what you said, where, and in what context... but I don't give benefit of doubt on this. Nor do I think you're guilty either... all I do know is that running a community is hard, and one of the things that the people of the community look to moderators to do is to keep the peace.
A difference of opinion can be minor, or major. And depending on the topic it can be quite offensive to some.
Have you considered that within a particular subreddit that the moderators were just trying to keep the peace? Has anything stopped you from starting your own subreddit to voice your opinion?
The below article was deleted from the queue in r/politics and I've been unable to post articles in politics and a few other subreddits ever since, using a particular handle from a particular IP.
Ron Paul’s Challenge to the Left: http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/07/a-question-of-morality-ron...
My point stands: reddit has been complicit in silencing political opinion long before it began worrying about whether child porn should be allowed or not.
You have also mistaken the views and actions of a specific community for the views and actions of the site owners. Anyone (yes, even you) can go start a subreddit whenever they want, and restrict content however they want, even if that includes suppressing information they don't agree with or banning users with whom they disagree. The idea behind reddit is that people show their support for a specific community by frequenting and contributing to it. If you don't agree with the way a community is being run, you are free to find a better one or even to start your own.
I'be had discussions with subreddit moderators and reddit admins. The majority of them dislike my political opinions, thus the active censorship.
To restate my point: reddit has been actively deleting unpopular political opinion long before they thought about restricting kiddie porn.
That kind of prioritizing is what's been instrumental in the herd of geniuses that now inhabit reddit.
The difference here is that now Reddit has banned subreddits for encouraging people to post "creepy," though not necessarily illegal, content. It's always been the case that subreddit admins could ban you for whatever they wanted.
I think that the (unique?) problem with child issues is that if you allow things that are clearly not illegal (just 'creepy'), you'll draw a community that 1) Looks illegal from the outside and 2) Will, with very high probability, be doing illegal things over the messaging system or private/side boards.
To the greater world, 1 and 2 are enough for a high profile lawsuit or media blitz that would effectively be a death penalty for the community.
Then there are cases like the Christopher Handley manga case in Iowa, where he plead guilty to avoid the risk of a longer sentence for possession of purely fictional manga that a jury of his peers may well have deemed "obscene".
It would be pretty unfortunate if literature couldn't even seriously deal with the subject! (Incidentally, it's pretty hard to read Lolita as being pro-pedophilia; if anything, it's an extended, mostly negative investigation into the protagonist's psyche, although many pages in literary journals have been spent arguing over how to interpret it.)
Companies and/or websites can ban almost any speech or writing they would like. It's not unconstitutional, because corporations aren't considered a governmental/Congressional body.
But wanted to highlight that the law can ban speech, despite the First Amendment. For example, in 1982 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that child porn was not protected by the First Amendment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_v._Ferber
Laws can also ban material deemed obscene. The Miller test is the standard there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_v._California
What about Adrian Lyne's 1997 movie, Lolita? It has artistic merit, but arguably not as much as the novel.
What about girls' dancing and gymnastics? Should photography of those activities, even including women's international gymnastics competitions, be banned just because, viewed with an eye toward prurience, they might qualify? Certainly the activities have artistic value, but how much?
What about purely fictional depictions of minors, either in manga (see the case of Christopher Handley's manga possession) or even in fictional stories that may not be deemed to have serious literary merit?
There is a lot of fiction from the perspective of non-sympathetic characters. If doesn't mean that those who appreciate the insight the fiction provides into the character, or the character's circumstance, are advocates of the character or the circumstance itself.
Besides, no actual child was abused in the production of these works, unlike with films and pictures with actual underage models; and potential harm to future children is a rather shaky basis to justify flushing the First Amendment down the drain. That's the argument that ACLU's Nadine Strossen used two decades ago against censorship of (non-child) pornography. I see no reason why the same argument won't apply to child pornographic literature.
But private websites are a different matter, and there's nothing wrong with a moderator who chooses whether or not to discriminate on the basis of perceived literary quality on his or her own site. Many forums ban discussions about religion and politics altogether, but that doesn't infringe anybody's Constitutional rights.
> I confused about why he thinks it ironic
> that Nabakov is banned...