Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign
blogs.wsj.com
Most notable is /r/fatpeoplehate, which had become an extremely popular "fat-shaming" community.
blogs.wsj.com
(And if anyone has any doubts that this is ultimately about harassment, count how many of the posts on the front page (and their comments) are made up of personal attacks and/or obscenities targeted at CEO Ellen Pao.)
I don't fault the Reddit admins for trying to clean things up but I can't see any good that will come of this. To paraphrase a comment that I saw earlier today and now can't find, it's like trying to get rid of an anthill with a leaf-blower; you just end up with pissed-off ants everywhere.
EDIT: Ah, found it. It was in the "can I sue Reddit for violating my freedom of speech" thread in /r/legaladvice. http://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/39c58h/could_so...
I don't agree with censorship, however the two sites aren't comparable.
Lots of ads have fat shaming in them, so I'm not sure why you wouldn't want diet pill ads next to fat shaming posts. Have you read any fitness articles recently? It's pretty much fat shaming content, next to ads for things that might make you less fat.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/one-on-one-christop...
People can express their freedom of speech elsewhere, I am extremely pleased with reddit getting rid of the most egregious subreddits
To be fair, I kind of always assumed that moot and mods did what they did solely for the shits and giggles they themselves got out of it.
It's not like they were running a distinguished web portal that would bring them fame, riches, and glory; they run the sewage pit of the Internet.
A very small fraction of the worst bored on a bad website left to join an even worse website.
Don't kid yourself.
GamerGate seems to think that they are the majority of users on any given site. They're convinced that Twitter is going to fail if they leave. It's pretty amazing how much they misunderstand the scale of any large social platform.
This is not true, there was a massive controversy and subsequent schism less than a year ago.
A "folk history" (if you're feeling generous enough to call it that) of the episode here: https://encyclopediadramatica.se/M00t%27s_GamerGate_Sellout
If-and-when they do that, they will finally have an actually-effective tool (in the form of being able to ban people "for good") to stop harassment. Until then, it will just go on forever.
Ideally: imagine that the government of each state/country—who already have to work out how to deduplicate people for purposes of taxation, Social Security, etc.—acts as an OAuth identity provider. Then doing KYC becomes as simple as having a signup process that requires an OAuth login, and having a whitelist of identity providers you'll accept for that login (presumably just government ones, but there might be interesting edge-cases.)
In other words, imagine a site that detects the country you're coming from, and presents a single button saying "Sign Up with [name of country] Federal IDPass" or something similar.
The first time you see one, you'll probably be forced to set up your Federal IDPass account, which will likely be a huge hassle (though I could see it being as easy as showing up at e.g. your local post office with your regular physical ID. A process similar to voter registration.) Every time after that, it's like logging in with Google or Facebook.
All I mean is that your application (e-mail req for a ship) is processed by a human, and there's incentive to keep it that way (because there are objectively not enough 32-bit numbers for everyone to get their own.)
If you don't have one, you can still get on the network, you just have a 128-bit identity. It would be relatively easy to blacklist all of them if it becomes a case of abuse. At the scale of Reddit, you would probably need the help and intervention of the government (or at least some multiple of current staff devoted solely to new user onboarding) to prevent an impossibly large backlog from forming.
Maybe I'm overestimating the number of unique individual new users that sign up to reddit every day.
And because of that, any company that did this would have a sort of natural monopoly. So the respective government would have to at least regulate them a bit to avoid them exploiting their users. A "crown corporation", in the British terminology. (In British Columbia we have ICBC, a crown-corporation insurance company, as the issuer of physical ID, which works well enough.)
I only noticed what was up when The Verge wrote an article on it, for example, since I tend to browse subreddits directly.
Even political cartoons with her driving the tank and the reddit alien with a down vote in front were getting deleted, which were quite funny and appropriate, since she was shadow banning and deleting people basically for down voting her law suit.
It's tough to stand up and defend the fatpeoplehate group, but when someone abusing their power and deleting anything they don't agree with in a lawsuit does it, well, in this case maybe a villain ruining the site on her managed to do something not terrible, but because she is a villain it comes across a lot worse.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/39ddnb/if_you_dont_...
"If you don't believe in freedom of speech for those you loathe, you don't believe in freedom of speech." (1600 points and gone from http://reddit.com/r/bestof)
Though not entirely consistent with their statement that "we do protect the right of people to express their views".
Would remaining true to their statement for one day really have killed them on the hill?
>This is a curated space. >The moderators reserve the right to remove posts, users, and comments at their own discretion.
If I create a subreddit where I ban all posts start with A, is that censorship, or is that freedom for me to run and build my online space as I wish?
Some subs leave a flair or a moderator message on removed submission, if not you can modmail them and ask.
Interestingly, one of them submits awful content. It's not spam but he is absolutely terrible. I wonder if they shadowban because the algo's figured out you suck.
Was in /r/TIFU recently, too lazy to get the link.
The only new rule is no harassment.
If they were abusing that, we'd know about it. There would be a shitstorm just like this. There has not been.
I reported a user harassing me all over reddit, stalking me everywhere I went for weeks. They did not even ban him. Anecdotal but the bar seems to be pretty high.
So, many of the deleted posts could have been deleted by the admins, in theory.
