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Reddit Removes Communities To Address Harassment, Users Respond
New submitter sethstorm writes: As a change to their community management, Reddit administrators have banned multiple communities (known as subreddits) in a bid to remove harassment. In response, users have responded in different ways — some have pointed out the bias of Reddit admins for leaving known harassers alone such as those in the "SRS" subreddit, others have attempted to re-create the banned subreddit "FatPeopleHate", and many have gone to overwhelm Voat (a competitor).
In all fairness, can an AC really talk crap about someone that actually logs in and has a record? For all anyone knows you're posting things in support of pedophilia in other threads.
ACs really have no moral or ethical right to criticize people that log in and have a history. What would you have us all do? Everyone be AC? Then who would you talk shit about? That other AC?
On the topic of Reddit... I think it is fine so long as they don't abuse the policy. Reddit did delete some stuff that was critical of Pao for example. So that implies that the place is being filtered for self serving purposes which isn't a good sign.
My biggest beef with reddit though is the Shadow Ban. That is some fucking Orwellian shit.
Imagine being censored so completely that you don't even know you were censored. Imagine publishing a book and checking on the book... and thinking it is there for anyone to get. But you're the only one that sees it.
Its fucking creepy.
Now is it a way of dealing with trolls etc? Sure. But only stupid ones. All the smart trolls know about shadow bans and they'll check for it.
The worst trolls in any case are the determined ones. I had one guy on a forum troll the board for about a year. He was banned about twice a week. He'd just change IP addresses and create a new account.
We eventually dealt with him by mocking and showing we didn't care about what he was doing. He got dispirited after about a month of that and went away. But man... he stuck with it for a long time. He must have been banned a couple hundred times.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Who said, "The Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it"? Yes. It's old. You've probably heard it a million times; but it's so apropos.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
There have been a lot of strange things going on for a while at reddit.
Banning people because they mentioned the alleged ponzi scheming of the CEO's husband,
Making a bunch of crappy sub-reddits defaults, removing other (crappy) sub-reddits as defaults.
This just seems to be the tipping point for a lot of people. I don't think most people really actually cared about the ban, but the way it was done and the obvious other sub-reddit targets that were just ignored, or had excuses made for them.
I just looked back at digg.com for the first time in a couple years from when it flamed out heroically on it's 2.0 launch. It's not horrible now, there doesn't appear to be too much drama on their front page. Looks like delicio.us Just a abc/cbs style repost of yesterdays "hot web news"
supposedly people flocked to voat.to so hard they took down the site.
The other thing people seem to be doing is re-enabling adblock on reddit, and voting with their purse strings by not purchasing gold anymore.
Reddit has an outrageously smug user community with a chaotic moderation system. I've been on Slashdot since the 90s, and I can at least say that it's a somewhat sane place to discuss tech-related and nerd-related topics (other than the typical political/religious commentary nonsense). The metamod system alone is a great balance, as is limiting the number of votes and randomizing who gets the votes prevents upvote and downvote brigading. It's pretty rare for factually-incorrect information to get upvoted or factually-correct information buried. Even when mods approve some article that looks like an advertisement, Slashdot users spot it and bring those comments to the top.
I occasionally read Reddit, but I get very frustrated watching completely factual information get downvoted or subreddits banned because it doesn't fit users' or moderators' view of the world. Between this and the Ellen Pao controversy, sites like voat might actually have a chance of doing to reddit what reddit did to digg. In fact, voat is doing the exact same thing to reddit that reddit did to digg when reddit posted the infamous shovel logo to welcome disgruntled digg users by welcoming the "fatpeoplehate" refugees. Oh how fickle the social media world has become...
I used to moderate a couple of forums about a few different video games, sizable at the time but nothing the size of Reddit, for sure. But there were some rigid things about our setup that I liked.
I feel like the backlash (maybe shitstorm is more appropriate) on Reddit is because the users don't feel the admins are playing by a set of rules. They haven't cited any specific rules the banned subreddits were violating, just "harassment" (which they didn't define.) Moreover, the punishment has not been doled out uniformly, with plenty of users pointing out subreddits that also should have been banned if harassment subs are banned.
