Reddit Readies For ‘Inter-website War,’ Major Subreddits Ban Links to Gawker
betabeat.com
betabeat.com
There was a great discussion on the implications a subreddit like r/creepshots can have on r/TwoXChromosomes last week. I haven't visited the site yet today, but I'd imagine they just alienated their entire female userbase (myself included), as if the users of that site didn't do enough of that already.
Edit: Can I get explanations for the downvotes?
The ultimate issue is not that an individual like Violentacrez exists, but instead that the community enables it.
> me to build out another alternative.
you could also just fork reddit: https://github.com/reddit/reddit
I don't go to Reddit anymore and I'm reading less and less comment threads here because of it's leakage.
If /r/creepshots gets banned it will be just another step towards suppression of completely legal speech, because of emotional hyperventilation that has no basis in reality.
Serious question: You're a man, right?
Go take a survey of your friends about this. I'll bet you find a strong difference of opinion along gender lines.
Think about why that might be.
Now think if the picture was taken at or around their workplace and what could happen. I can only imagine that there are bottomfeeders out there who went out of their way to try to locate where one of these women was.
While doxxing someone isn't the answer, something needs to be done so that bullies/trolls get the help they need and we can prevent something terrible from happening to one of the people posted.
I'm pretty sure I can't just relate to how this makes women feel. If somebody took my pictures without me knowing about it and a thread about the picture talking "nice ass" "what a handsome guy" it would just raise my self-esteem.
Of course I would think these women (or gay men) would be weird and a little sad, but nothing more.
Freedom of speech is not meant to protect someones feelings. It is in fact because of the opposite. It is meant to protect speech that can hurt someones feelings. Sure, they can be judged by the content of that speech but they should still be allowed to say it.
Only exceptions I can see to this are hate speech and child porn.
At the end of the day, in an era where facial- and location-recognition software are becoming more and more the norm, I don't need threads about my "nice ass" being tied to my face and my whereabouts on an open forum where anyone with a grudge against me personally or just somebody that hates my face could go and start drama without my presence and ability to defend myself.
In nearly every single thread with a picture of someone, there is a comment or two asking "Does this person live in X?" or "Is their name Y?" A (somewhat humiliating) photo of an acquaintance was posted and made it to the front page, and it seemed like everyone knew a girl that looked like her and named names, trying to work together to solve this unwanted mystery.
In the worst scenarios, you'll get exes that go off the rails and start listing off details about them before a mod finds the post. Privacy is a right, not a privilege, and while the lines blur and it becomes more of an ethical issue between who you trust with images/information you post online, it should still be treated from the perspective that gawkers should find their kicks elsewhere.
For people looking for more background on the drama:
http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/118qdg/the_r...
Also note that Saydrah, who appears to be defending him a bit, was a long-time reddit mod (also was an active 2Xer and is pretty pro-women's-rights). She used to be much more active but someone doxed her a couple years ago and found out she was a social-media marketer (including consulting on reddit promotion) and the reddit community turned on her pretty quickly. She was personally harassed and some members of her family were as well. Part of the female community on reddit also turned on her a bit (though not so agressively) when she posed -- in a non-provocative fully-clothed manner -- in the Reddit calendar in 2009.
http://reddithistory.wikia.com/wiki/Saydrah
http://www.reddit.com/r/InternetAMA/comments/11au8g/iama_say...
I got a little off track there but reddit has a pretty rich history with a wild cast of characters. Quite the soap opera.
Needless to say: Violentacerz isn't as one-dimensional as everyone assumes either, but he did do most of the things you've heard about.
There's a post somewhere, I'll try and locate it. I was an active redditor during the drama.
I'm a regular redditor, and in all honesty I wasn't aware of any of any of this drama- I don't go to any of the creppy, weird subreddits mentioned, and have long since removed /r/politics from my front page. So, "Reddit" isn't readying for anything- just some overly militant subreddits.
I'm also having a hard time drumming up sympathy for Gawker - they have consistently and repeatedly proven themselves to be complete unprofessionals, have zero journalistic integrity or credibility, and have some of the worst, borderline libelous "reporting" I've seen on any major blogs.