It's very much both. Where did you get the impression they're mutually exclusive? The "censorship" word is often only vocalized such when popular opinion objects to it, doesn't make it not censorship.
It's like how Bruce Schneier says that facebook's business model is surveillance. It's a descriptor advertisers and their platforms work hard not to be associated with, that doesn't make it not-surveillance.
Editorial cartoons are a pretty fundamental part of journalism. What if Tony Blair could delete news of the world editorial cartoons?
Seems to cross a line and, all due respect, until I saw proof that a delete happened, I'd be more likely to believe it was a histrionic "just-so-story"
I mean, Pao deleting this stuff personally? Even admins doing it?
It doesn't seem reasonable to me.
These people somehow seem to miss the dozens of huge threads that aren't removed that she could delete with a couple clicks. She could search her name every night and delete everything in a few minutes. Yet instead she randomly deletes a thread here and there? Makes no logical sense.
>constantly banning and deleting anything disagreeing with her viewpoint about her law suit.
There are multiple posts on multiple reddits, each with thousands of points and comments that were not deleted. Some posts were deleted by sub moderators(not the same as Reddit staff or Pao) on some subs because they were offtopic and were being vote brigaded and had comments full of hate speech.
E.g of posts:
http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/30j9mn/ellen_pao_loses...
http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/38qkmx/after_losing_he...
It doesn't make any sense why she would leave those posts up if she really was deleting stuff. It's interesting how the folks against her have made it look like she was. It's just sad how easily so many people are manipulated by false information.
Examples of comments that were being made and upvoted by the brigades on unrelated big subs:
>Somebody needs to fire this whore right fucking now. What a tampon smear...
>She's a lying cunt who is using her pussy pass because she didn't get what she wanted; a big pay-out for being a whore.
Why would subreddit mods want to deal with hundreds of such comments when the story is offtopic to their sub?
It's complete fiction that she is censoring anything. Every time it is sub moderators removing stuff that violates the rules of their sub. And there are massively upvoted threads bashing her everywhere with huge comment threads full of vicious attacks on her and nobody is deleting those.
If she is trying to censor criticism of herself on reddit, she is fucking awful at it.
Tons of people got shadowbanned and shadowbanning can only be done by the admins.
So stop spreading misinformation please.
Let's see your proof that people are getting showdowbanned for criticizing Pao. You have no proof. Because shadowbans are about as transparent as mud.
So stop spreading conspiracy theories as fact, please.
It's never very logical, someone shadowbans the first person to make a comment about Pao's husband but leaves the rest alone. My pet theory is another admin is making it look like Pao is doing it to build a case against her for her dismissal because it only creates a bigger shitstorm.
She may not have been removing anything, nor any of the other admins, but lnanek2 does bring up a strong point, albeit indirectly: She is hated by a majority of users on reddit. And she's hated because of her bogus lawsuit she now appears to be dragging out, and how her husband is in serious debt due to running a ponzi scheme.
Her and her husband are not nice people. She even says as much in her interview with Katie Couric, she says "I'm not likable". I sort of have to agree there. The CEO of a website that cannot function without its community needs to be a pillar of that community. This isn't some hedge fund company or a company making widgets where a sociopathic and ruthless CEO flourishes, this is a very intimate community-driven company and the CEO needs to reflect that. The CEO needs to be the epitome of that.
By all accounts, she's straight up out of touch with what reddit even is. She even screwed up sending a PM earlier yesterday and instead posted it as a submission to a subreddit, and was getting made fun of for it. She literally doesn't know how her own website works.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy those hate subreddits are banned. But completely unreleated to the current drama, and these are my thoughts even before this whole thing started: Ellen Pao needs to leave reddit, like yesterday. She's quite literally the worst CEO for a site like reddit.
There's no denying this is the biggest (and frankly hilarious to watch unfold) shitstorm in Reddit's history, but it is a vocal minority. There were only 5k subscribers to /r/fatpeoplehate. It was a silly move to ban it, because its clearly pissed off more than 5k people, but make no mistake, most of Reddit doesn't care.
You're off by about 160 million. Reddit had 172 million unique visitors last month. Source: http://www.reddit.com/about/
> There's no denying this is the biggest (and frankly hilarious to watch unfold) shitstorm in Reddit's history, but it is a vocal minority.
Here's the thing. I'm a power user over there. And a power mod. I have access to many of the backroom subreddits for the default mods and a few of the other "in group" communities. That said, I have never, not once, stumbled across anyone who truly likes her. Even the prominent mods of reddit are keeping their mouths shut because they're afraid of being targeted by her or the admins. But the general sentiment among most mods is that she's toxic.
Regular users either hate her or are largely indifferent. But those that are indifferent are either not really into the reddit metasphere, or they're ignorant of Ellen. Once they find out about Ellen's life (lawsuit, ponzi scheme) they usually bristle at the thought of her.
> but make no mistake, most of Reddit doesn't care.
If we were to scale reddit's public opinion of her, the people who don't care or are indifferent would get a zero. People who like her would move the scale to the right, into the positives, while the people who dislike her tip the scale to the left.
