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Comment by powrtoch | Hacker News Reader

The front page is pretty worrying.

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.

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Previous Reddit CEO's have made lots of statements about wanting the site to allow relatively free expression, aside from things like doxxing and pedophilia. Ellen Pao has instead talked about turning Reddit into a "safe space", which is a common euphemism for eliminating dissenting viewpoints.

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.

Oddly, theh still kept subreddits from reddit's "nigger network" in place. r/greatapes and r/coontown

Give them time. Neither of those subreddits reach /r/all, but FPH did.

Pao is attempting to "clean up"... in an environment that cherishes its traditional freewheeling and unrestrained discourse. Even if the stuff getting cleaned up is just the stuff that most people agree deserves it - for some value of deserves - it's a troubling precedent to set.

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.

> what opinions will be deemed unsafe next.

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.

> It's akin to a hotel owner disallowing a Klan meeting in the conference room. I think any business owner deserves that right.

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.

Business owners deserve that right, certainly. I don't have to patronize the businesses that won't cater to everyone; Internet forums would do well to remember the definition of forum, and realize that they outmode themselves when they stray from it.

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.

I don't think anyone's saying reddit isn't within their legal rights to remove that or any other subreddit. They're saying that by banning fph, reddit violates the spirit of the community they've built up, and generally make reddit a shitter place.

I think this is a something without general and clear-cut answer. I don't think there is something inherently wrong if you run a hotel only for women or people of a specific religion, probably because your offering is tailored to your audience in some way. But if every hotel would start to randomly decided to set up rules who can and can not stay there, I would definitely see this as a case of discrimination. There is tension between your right to run your business the way you like and the right of your potential customers to not be discriminated and there seems not to be a general and easy way to draw the line.

There are easy ways to draw the line. There are also comfortable ways to draw the line. There are precious few that are both. Therein, I submit, lies the tension.

> It's akin to a hotel owner disallowing a Klan meeting in the conference room. I think any business owner deserves that right.

Would it be acceptable, or legal, if that were a Black Panthers meeting? Or a gay wedding?

> The policies are not exactly clear-cut, and neither are the actions of the administration.

Understated.

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.

Just because the volume of hate has been turned up to 11 does not in any way mean that the majority of Reddit users feel this way, and this is something that many people seem to be forgetting.

Take a look and see how much reddit gold has been gifted recently. Reddit is doing just fine.

I've seen plenty of these claims but far less in the way of actual removed content. My sense is that this is largely a myth used to stir up outrage.

It's a bit harder to link to this type of stuff because by definition its been removed, but for example,

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...

I wonder why people don't use archive.is and archive.org to archive things more.

Hey I wanted to thank you for your comments and links in the Kindle thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9365567 - I used them to successfully improve my device. Replying here cause replying on the other thread is closed. Cheers!

http://www.reddit.com/r/undelete

/r/all is not the front page. Reddit is at a scale at which this will probably blow over, likely for a better Reddit. Other teacup storms like the removal of /r/jailbait, their handling of 'the fappening' and gamergate don't seem have affected reddit much at all. It seems almost more like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlOSdRMSG_k

> "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."

I mean its almost like her being an asian woman rather than a white male makes a difference

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