It's like Violentacres and Gawker are built for each other - morally I'd consider them in the same ballpark.
But /r/politics and /r/atheism aren't the targets. Did you see /r/jailbait, /r/upskirt, /r/CreepShots, etc before they were taken down? Do you really put child porn, upskirt photos, and trading strategies for creeping on unsuspecting women in public in the same moral ballpark as shitty journalism?
/r/ShitRedditSays is right to eliminate these communities from Reddit and shame the participants. Sexual predators need to be confronted globally in any forum they are present in, and community confrontation is exactly what most of the offenders need. The presence of Gawker in the affair is a small price to pay to help reduce sexual violence.
I really, really heavily disagree here. /r/ShitRedditSays is very much the opposite end of the spectrum from /r/creepshots (et al), and having the pendulum swing completely in the other direction is, IMO, just as bad.
Look at the content of /r/ShitRedditSays. Like, really look at it as a whole with a critical eye - you have a few truly egregious things getting called out, then you have people getting into a populist rage-fest over inane stupidity, and you also get a very large chunk of simply harassing people for going against groupthink/being controversial.
/r/ShitRedditSays is exactly the sort of censorship we don't want - i.e., an organized cabal of users who enforce their ideology on everyone else by means of harassment, ad hominem attacks, labeling, and drumming up massive populist outrage. Go up against /r/srs? Congrats, you are now a misogynistic racist gay-bashing bigot, regardless of what you actually said. Once /r/srs readers hook onto a thread all semblance of discussion stops. Silent downvotes plunge posts into oblivion with nary an explanation, combined with a litany of outraged replies, name-calling, and ad hominem attacks.
They're not the objective observers they think they are - like every other subreddit they have evolved their own groupthink and notion of what is acceptable and not, and it happens that they've settled into a fairly narrow definition of acceptable content (whereas /r/creepshots have a very very wide definition of acceptable content).
No, just no. /r/ShitRedditSays is not the solution to /r/creepshots and the like. You go from an open community with a fringe, disturbing element... to a closed community that toes the party line, or else.
And the Gawker network is after one thing, pageviews. So the more controversy they conjure up the better.
1. If you stand for free speech, you are going to be defending assholes and thugs and people who say disgusting things. We don't need free speech for people who emit rainbows. The ACLU defended the KKK's right to march, not because they thought the KKK was a bunch of nice guys or that the KKK would ever return the favor if the ACLU were in trouble.
2. It's more about the doxxing, which seems to be the one legal thing that isn't allowed on reddit. Either they have the policy that doxxing is horrible or they don't.
You can have a policy of "we are not allowed to publish personally identifying info of anyone."
You can have a policy of "we are allowed to publish personally identifying info of anyone at will," but you need to realize that it will also affect people you like as well as people you don't like.
What doesn't work is "we are allowed to publish personally identifying info of people that a sizable minority of the community thinks sucks."
Which is an argument that flies legally, but not morally depending on what you believe.
If you believe in free speech, then using the fact that your website is private to censor others is not a violation of the law, but it certainly seems like a violation of your own declared ideology. Which is to say, you would support free speech until it got inconvenient.
Reddit as a community seems to place a high value on free speech, so while they're under no legal obligation to keep things open, it would be a violation of its own declared ideology if they started censoring.
Note that I don't miss the creepy subreddits at all, but if you're one of the people on /r/politics, /r/atheism, or whatever who are quoting Voltaire all the time, it seems hypocritical to call for censorship.
Ultimately, I think it is exploitative of the reddit corporation and their masters to allow completely disgusting and clearly immoral content. This is 2012. The internet isn't the wild west anymore.
I support free speech but I certainly wouldn't allow the KKK to march through my backyard.
Exactly like all the pro-/r/CreepShots/ arguments.
Upskirts, panty shots, and the such are not legally protected, even if they are done in public. As a street photographer myself I'm quite familiar with the difference.
Which is to say, much of the content on /r/creepshots wouldn't pass legal muster, let alone the morality test.
Oh, it's ok to do it to violentacrez, but not to someone slightly less creepy? Are you in favor of the slightly less creepy guy? What about someone talking about drugs online? Hacking?