You're right in that many people are indifferent. They'd be a zero on this hypothetical scale. But the problem is, the rest of the people who do have an opinion tip the scale significantly to the left, into the negatives. There's virtually zero people who like her (even the people into SJW stuff don't particularly care for her) and there are many, many people who hate her. It's telling that more people liked Yishan Wong, reddit's previous CEO and that guy was a loon.
I'm really glad that moderation actions like that are taken, and I'm sad that people reply to that by "harassing" the CEO...
Hopefully such people will get frustrated by such events and will eventually leave reddit.
Note that it's mostly people posting to /r/punchablefaces that are reaching r/all right. Another hateful reddit for you...
PS: FWIW, /r/all has always been pretty bad. If you want a good reddit experience do like me: unsubscribe from most subreddits and suscribe to smaller subreddits with active moderators.
There's a large segment of the online community in general that understands the ideal of free speech to mean that no one may ever be prevented from saying anything, in any location or context. These folks believe that the banning of /r/shitniggerssay deserves exactly as much righteous indignation as, say, secret police disappearing anyone who speaks against the government. Reddit was founded on this ideal, and has only recently started to move away from it.
This understanding of "free speech" was obviously originated by petulant children on BBSes and Usenet groups casting about for a justification to (ironically) silence anyone who disagreed with them. I'm not really clear how it became something that otherwise-rational adults espouse in defense of people other than themselves.
My idea of free speech is that large privately-owned communication networks shouldn't engage in censorship, just like the government. If you disagree with that, say goodbye to free speech on the internet, because most of it is privately owned. Large websites are already cooperating with each other in censorship, and it's only a matter of time before ISPs join as well.
[...]
Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.
I feel like you're skipping over a lot of slippery slope in the middle there.
I'm not saying that is explicitly the case for reddit, but there are a number of internet communities who work from that definition.
The thing is, these are different goals. There's no reason to assume that a goal of "we don't want to host a forum exclusively dedicated to egregious bigotry and bullying" will necessarily morph into "we demand that all our forums be safe spaces for PTSD sufferers." You might as well say that, I dunno, installing public security cameras on a college campus will lead to the students being escorted to recess by a hall monitor, and given detention if they're not in their seats when the bell rings.
I don't care, though. I have never found use in reddit, except as an example of how putting people into internet echo chambers turns them into reference-spouting cliques.
I think that's kinda weird. Does a book publisher have to publish my manuscript because "free speech" and rejecting me would be censorship? If MTV doesn't want to pick up a show is that censoring the producer's freedom? If I owned a site and then shut it down because I couldn't afford the bills is that censorship of the people who engage in my site? If I owned a very large site do I have to have a comments section for the stuff I post am I censoring other people's opinions on what I post? If I made a community dedicated to (say) Christians and it became overrun by atheists and was no longer suiting its original purpose and I shut it down because of that is that censorship? Is the New York Times obligated to post dick pics because a reader posted them in the comments section?
Private (IRL) meetings for a certain groups/organizations have the right to kick out troublemakers and those who disagree. Those kicked out have the right to start their own group with their own members too. That's not too much different with how it works on the internet too. If you go to (say) and atheist conference they are not obligated to give the podium to anyone who walks into the door and has an opinion. You are suggesting something as strange as that.
>If you disagree with that, say goodbye to free speech on the internet, because most of it is privately owned.
That's silly. There's plenty of hate and various opinions on the internet and always will be - but it thrives in smaller communities with a more dedicated audience. In other words something like Reddit who was trying to be "everything to everyone" has problems with making everyone happy but the KKK forums are certainly not going to have such an issue and will thrive. If there is so many people who want to shout to the world their hateful things than you bet one of those people (a private individual/company) is going to spend a couple bucks to make that happen.
I liked that reddit bent over backwards to allow a wide variety of opinions, even ones that were ignorant or hateful. I viewed it as a noble stance.
But once upon a time, the "ugly" subreddits were ignorable and mostly self-contained. (At least to me, usually)
> that attract more and more people like that, that makes the community as a whole worse.
Yup. This trend surprised me--the recent exponential growth of some of the toxic hate subreddits. I guess I was naive. The uglier subreddits more and more frequently show up on /r/all, the users would encourage each other to post more frequently, and there was a thriving community built around the hate. It struck me as mentally unhealthy for all involved--the rapid innovating of negativity and the stoking of mild opinions into full on hatred.
But individuals being singled out to slander and poke fun at is not acceptable in my opinion, regardless of whether you define it as free speech or not. There's a world of difference between simply saying "I hate fat people" and putting up a specific image or video of a fat person and then gathering around to verbally abuse them. Quite happy to see that sort of behaviour banned.
Here's an example unrelated to harassment. Many people strongly disapprove of consumption of drugs, including marijuana. Reddit has a forum with 750k members who actively promote the consumption of this drug. It isn't even considered 18+ only, so reddit is ok with children subscribing to this forum. Shouldn't the promotion of acts which are illegal be banned too? Shouldn't we go after this before we go after the people who are merely insulting others?
Another way to view it: Hateful reddits are a pressure release valve caused by political correctness.
The media's political correctness and current pushes for "diversity" in tech pretty much gut normal speech in favor of giving control to outsiders. I could elaborate.
> do like me: unsubscribe from most subreddits and suscribe to smaller subreddits with active moderators.
