Note that Hacker News made the opposite choice: it has a variety of mechanisms (slow-banning, hell-banning, quarantine, explicit moderation) that makes it very clear to certain users that they are not welcome here. And it gets shit for it too: if you browse the New page with showdead turned on, you'll see pretty frequent posts from people who are hellbanned complaining about the fascist moderators of this site.
Ultimately, the problem is that for any given slice of humanity, there are significant other slices of humanity that the former find repugnant. And usually vice versa. As a community grows bigger, there's no way to avoid running into the bad apples. I actually think the subreddit system is about as good as it can currently get for a public, open forum.
Are you kidding? None of those make it the least bit clear to the users. HN is the most passive-aggressively moderated site I've ever seen. Also, hell-banning non-spammers is about the most cruel thing you can do. By extension of holding Pao responsible for all actions taken under her charge, I declare PG to be sociopathic, if not outright evil.
As I expected: downvoted for pointing out the truth. HN is terrible.
You don't think the downvotes are for this hyperbolic insult?
What is even slightly out of sorts about comparing Ellen Pao to Paul Graham?
I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that both sites have an element of sociopathic and downright evil people influencing the culture. And reasonable people can still disagree about the level of accountability for the actions and inactions of Pao and Graham.
There are plenty of details that don't line up well when making that comparison, but I read the comment as intending to illustrate all the hyperbole around Ellen Pao. There are a lot of people on the Internet talking past each other this week.
He wasn't dealt with. He deleted his account in a frantic and futile attempt to avoid exposure.
Violentacres/Violentacrez (had to block him twice) set himself up as king of the reddit underworld. The admins cast a blind eye to his antics, and in return he prevented the raw sewage from gushing onto the clean streets of the reddit front page.
He was a troll from the start, and deliberately so, even in his choice of username which he had stolen from a popular blogger at the time. This illustrates the kind of brinkmanship that was his trademark - it is not quite impersonation to steal someone else's anonymous handle, but it is not quite ethical either.
His one good point was that he kept the other reddit trolls busy via interminable (literally) troll-fights.
The /r/SubredditDrama posts in regards to the incident are correct as I remember it:
Part I - violentacrez: https://archive.is/7ygdr
Part II - CreepShots: https://archive.is/8AVd8
Part 2 above ends with a link to VAs alleged last comments with an alt:
It's a common meme that violentacrez was "special," had some kind of sway with the admins beyond any other moderator, received instruction from the admins that was unique and not the usual ban threats that many subs get in modmail, and so on. Most people who say these things heard it from someone else, because the actual story is that he was barely tolerated. He even says so himself in your linked thread.
I don't get the elevation of violentacrez to something special. I see it a lot (friendly with the admins! The admins asked him to help with creepshots! it's all over this thread) and I don't get it. He was a power mod. So are hundreds of others. There are a bunch of Reddit yarns that put the Kubrick lunar landing to shame; some of them are making an appearance in this thread.
Doxxing is doxxing. It doesn't become 'exposure' when people you like do it.
I meant that the reddit admins didn't 'deal with' Violentacrez. Chen doxxed him, destroying his career, despite the full knowledge that Violentacrez had innocent dependants who would also be hurt badly. If Violentacrez deserved to be 'punished', then whatever punishment was meted out should have fallen exclusively on him.
>It doesn't become 'exposure'.
Bad choice of words. I intended the term in a literal sense, not a judgemental one. It was revolting how Chen made Violentacrez crawl in the false hope he could salvage some part of his livelihood.
>...when people you like do it.
I dislike the people who doxxed Violentacrez very much. I disagree with the use of doxxing as a tactic.
The admins asked violentacrez to help with the /r/creepshots. Later history got rewritten to say that he had created it, maybe to throw him under the bus.
Genuinely curious: why?
That's a highly subjective opinion...but it's how I felt. r/shitredditsays probably captures a bit of what made me uncomfortable.
> we
> them
Gah.
SRS are notorious for brigading and messing with peoples lives.
IRC networks are still running just fine with minimal intervention.
I know what you mean. I logged into /r/funny one day and someone had used the "b" word. I was just really concerned and uncomfortable with how things were going. What did you end up doing?