I'm not usually a 'principle-above-the-particulars' kind of guy but when it comes to free speech and privacy online, you've gotta keep it absolute.
Actually if that person is publically and actively opposing gay rights (e.g. political who blathers on about how bad gay people are and shouldn't have rights, and then is caught with a prostitute of the same gender), then yes, those people should be doxxes.
"You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices. It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others--after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?
"Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others' shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices..."
http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2006/03/21/hypocrisy_is_the_gre...
For better or worse, the reddit admins want free speech, in which the admins don't prohibit anything that isn't illegal in the US. The one exception, which they apply in a viewpoint-neutral basis, is doxxing. The policy is "no doxxing," not "no doxxing unless you really really hate someone."
Now, you can say that the doxxers were doing their version of protest. Civil disobedience, I guess, because they think that reddit's approach to free speech is wrong. We now have two mutually exclusive philosophies in conflict, and reddit will need to choose one of them.
There are numerous different defintions of free speech. Some countries draw the line in different places. E.g. in the USA, you cannot say "shout fire in a crowded theatre", and there are various laws against revelaing some USA military knowledge. All "right to free speech" laws have limits, as they should.
It's more about the doxxing, which seems to be the one legal thing
Here's a thought, in the EU, we have data protection/privacy law. It's illegal to release personal details of people unless it's within the law. I wonder is doxing illegal?
The folks in creepshots and its kin are in fact doing something against the law, and they should be shut down accordingly. This is not a free-speech issue.
Every country decides where to set it's limits, the USA is almost certainly the one that has a few limits as possible, but it has limits, it has set the line somewhere/
We have a moral obligation to protect free speech from government intrusion.
We have an equal or greater moral obligation to personally confront the KKK, and sexual predators in order to enforce moral standards within our community.
The government's job is to make sure we both get to speak, and don't kill each other over the disagreement. The first amendment has nothing to do with protecting KKK members from public shaming and expulsion for the views they profess.
"You" wasn't "you, thwest." It was to the reddit admins and their own desire to have a community of free speech. Once they, the reddit admins, decide that they, the reddit admins, want a community of free speech, then they, the reddit admins, are going to find themselves supporting the rights of assholes to speak.
I guess the question is whether that is a sensible policy. It may make sense to protect anonymity - I can see that - but does it make sense to protect nothing else? Is anonymity really the only true community value?
Violentacrez's speech rights do not automatically trump the privacy rights of his victims. His ideas and opinions can be communicated via speech that does not violate the rights of others, and so when balancing his speech rights against their privacy rights I'd favor the privacy rights.
Sure they are media and sure the media loves a witch hunt but the bottom line is that their actions are threatening and it's blatant blackmail. In my opinion their actions are as disgusting as their targets online activity.
It's easy to defend and justify stuff being anon.
Warning: most of those are exactly what it says on the tin. Pics of dead kids is exactly that.
He also claimed to have had sex with his (of legal age) stepdaughter (whom he raised from a very young age).
I suspected a lot of his activity was bluster just to get people riled up, but I think I'm in the minority, and probably completely wrong.
Take a look here, someone has already apparently been attacked because of these: http://www.reddit.com/r/CreepSquad/comments/11b39y/modpost_l...
Gawker has proved time & time again that it is a vile, ruthless company, I really wish this is an internet-wide ban.
People are going as far as disabling their facebook accounts to keep their personal and professional life separate - at least you have a degree of control on facebook. There's no control over what people associate your name with on the internet.
Concern troll red flag.
These people run multiple subreddits dedicated to ruining lives for sexual gratification and celebrity. I couldn't give less of a crap about what happens to them.
I am not sure if it is just because of the personal preference of the owners, or they do not want to waste time with enforcing at least basic civility, or is it some inherent part of the reddit's success that anything not illegal is allowed to be posted there?
It is actually an interesting moral question: Is someone allowed to publicly deanonymize someone else?
Just a coincidence, I guess.
And that just goes to show you the danger of writing anonymously on the Internet, the next person to use the same nickname as you might be a drama-causing pedo.
Does anyone know if there's some source for "violent acres / violet acres" that they're both riffing off of?