Answered your own question. Because people can do that and not have to deal with that crap. reddit is many things to many people. Some people enjoy that stuff and reddit wants as many people as possible on the platform. The site was also founded with free speech and an open platform as something they believed in. And they've stayed true to that.
I think people are just upvoting anything that is critical of reddit at the moment. I doubt most people actually care who, if anyone, is being targeted.
The situation seems almost identical to when Reddit axed r/jailbait: one of their more embarrassing communities started to get too much attention, its users were increasingly behaving in a way that was damaging Reddit, and Reddit decided to kill it (ostensibly for the greater good of the site).
But even though that pissed plenty of people off... I don't recall the front page being totally dominated by calls for anyone's head on a silver platter. Reddit's userbase seems to feel especially threatened by Ellen Pao, and it's hard for me to believe that the difference is anything rational.
Well, she has basically said that she wants to start cleaning up the "objectionable" sides of reddit. Plus, there is a strong sentiment that content that's critical of her (even the less hateful stuff) has been removed often in the past.
this sub has been banned today: https://np.reddit.com/r/paoiskillingreddit
here's a thread regarding a joke removed about two weeks ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/378smw/a_jo...
Take a look and see how much reddit gold has been gifted recently. Reddit is doing just fine.
Some people find themselves wondering what opinions will be deemed unsafe next. The policies are not exactly clear-cut, and neither are the actions of the administration.
Understated.
I think this is a little dramatic. It's not about censorship of "unsafe opinions" - you are free to hold your opinion and talk about it, just not on Reddit. It's akin to a hotel owner disallowing a Klan meeting in the conference room. I think any business owner deserves that right.
> The policies are not exactly clear-cut
I dunno, the blog post seems fairly clear cut to me. It's not about blocking content, it's about blocking subreddits whose sole purpose was harassment of individuals.
Tell me; Would you support that same hotel owner disallowing the NAACP from renting a room? He disagrees with their economic views. Would you support him ignoring requests from GLAAD, because their color scheme doesn't fit with his drab hotel? Private enterprise refusing to serve those they disagree with should be treated no differently than any other form of bigotry.
Sure. But if your business derives its customer base from its longstanding support of freewheeling speech, more than a little pushback is to be expected.
> I dunno, the blog post seems fairly clear cut to me. It's not about blocking content, it's about blocking subreddits whose sole purpose was harassment of individuals.
If your only context is the blog post, it seems exceptionally clear. From following some of the discussions, I'm also aware that they came down on exactly five subreddits while ignoring many others. In a few cases, they appear to have tacitly approved of some.
So the result is that it's not clear what they come down on, why, when, or what gets their attention. Except bad PR - that seems to work miracles.
Would it be acceptable, or legal, if that were a Black Panthers meeting? Or a gay wedding?
FPH in and of itself isn't the most defensible or tasteful subreddit, but they're going to start by banning the least defensible subreddits first. Once the precedent is made, they can start banning political dissent subreddits.
I mean its almost like her being an asian woman rather than a white male makes a difference
An nice juxtoposition is the top post of the default homepage is social justice outrage about a police officer shooting somebody.
That's really sad - I don't think there's many communities like /r/assistance and even /r/buildapc around.
r/hiphopheads, r/nba and r/comicbooks are great communities in their own right
This is reddit in the act of growing up. And it's about time and a a good thing in my opinion.
I like that I manage my filters well enough that I visited reddit several times today and was blissfully unaware of this particular bit of drama.
I see mentions of thought-policing etc., but that's really wholly different from censorship and moderation.
This is an obvious departure from this ideal.
I understand that point of view and agree with the need for those kinds of arenas. But even the article you link to state that doxxing and harassment goes against the TOS, which seems to be precisely what started this whole mess, from what I've gathered. Or at least that's what the official announcement [2] and /r/OutOfTheLoop [3] threads state.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9697285
[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/39c58h/could_so...
[2]: http://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removin...
[3]: http://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/39bzdf/why_was...
I've never had a problem avoiding content I didn't like there. Meanwhile I saw great discussions at various times.
Here, on the other hand, I've nearly stopped reading. Besides the unjustified elitism, constantly I'd post on a thread here only to see it disappear with no explanation. I don't understand HN's weighting and it seems to change without notice, or it did a while ago. Arbitrary curating means someone is arbitrarily imposing their values on discussions. I prefer allowing legal speech.
I generally preferred Reddit to HN and will probably end up going to Voat.co like everyone else talks about.
EDIT: Case in point: When I posted the above, the story was number 1 and it was about fifty minutes old. When it hit one hour, it dropped to number 5. The stories that it dropped behind were 5 to 12 hours old so I doubt they suddenly got surges of activity.
In the time I wrote the above edit this story dropped to number 11. Soon it will probably drop from the front page. Who knows?
I don't understand HN's weighting. Maybe this story is getting downvoted and user behavior is driving its trajectory, but it seems arbitrary and tells me to leave the site.
EDIT 2: corrected voat.co address thanks to ljk's comment.
correct url is https://voat.co!
This has been bothering me about HN for some time. Maybe it's due to a smaller user base, but having stories disappear, specific user's comments always being weighted lower, and childish hellbanning is really discouraging. It does give the sense of a 'country club', where if you're not of the same bread and butter as those making the rules then you're not welcome.
