Things to Love About Reddit’s First Transparency Report
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Good on Reddit for not being swayed, but they'd better keep their servers out of the UK.
Here in the "libel capital of the world" hosting providers are treated as co-publishers of allegedly libellous content once we've been notified of it on our network. We _have_ to act, though many complainants don't really understand the precedent and try to hand-wave us into taking down a whole site without giving any specifics.
I wrote https://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2010/02/07/adventures-in-libel-o... in 2010 though Simon Singh's case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Chiropractic_Associatio... was a precedent that improved things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communitie...
Ideal world: Reddit admins would only delete things that are illegal according to the local laws where their servers are located. Then they would only focus on making sure the platform works and leave the content policing to moderators of individual subreddits.
Reddit bans doxxing, which I think is protected speech in USA, because it can be used to out people who run bigoted subreddits.
(I agree that the ban happens to protect those users, I find it highly unlikely that this is a motivation for it)
> If you are like everyone else on the Internet, your immediate response is "Whoever is saying that is obviously a racisty racist who loves racism! I can't believe he literally used the 'I'm not racist, but...' line in those exact words! The old INRB! I've got to get home as fast as I can to write about this on my blog and tell everyone I really met one of those people!"
If you've trained yourself to knee-jerk whenever you hear certain buzzwords, you're probably being intellectually dishonest.
This is an adorable fallacy, but it's also the kind of thing that would get fixed in a freshman-level philosophy seminar. If you think that you're furthering the development of a just society by ignoring any dissenting opinions, you're not likely to accomplish much.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/
If you want some further reading on these toxic people I recommend this Julia Serano interview. http://www.ravishly.com/2015/02/05/how-make-queer-and-femini...
If you want some perspective on why people hate SJWs this post is also good.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-word...
Money quote
>I feel like every single term in social justice terminology has a totally unobjectionable and obviously important meaning – and then is actually used a completely different way. The closest analogy I can think of is those religious people who say “God is just another word for the order and beauty in the Universe” – and then later pray to God to smite their enemies. And if you criticize them for doing the latter, they say “But God just means there is order and beauty in the universe, surely you’re not objecting to that?”
>The result is that people can accuse people of “privilege” or “mansplaining” no matter what they do, and then when people criticize the concept of “privilege” they retreat back to “but ‘privilege’ just means you’re interrupting women in a women-only safe space. Surely no one can object to criticizing people who do that?”
>…even though I get accused of “privilege” for writing things on my blog, even though there’s no possible way that could be “interrupting” or “in a women only safe space”.
>When you bring this up, people just deny they’re doing it and call you paranoid.
>When you record examples of yourself and others getting accused of privilege or mansplaining, and show people the list, and point out that exactly zero percent of them are anything remotely related to “interrupting women in a women-only safe space” and one hundred percent are “making a correct argument that somebody wants to shut down”, then your interlocutor can just say “You’re deliberately only engaging with straw-man feminists who don’t represent the strongest part of the movement, you can’t hold me responsible for what they do” and continue to insist that anyone who is upset by the uses of the word “privilege” just doesn’t understand that it’s wrong to interrupt women in safe spaces.
>I have yet to find a good way around this tactic.
1. Believes in equality of outcome
2. Believes in total war for the cause.
So basically, every phenomenon (like language, culture, everyday behaviour) should be judged by whether it brings us closer to equality of outcome. If it leads the wrong direction it should be banned, if it leads in the right direction it should be mandated. People who refuse to comply should be punished harshly.
Though in general, I would say Reddit does benefit from allowing lousy subreddits. Not because those subreddits are good things. But the policy of allowing easy creation of subreddits is also what's made Reddit good. There are plenty of great niche subreddits.
Once you get into quality control, it's going to reduce the potential for the creation of good communities too. You also need a lot more admins.
By banning that subreddit, and creep pics etc. the admins have already made some broad stances on what is or is not acceptable. Banning them as the reemerge can not be, I imagine, such a huge task as to require multiple people.
In fact in the current system such demands are not only legal but are rewarded. Police will call the resulting evidence "voluntary" even if the company had no idea it was volunteering anything (and thought, often because they didn't hire a lawyer, it was required).
Small companies in particular who don't have a staff lawyer, and who don't want to spend a thousand dollars in fees to check an incoming request, are particularly susceptible. Even if they do have a lawyer on retainer, that lawyer may not specialise in this type of law.
Given how widely they're used in the U.S., spreading the word that you can just ignore them seems like a good idea. If that's true.
That said, there could be all kinds of reasonable explanations for what happened, including automated anti-abuse defenses that malfunctioned.
TwoX is a default and at least before I quit the site a contrary view in that sub was likely to earn a shadowban. I understand the mods have to deal with trolls but when contrary viewpoints are being censored as "trolling" it's gone too far.
The toxicity of the reddit's "social justice" movement and SRS in particular is poisoning the site and making discourse about controversial topics nearly impossible.
I agree with having safeguards against things like hate-speech, I disagree with how conveniently and broadly that's defined by certain people in order to push their social and political agendas.
I was also talking about default subs where people are being activists and pushing stories to the front-page. Blowback is a part of activism, if somebody gets pissed about a social justice story that's been pushed to the default front-page that's different from the person who searches out a LGBT sub to go pick a fight.
SRS and the SJW subs aren't default subs. So don't use SRS as an example of "all of reddit".
SRS wasn't supposed to be the point of this but I feel confident that any reasonable person who reads their FAQ will realize they aren't just keeping to themselves. Their reason for existence is to change the entire site. They justify and celebrate their bullying tactics.
Out of respect, and since my last throwaway has already lost posting privileges I must bow out of this discussion. But I'll leave you with some thoughts from Christopher Hitchens on free speech. Earlier in the video you can hear the arguments for abandoning free speech, I think the reasons given for this are often as hateful and fearful as everything they fight against but I'm linking the version of the video with their arguments, in their words, left in.
This type of commenting is done to dehumanize and marginalize those you disagree with so you don't have to think about what they're saying. It's bad for discourse and it's how echo-chambers are built.
Perhaps /pol/ would be more your speed.
Has that changed?
http://www.dailydot.com/business/reddit-admin-intortus-leave...
I decided to stop by for old time's sake and found this on the front-page: http://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2v39v2/what_popula...
Free speech on reddit is a privilege of the powerful, not a right of the powerless.
But that's neither here nor there; my point was that not all censorship is wrong, and based on this comment, it seems you agree.
It's more like they'll be quick to ban things that make noise and make them look bad. There are lots of creepy or illegal small subs, it's not until there's a huge stink made about them that they'll act.
Lawyers were the cause of the deletion of that subreddit, not some censorship boogeyman. If you believe that Reddit should have weathered millions of dollars in possible legal fees in order to protect their user's ability to view illicit pictures of celebrities then take your problem to your congressman and the DMCA.
Notifying users of requests by law enforcement that they are legally allowed disclose is just stupid. What matters is the nature of the requests - not the number of them!
So it's not really clear what the best practice is here.
On a side note, I've been a reddit user for some years but this is the first time I've noticed that the name is preferred un-capitalized.