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It's a little sad, because there was definitely a sense, a few years ago, that Reddit was pretty much user-centered and therefore fully unrestricted, content-wise. You can choose what subreddits you belong to, or make new ones for whatever subject you want. The admins simply created the platform and set the defaults. Freedom!

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.

That to me is exactly the core issue. It's not as if these people were staying in their obscure subreddit, they were leaking out into advice forums and posting IAMA pedo threads and so on, scoring upvotes due to typical young male contrarianism. It was all creating the general impression that this was acceptable behavior which was commonly discussed by Redditors.

(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.

This is definitely an oversimplification of the history. Censorship is an active topic of furious debate. r/SRS, which is for all intents and purposes Reddit's White Guilt, self-censors extremely rigorously even as it invades other subreddits (not officially, but essentially). r/lgbt splintered to r/ainbow due to heavy-handed mod censorship (with allegations of connections to r/SRS and its heavy-handed trolling).

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.

"now the masses (and/or governments) dictate the content you are allowed to post"

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 can't help but feel this policy only serves lip service to "Stopping exploitation of kids". Personally, I think Reddit has the right to have whatever policies it wishes -- but this 'think of the children' argument is the same one that will be used to pass SOPA like regulation.

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.

If you don't like reddit's policy, it's pretty easy to take their open source code and set up your own clone. You'll likely run into the same issues at some point, though. There are always people out there that will want to do things that are incredibly detrimental to your business. Now that reddit is mainstream and one of the largest communities on the web, they're set up to be a huge target. You don't get popularity or legitimate money without policies regarding unsavory content.

In reddit's case, "think of the children" is a perfectly legitimate cry when the policy specifically is designed to stop exploitation of children.

It think reddit acted entirely reasonably. I just wanted to point out that this argument holds huge emotional weight which will likely be the justification for SOPA-like regulation.

"but this 'think of the children' argument is the same one that will be used to pass SOPA like regulation."

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.

The only point I was making is, the 'think of the children' will be used to censor the internet by the gov't. Reddit is not censoring the internet. It's their own site.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120213/13212017749/canadi...

It's a tradeoff. If you want general-public-scale levels of traffic, you will be subject to the general public's social norms or face their wrath.

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.

> Back when there was usenet

NNTP is still alive. : )

This shit killed Usenet. Not just child porn, but that and a lot of things like it.

(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.)

This kind of response, using words like 'repulsive', is a form of thoughtless polarisation. I expect better from someone always up-in-arms about the quality of posts here. This is just flamebait.

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 agree that my wording isn't persuasive. It is, on the other hand, clear, which is my priority on this thread. Again, to be clear: I am repelled by any argument that suggests that it is unfortunate that Reddit is cracking down on child pornography.

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.

>it is unfortunate that Reddit is cracking down on child pornography.

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.

>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.

>The content posted to these subreddits was, for the most part, child pornography.

Allow me to be blunt: Bullshit.

You never actually looked at any of the subreddits removed, did you?

In passing, anyways. I find the whole child modeling scene and anything around it to be just plain weird on a good day.

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

What Reddit is banning now is not child pornography, at least not in the cut-and-dry sense. They were already filtering clearly illegal images, and reporting them to the authorities.

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.

Reddit was already cracking down on child pornography --- illegal content was actively searched and reported to the authrities already. What's happening here has nothing to do with CP (in the legal sense), but with public perception. It's a PR move, protects roughly 0 children, and that's why so many people don't really buy it.

should they also ban the lolicon subreddit?

In fact, they did ban the lolicon and respective male version along with the jailbait subreddits.

> 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

The real question is how far can you stretch this definition. If you find someone jacking off to a picture of a mother holding her newborn baby, is that image now 'sexual' and fair game for censorship? What about a couch[1]?

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGU7MlDYgXA