We surely don't have the same experience with reddit then, most big subreddits have a huge amount of rules and posting to them will just cause a bot/moderator to remove your thread and ask you to make changes
He said "disappear with no explanation". Most of the time, bots will comment on why a post was removed. Not only that, the rules are indicative of why your post was removed. It serves as an explanation. Here on HN, you get nothing. Not even a list of rules which need to be followed.
That isn't a big surprise, is it? If they thought otherwise, they'd be commenting on Reddit about how HN sucks :)
Reddit and HN have different audiences. I tried both and found HN suits me much better. If it's not your cup of tea, nothing wrong with that too.
Yes, HN story ranking is arcane and I wish there were better tools to track content I like. But it also has a lot of insightful people and great discussions while trying not to devolve into circus.
Good luck with that. The users exiting reddit are precisely the kind of users you don't want on your website. The young, trolls, immature and racist/bigots. They're essentially filling their community up with 4channers. That site is already filled with reddit's /r/conspiracy users. They run many of the most popular subreddits.
That place is doomed to fail. And as far as I know, they've already begun banning users and blacklisting domains. So much for "free speech".
Some thought experiments:
Imagine if Comcast blocked access to all liberal sites.
Imagine if Microsoft word was changed so only pro-liberal documents could be created. For extra fun imagine if people could be "shadowbanned" so all their files were silently deleted.
Imagine if Google could only be used to find websites that supported global warming.
Imagine if Facebook messages could only send "patriotic" messages (as determined by their moderators).
Imagine if Intel processors could only run non-violent games.
These may seem weird comparisons because when we think of forums, we think of moderators having the power. But reddit isn't a forum. Reddit is basically a site that hosts forums. And now it wont host some of them anymore. Not only will it stop hosting some of them. It stopped hosting them unexpectedly, with a self-righteous "fuck-you".
If Google didn't let people search for what they wanted, they'd just go use a different search engine.
If reddit doesn't do what people want, there are other websites for them.
For example, both AWS (http://aws.amazon.com/aup/) and Google (https://cloud.google.com/terms/aup) have very broad acceptable usage policies that allow for doing anything deemed legal by US law.
/r/FatPeopleHate was engaging in both.
In the end reddit is a private site that can do what it wants. Wikipedia removes things all the time and sites like 4chan remove all sorts of extremely offensive material.
I'm glad the mods of the hate oriented subreddits have been shadow banned, I actually think this shit storm is wonderful and I hope the reddit admins literally pull the plug and shut down. The FPH spammers are complete idiots, buying thousands of guilds and donating money directly to reddit and hurting their cause by vote brigading at the same time. They're sealing their fate.
This whole fiasco has shown the true face of reddit, just a whole bunch of (slightly below) average kids who don't deserve my attention.
I can't wait until reddit dies, but I have no idea where I'll go. I want something like reddit, but more open and transparent, and with a way for users to somehow remove mods.
Honestly, the writing should have been obviously on the wall when r/jailbait was banned. I think they could have made up reasonings that would have placated the userbase, but they failed to, and they handled the resulting outrage very poorly. I was sorta surprised that wasn't reddit's 'digg moment', but I thought that the HDCP controversy was Digg's, so maybe I'm just ahead of the wave.
What does "gender-baiting troll" mean?
Absolutely nothing, in reality. In terms of Randi Harper though, she is a misandrist using a convenient boogeyman to push her own agenda.
Reddit also has a massive advantage when it comes to companies/games/etc communicating with their fan-communities. It's an excellent medium for it as the type of vote-curation that happens there is great to sort topics of importance and the threaded comments are far better than what you would find on bulletin boards.
Overall, reddit has had a fantastic impact on the internet when it comes to communication, IMO. I hope that sticks.
I feel like censorship isn't the right word for this but I can't think of a better one.
This precisely fits the common definition of censorship (not the legal one)
"Censorship" implies suppressing free speech, which this is not. It's simply removing undesirable content from a privately-owned website.
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.[1]
Say you post an article about the current state of socioeconomic affairs in the EU in /r/askscience. Your submission will be deleted, because /r/askscience's subject is not to host such articles. There is room elsewhere in Reddit for such an article.
This is an example of moderation.
Moderation implies curating an intermingling of user-generated comments so as to provide a super experience for the people reading those comments. There was no intermingling here.
I think a large part of the anger is that people on Reddit tend to recognize it's a patchwork of communities, each with distinct borders you can't cross accidentally, and they like it that way. In contrast, this decision is motivated by a desire to expand Reddit's appeal to new users and as an advertising platform, both of which rely on it having a good reputation to the outside world.
Most forums will delete stuff like this - I assume HN would too, and no one bats an eye.
Of course, moderation can be misused to a point where it's almost effectively cencorship. But IMHO, the order matters here.
There are numerous incidents of harassment against other users on Reddit, and even off of Reddit. The admins said themselves they received numerous complaints.
Not to mention, the number of death threats and threats of sexual violence is climbing at an alarming rate, especially for women and PoC.
I have no idea why people think it's socially acceptable to say things on the internet to people that you wouldn't say to them IRL in front of a police officer.
