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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

Prohibited: Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people (these behaviors intimidate others into silence)

About time.

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It sounds reasonable. In practice its been difficult. I've been in communities where one mod is okay with certain interaction wheras another has no hesitation in yanking things.

There's personality, history, friendships, etc. Some mods were likely to tolerate irritants if they knew the person or the person had contributed to something they approved of... Like a movement, cause, etc.

That said, it looks like so far, its been used sparingly and not vigorously. But it's like speeding. You know the chances of having a ticket issued are low, but if highway patrol were to e force to the letter, one would have many more tickets issued.

> About time.

My objection to this comment is that it treats it like it's a simple thing.

For starters it bans harassing lets say The Nazi party or ISIS or a pro abortion doctor killing group.

I don't think this is wrong, but it's a fair enough complication.

But more importantly it sweeps under the carpet how to best get free speech on really important issues. Everything comes at a cost. This will hurt free speech at least a bit.

Once again it's not just 'About time' it's something that needs to be considered.

If you didn't notice, that part had a link to the months-old policy change when it was enacted.

That isn't a new policy, they were just reiterating it. The actually new stuff is the NSFW scope enlargement, hiding from search, etc.

knowing the political bent of reddit I would not want to be a Conservative and posting there. This rule sounds like a SJW dream, straight out of our colleges of today where all speech is effectively silenced; even humor.

Any speech can be harass another and this the problem with such rules.

I consider your comment harassment. I think it should be removed.

Slippery slope don't you think?

No, I don't. I'll submit to the Reasonable Person Test here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person

One my favorite things about the anti-SJW movement is how they fundamentally don't understand what they're opposing. They see people using words like "harassment" and achieving results, so they go full cargo cult and start spewing those same words in the belief that they'll be able to achieve something as well. It reminds me of the sovereign citizen movement, a belief that there's some set of magic words that gets results, rather than actually interacting with society.

I don't know, in an Internet context "harassment" can be very ambiguous. In real life situations it's usually pretty clear, but some people may consider certain Internet activities harassment while others may strongly disagree.

One of my favourite things about the anti-SJW movement is how they confuse privately-run forums for government-imposed law.

Nothing is stopping them from running to one of the great many zero-moderation forums that exist online, but of course those forums aren't very attractive to a critical mass of users, so they have less content and fewer third-party tools to integrate with.

The irony is, of course, that by demanding that Reddit cater to their demands, they're impinging on Reddit's freedom of expression. It's their toy; they get to set the rules on how it is used.

No one expects these words to have magical effects - the anti-SJW "movement" is quite well aware that SJW is little more than window dressing on top of bullying. The point of posts like the one you are responding to to illustrate to thinking people that there isn't a consistent philosophy behind the words and they are merely a power grab.

FYI, ttrashh's third sentence should have been the tipoff.

This was not a cargo cult use of such words, as you seem to think it is.

There a thing called the "reasonable person test". It's well understood and applies widely. I suspect you know this and just don't like it.

I think you need new arguments. The slippery slope argument is abit used up for HN in 2015. Pretty sure that had it's moment in 1998 Slashdot.

It's not a slippery slope at all. What you said is more like going off a cliff. What you wrote parses as English and highlights an apparent logical contradiction, but it's no more valid than someone complaining about other people being "intolerant of intolerance", and presenting that exercise in reductivism as some sort of deep wisdom.

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

Harassment is usually defined as some repetitive unwanted targetted behavior, particularly where it has been made clear that the behavior is unwanted. I don't think a single comment is going to be considered harassment.

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