Slashdot Mirror
Reddit Turning SOPA "Blackout" Into a "Learn-In"
bdking writes "Reddit's planned 12-hour 'blackout' on January 18 sounds like an ineffectual, if not self-defeating, strategy for opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act. But the social news site actually will use that time not to 'go dark,' but to educate visitors about the ramifications of the House legislation that many fear will lead to widespread shutdowns of Internet sites."
Hopefully other major supporters(Google, Facebook, etc) will follow suit and get the word out how bad this piece of garbage is.
"Hopefully other major supporters(Google, Facebook, etc) will follow suit and get the word out how bad this piece of garbage is." And don't forget Slashdot. Participating in Reddit's blackout is something we could do also.
Can we get /. to join in the blackout? I suppose everybody who visits /. already knows about SOPA, but we really need to get everybody in on this.
:O Think of the lolcats!
They're going to ruin the internet. The INTERNET.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
My experience has been that people do not really care about hypothetical consequences. People will not understand that SOPA is a bad thing until it is passed and bad things happen that directly affect their lives. If Facebook were taken down by a SOPA complaint, people would believe that SOPA is bad.
The blackout idea might help to convey the problems with SOPA. More likely, people will think that the problems are being exaggerated by the participants in the blackout.
Palm trees and 8
They should do a Doodle that is just a symbolic black censorship bar. I'm sure people would click on it just to find out why, and then it would lead to info on SOPA.
Not because it will reach people who need to know; I suspect that most clueful people here already realize that SOPA and PIPA are awful legislation, written by industry lobbyists and supported by their pet Congressmen -- who have been well-paid for their votes. But because it will change the dialogue from "Reddit is blacking out" to "Two sites are blacking out" and then -- when another one joins "Three sites are blacking out" and then "Many sites are blacking out" and then "A lot of sites are blacking out" and that is when it will matter.
It matters because it shows we'll make sacrifices to make a point. It's easy to post something whining about how bad these bills are, but much, much tougher to actually give up something to back that up. The supporters of these bills know that. They're counting on the millions and millions of us out here to grump about it...and move on. To ignore it, as if it doesn't matter to us, doesn't apply to us. We need to demonstrate that it DOES matter, that we're not going to let it go.
A blackout isn't the end of that, of course. It's only the beginning. But it would be a good way to start.
Back when they were trying to pass the Communications Decency Act back in 1996, a bunch of the major web sites changed their pages to black backgrounds and included a link explaining why they were doing it. I remember that really getting my attention the day I went to Yahoo (remember when Yahoo was important?) and seeing that for the first time.
If someone like Google or Facebook did that to protest SOPA today, I guarantee that it would get major news attention.
I don't. I think that Reddit moderations are much more prone to "I disagree with this post so I'm going to vote it down" and groupthink. And uncapped moderations doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Slashdot comments on a scale of 1 to 5, that's reasonable. Reddit comments on a scale of 1 to a million doesn't really work, the top comments have thousands of upvotes and no one reads the later ones. Anyway, different user populations are going to vote differently no matter what system you implement.
Disclaimer: I am a reddit admin
Here is what I'm hoping to see as the result of the blackout:
* Awareness raised among the users who don't login to the site(a majority of our traffic).
* A day of action which encourages people to contact their representatives.
* Other web properties participating in some form of highly-visible protest. A lot of the big players are considering how far they can go in protest. Hopefully the step we are taking here will give them some encouragement.
Jimmy Wales recently indicated that he is interested in joining us. If Wikipedia joins in a blackout, the message would reach a huge number of people, and will hopefully make a splash in mainstream media and news coverage.
Well, as they say, 90% of everything is crap. On slashdot, something like 30-40% of comments get modded up, usually to 5, 33% or more of what you see still falls into the 90% category even if moderation is perfect. On Reddit, and with unlimited positive scores in general, you're going to see a much smaller number of comments moderated up to the point of visibility, so you're more likely to be limited to the 10% of comments that are actually good. The problem is, that assumes perfect moderation, which isn't the case. Slashdot is much more likely to catch a good comment that not everyone agrees with because it only takes 4 moderators to agree with it to move it to the top of the pile (baring of course, the "I disagree" downmods). A busy thread on Reddit might require several hundred people to upvote it before it's really visible to the average user which isn't likely to happen for an unpopular post, no matter how informative or insightful it is.
I've actually found the opposite - I've come back to Slashdot from Reddit because Slashdot's moderation system, as simplistic as it is, seems to be less susceptible to groupthink/hivemind tendencies. I'd bet this is because here you must have your moderation moderated, and only citizens in good standing are given mod points.
SOPA is also planned to block ip addresses so good luck with that.
"What the bill can't do is block numeric IP addresses" http://lifehacker.com/5860205/all-about-sopa-the-bill-thats-going-to-cripple-your-internet
Metamoderation makes Slashdot worse, because moderators who go against the groupthink receive a lifetime ban from moderating, so you end up with a system where only people with the "correct" beliefs have mod points.
Metamoderation is good for eliminating trolls, but it suppresses minority opinions even more than a straight upvote/downvote system.