> I have no idea why people think it's socially acceptable to say things on the internet to people that you wouldn't say to them IRL in front of a police officer.
Whoa. Incredibly hypocritical of you to lecture others on hate, harassment and tone policing. You have routinely said awful things online and harassed people.
- You tell people to "set themselves on fire", a favorite phrase of yours used to those that disagree with you (http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/8-579... & https://twitter.com/search?q=%22set%20yourself%20on%20fire%2...)
- You harassed a data scientist, Chris von Csefalvay, and set your followers on him to the point he quit Twitter after he conducted some research that didn't suit your narrative. (http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.jp... via http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/the-hidden-face-of-hypocrisy-ran...)
- You wrote a non-review on Amazon to bully an author you disagreed with: (http://www.stopthegrbullies.com/2015/06/01/randi-harpers-bul... & http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/06/03/renowned-author-c...)
... just the tip of the iceberg. Now you are posting on HN and masquerading as an online anti-harassment activist. Unreal.
Come on lol everyone knows that isn't true.
A lot of fit people don't participate or enjoy FPH either. I couldn't imagine one of my college professors asking the fat kids to leave when another student starts bullying them.
If you pulled this kind of behavior on just about any college campus you would be asked to leave, this just shows the level of immaturity these people have.
It is a pretty disgusting place.
Edit: For the record, I don't think voat.co will become more popular than reddit in the way reddit became more popular than digg. The subreddit system is much more resilient than digg's system was. As others have said, I barely noticed that this was occurring.
If Reddit wants to get some of the amazingly creepy stuff under control, I'm all for it.
But they're not actually doing that, because they're leaving plenty of subreddits that are arguably much worse.
Because they've taken so little action (and because of the way the admins were defending it in the announcement thread) instead of a real step forward this looks like someone pushed them forward 2mm and they're trying to claim victory.
But if some of the worst elements of the site want to take this as an opportunity to abandon the site, I'll feel better about it.
Blatant lies such as this do not help your side of the argument.
FPH was not engaging in harassment or bullying whatsoever, any instances of this were entirely attempts at false flagging. FPH is not about hate, it is not discriminatory, it is not prejudice, and it most certainly didn't violate any of reddits rules.
What I really don't get is that they choose these 5 subreddits to ban, reddit has at least 50 (and probably more) subreddits that are arguably a lot more offensive than the ones they just blocked.
You cant gentrify reddit because there's no incentive to be the first to go back to the cesspool.
I think this is the key thing that's really got everyone all in a tizzy. There are a pile of subreddits that the vast majority of Reddit users would like to see gone: topics that aren't just politically divisive, but are offensive for the sake of being offensive. Instead, the only thing that's consistent about Reddit's decisions to police subreddits is that it's inconsistent. Reddit's administration looks like they're generally OK with whatever's on the site up until it gets some kind of exposure elsewhere and only then does it get banned, and then the reasons given for it don't make any sense given the site as a whole.
I think Reddit is actually in a unique position to start cleaning up their site. They don't have any real competition at the moment and they have a huge userbase. They could probably institute and enforce new consistent site-wide policies and actually get away with it. But this blindfolded "pin the ban on the subreddit" game is only succeeding in irritating their users and making the admins look ham-handed.
On a side note, I was a little disappointed to see kn0thing's name prominently on the announcement. He's always seemed like a smart, level-headed guy. I'd genuinely love to hear from him how the subreddit banning policy makes any kind of sense. (Alexis, are you lurking here?)
What I find funny about people complaining of censorship is that the sub in question would routinely ban people for saying positive things about the people they were trying to harass.
[0] http://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removin...
I've dealt with reddit's administrators from a moderator side before, and they can just shadowban moderators they don't like. It makes no sense to ban a subreddit for the actions of that subreddit's moderators when they can just remove the moderators that are the issue.
I suspect they wanted to ban certain subreddits, and "the subreddit has toxic moderators" is a good reason to give publicly. Nonetheless, they've always had policies for dealing with toxic moderators that don't involve removal of subreddits.
Is this some sort of trick physics question?
It seems to me to be possible to have this sort of feature in software... it's like a channel in IRC with out an op.
Also, how is what the mods were doing not a speech issue? If crimes were committed surely reddit was not negligent in reporting these to authorities?
If you're monetising a website, and the most active and fasting growing sub on your website (aside from the defaults) is a subreddit dedicated to mocking fat people, I think that may make it a difficult sell.
It's becoming more clear that Reddit took action specifically because of the Imgur insult, and that makes a lot of sense from a business perspective. But from a wider perspective it looks very focused and targeted - not in a good way.
I said exactly as much in my comment?
Is there any reason at all to think that /r/fatpeoplehate5 is not going to be administrated in exactly the same way that /r/fatpeoplehate was?
I'd love to see them squish some of the subs mentioned, but ultimately today is just one day, and I'd prefer to see them take SOME action than sit around waiting for the day that they can sweep Reddit clean in one single swoop (which won't ever happen).
PS - The two subs you listed have under 5K readers combined. FPH had 150,000. I've never seen any racist sub on /r/all but FPH was bullying on the front page daily.
I don't see why banning racist ideas would be so out there. Sure people are going to complain and leave, but aren't those like EXACTLY the people you want to leave?
A lot of people are migrating to Voat.
The site always had undertones of this stuff, but as the popularity grew these previously minority voices got louder and louder and harder to ignore until I myself don't spend a whole lot of time on Reddit now.
For instance, /r/games used to be super awesome with great comments and discussion. Since it got bigger over the past few years posts are lackluster, comments are nonsensical, and so on...gah now I'm ranting
The same is true to a lesser degree[2] for many women's issues, though I hesitate to mention it because this community isn't immune either.
[1] Ex) "I hate racism as much as the next guy..."
[2] Or maybe I don't appreciate it as much.
What do you mean here? Just looking for an explanation...
It's a bit of a confusing term, because its use from a more theological perspective (e.g., hard work is a symbol of salvation). I probably should have used a different term.
https://twitter.com/notch/status/608706518972788736
Reddit just put the world on notice that they are willing to become user babysitters, and historically this has never ended well for the company involved.
The issue wasn't with the subreddit, it's with what it was doing outside the subreddit.
This will die down/blow over in a week or so anyway.
Banning 1 hateful subreddit on an open forum does nothing to solve to issue of someone being called a hambeast, or someone being an asshole in general.
In other words, just because banning /fph won't entirely solve the problem of People Being Assholes doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
Neckbeard seems to be a very similar level of insult (ie mild and related to appearance) and that is widespread. Actually just calling someone "ugly" seems more offensive than either of these.
Reddit certainly have a legal right to censor whatever they wish on the site but I feel they have a responsibility to the community not to do it in an arbitrary or disproportionate way.
Really? Places like Something Awful ban for hate speech, and that site has continued existing for a while just fine.
The fact is banning of the worst of the worst makes life better for most of the users, and they're grateful. I can't think of a single community that has suffered overall from banning racists and mysoginists.
What I've seen is those banned people end up going to form their own little secret clubs, and it's just a cesspool of seething hatred. Fine, stay in your corner, means we don't have to deal with it.
/r/FatPeopleHate
/r/HamPlanetHatred
/r/TransFags
/r/NeoFAG
/r/ShitNiggersSay
1) Reddit is a business and has certain interests at stake. If they want to seriously monetize their inventory (i.e., subreddits and pages), it needs to be with content that jives with advertisers. Odious content and sub-reddits are kryptonite to advertisers. Clorox doesn't want to see their advertising next to fat-shaming/racist/misogynistic horseshit.
2) Whether or not you think Reddit is suppressing "freedom of speech" is irrelevant (I personally don't think they are). What matters to Reddit is that those who contribute objectionable content according to advertisers leave the site, either because their subreddit has been shut down or because they find Reddit is suppressing their freedom of speech. All those pages were a cost to Reddit that had no chance of making money. When they're gone, they don't have to worry about them anymore. Reddit is probably rooting for other platforms, like Voat, to get traction so that people who want to post horseshit don't linger and leave immediately.
Anyone know how /r/fph suddenly jumped so high?
It was the fastest growing subreddit outside of the defaults, and by far the most active. Turns out there's a large contingent of people who seem to hate fat people, at least that's how it seems anyway
Possibly, though theres /r/imgoingtohellforthis that literally aims for that exact "use-case", so whether FPH is the outlet for it I'm not sure? It's definitely possible though.
To be fair, I would wager that fatpeoplehate had its share of trolls, but I would definitely believe that the vast majority of its denizens were former fat people, and very frustrated at the obesity epidemic in the United States.
Frustration leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. You know the rest.
I speak here from some experience. Several members of my family are morbidly obese, with BMIs well north of 45.
For the average person, obesity starts at a BMI of 30.
More than a third of the population of the United States qualifies as obese. Obesity-related diseases are the leading cause of death, and the problem is getting worse.
There are growing social movements that promote obesity as a way of life. This is simply insane. Nobody would promote anorexia as positive, or smoking, or heroin.
Now, this would all be completely fine if it only impacted those that choose this lifestyle, but the problem impacts all of us, in the form of higher medical costs, greater danger for service personnel, and in the cost of infrastructure changes required to support the obese.
Every holiday, I got to watch as some of the people I grew up with eat themselves into an early grave. To listen to them complain about their latest weight-related medical problem. To hear them make excuses and blame other people as to why they are sick.
And then these same people would insult my spouse and I, because we control our diets and exercise regularly.
I do not want to live in a society where this is accepted or encouraged.
While I don't think that mocking fat people will solve the problem, I can understand how that particular community could grow so fast.
I think FPH got created as a counter culture to these movements.
>I do not want to live in a society where this is accepted or encouraged. While I don't think that mocking fat people will solve the problem, I can understand how that particular community could grow so fast.
I agree.
Rather than focusing on education and knowledge they resorted to insults and mockery.
I just wanted to point how that comedy is as if not more effective than education. Education through comedy is even more-so. This is likely a healthier outlet than what they could be doing (given mockery was their first choice of action). Possibly the most peaceful option for this type of community... Is vandalism, assault or other crimes now further up on the to-do list? I suppose we might find out now since censorship has created the opportunity.
Actually (and frighteningly) you'd be wrong about that.
What makes you think that?
There's a fairly large community that is pro-eating disorder. It's called "pro-ana" and includes such things as "thinspiration."
If Reddit can't survive this cleanup, then good fucking riddance.
Edit : added quotes for clarity
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ae/HD_DVD_Night_...
The willingness of the government to infringe on rights of the free speech by definition can not be any part of "civil rights society" - quite the contrary, it is the opposite of it, as one of the most basic rights - right to speak freely - is being violated.
It would be one thing if the group was about beating up fat people, but posting comments online about them is clearly under the ideals of expression.
If they want to ensure it's behavior and not ideas they should get a judge to rule on whether the expression would be constitutionally protected.
And yes, as a private entity it is their prerogative to ban certain ideas on their site, however, they should just be honest about it, they are limiting speech in a manner that would likely be unconstitutional if they were a government entity, aka. they are abridging freedom of expression.
I'm really starting to doubt that plain users can put so much energy in hating fat people, and I'm really dubious that it would create such chaos.
I wonder if the popularity of reddit has not brought some attention from PR groups.
There are a lot of people on reddit and policing individual users would be a challenge. Would something like a "flag harassment" button have the same desired affect?
0 - http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removi...
Depends. As it stands, making something a "safe space" is a super broad goal that has some very fuzzy edges. But then, I enjoy dissent and viewpoints at odds with my own, and it's a private company that needs to make money, so I can understand it.
This is clearly a growing pain for reddit. Something like "reddiquitte" only scales so much.
The time to set boundaries was during the sites initial founding. It's a little late to have regrets.
Firstly it's the wrong sort of user that is thinking of leaving reddit - these are a lot of the latecomers and consumers rather than the early adopters. Secondly, these types of users will not be going to Voat because it is not a better alternative.
If someone comes along and creates a better alternative, we will be pulled towards it, not pushed from something else.
In any case, Reddit has become a new mainstream site full of propaganda, censorship, shadowbanning, hand-picked news, etc. I've noticed a sharp decline in the last year or so.
It's not even their new policy, it just feels like it Reddit got big enough to finally join any other mass media source of information, not in a good way.
A dream they weren't prepared for. The site has been in failboat mode all day. Should have designed to scale for all of those users that want to hate on fat people.
And i'll leave it at that because it looks like, if the comments are telling, Hacker News is going full-on Eternal September right now.
But I am very much against the "For Safety!" stance. That is not what Reddit is about. I don't think angry Redditors is for Hate, they are against Safety.
IMHO, that is pretty simple.
Now I'm stuck with all these fatpeoplehate post on the front page.
With a title like "'Troll hunting' algorithm could make web a better place" (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-04/14/google-algori...) this algorithm seems like a true boon. It's only slightly suspicious (and can easily be explained away) that two of the three websites used in its study were political websites. You'd have to be pretty zany to leap to the conclusion that the paper had anything to do with censorship.
It would look worse if one of its co-authors (Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil) received funding from the DoD to study the propagation of information through social media online (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.01383.pdf) as part of DARPA SMISC - a strategic communications (DoD term for propaganda) research group that studies how information flows on social media and how to direct and disrupt it.
Many researchers take grants from all over though, and anything in this area of study is likely to get investment from the DoD. So still it's more reasonable to think that, since he works in that area, of course he will receive DoD funding.
Yet it was posted with 22 likes to NATO's Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (https://www.facebook.com/StratComCOE), a Facebook wall also contains a review of a book called "The Weaponization of Social Media" and announces its participation in a conference on “Cyberattacks and Propaganda: the Battlefield of Future”.
As evidenced (again) as recently as this week by a group of people who run an anti-TPP website, there is an inter-website system for blocking posts to certain content (https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/38pmg8/hey_redd...) - Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, etc all simultaneously blocked this website. Whether this was an error or not (it probably was), it points out there is a centralized system for blocking content.
Both the Facebook emotion experiment and the Facebook vote experiment had ties to funding to the DoD (and Air Force though blurbs about funding from the Air Force, which handles cyber in the US, was erased from the academic's page when there was public attention; it was reported to be a clerical error).
This is not to say that this is used inside the US to block US contibuted content. While the history of the United States Government in applying strategic communication and information support to US audiences has been slippery, and the Smith-Mundt Act (anti-propaganda law) was recently weakened under the justification that global interconnectedness of conversation, news and social media makes it difficult to prevent US propaganda intended for foreign audiences from making it back home.
The new CEO of Reddit is on the board of a Washington Defense Thinktank. This anecdote doesn't imply anything. But it does mean that you should be asking Reddit and its CEO hard questions, you should be skeptical of intentions, and you should demand that Reddit - like all other companies that own your communications and socialization - keep themselves to the highest possible standards.
"Free speech!"
But then it will close down forums where some people say mean things about some other people.
"Propriety!" "It's 'curated' or 'managed', not censored!"
This comment above is about consensus - or its approximate form - that ends up dominating the conversation.
I think the gentlemen shooting bullets at the Charlie Hebdo authors contributed quite a bit to this attitude of defiance.
1. End of Chairman Pao's CEO term
2. End of Reddit.
I find only these two outcomes desirable, because the third one is chilling free speech in the internet, the one that Ellen Pao is gunning for.