The judgements being handed down seem, to apparently fucking everyone on Reddit, arbitrary. Like some far off god on Mt. Olympus has suddenly decided mess with people at random.
Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass because I've never had to manage a community the size of Reddit, but this just seems like an admin took offense to something ("got triggered," in the parlance,) and dusted off the ol' banhammer without thinking. I don't know if that's what happened, but that's how it seems, and that sort of abuse of power always triggers (the way the word is really used) a community schism.
This is exactly why we need liberty-minded proponents setting up anonymous mechanisms of communications. Nobody should have the right to censor content online. I don't care who you are. Not even if its a death threat, a bomb threat, or a threat against the president himself. Threats don't kill people people kill people.Yes- words can take a toll, but it's not the same as actual physical abuse. You can get away from online harassment. You can't get away from a school bully. As a gay person I get words can hurt- but a solution is NOT worth the price of censorship. And I'm going to say the worst thing I could because nobody else will: feminists or whoever you are that's crying about nudes being published of you: suck it up. The problem is social, not the person who violated your privacy. Nobody is physically attacking you and if they did it's a social problem- not a communications problem. It's the people physically attacking- not the f'ing words.
All that ever happens from these anti-harassment laws is the government comes in and uses them against people it doesn't like. There are already laws against murder and other other forms of abuse. You don't need another law to tack on to someone whose murdered because they dislike some racial, social, sexual, or other group.
Getting Shadow Banned means that no one can see your posts except for the logged in user that posted them. In effect it's a particularly devious and underhanded way of censoring posts. Usually carried out by some immature moderator that don't agree with you.
I have been around here a long time.
I can honestly say that I am dissapointed to see /. post gloating over a row brewing on another community site while at the same time censoring discussion and posts related to the recent and ongoing Sourceforge controversy. Choosing which subs stay and which go is going to upset a small but vocal set of users. They would be stupid not to know this.
In the case of Sourceforge, I think it's much worse to sell out and betry the trust of an entire community. But let's not talk about it!
There's a certain critical mass of dissatisfaction in a user base/community. Until that point the site can be salvaged. It takes more than an unpopular move by admins/community leaders. There has to be BOTH:
I think it can be generalized to other communities but for web sites in particular there has to be enough dissatisfaction to create a feedback loop of angry users being ignored leads to leadership blunders leads to more angry users. When meta-conversation overwhelms normal conversation there's a tipping point. Slashdot has almost been there. coughcoughbetacough But it takes more than that. At the tipping point administration must demonstrate such disregard for the users concerns that a revolt becomes meta-shared knowledge. Many users knowing isn't enough. They need to know that other users know. Only if that happens the site will descend into a digg-esque melt-down and hemorrhage users until admins capitulate or the site collapses.
I don't think Reddit has reached that point. In fact, I think this will serve as a safety valve. Users who strongly value freedom of expression will go to voat and everyone else will stay, and not see as many complaints. Obviously this makes the culture more brittle. Reddit is not in danger now but will lead to other problems down the road.
This is a big step toward Reddit becoming an echo chamber. New users will be less likely to stay and it will create its own cultural feedback loop. Those unwilling to toe the party line will find themselves shunned. Users will pretend to go along, hiding how they really feel, leading to a more intense echo chamber. Soon there will be prescribed viewpoints on almost any topic. Reddit will die then. Not with a bang but with a whimper.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I was shadow banned from a science related subeddit that is my professional field (40 years) and whose main posters I would bet a large sum of money couldn't pass a high school science class. I never posted anything unprofessional, but generally unpopular. I didn't really care, just stopped visiting a few months ago, wasn't getting anything out of it I didn't already know and people were more interested in personality cults than anything else.
"people were more interested in personality cults than anything else"
which is exactly why I only post as AC.
I have had a few accounts here, and every time I would manage to offend some group of people somehow and *anything* I posted would immediately get set to "-1". Oddly enough, I have had many AC posts go to "5" over the years.
I don't understand it, so I don't play the game.
The key is to be utterly immune to the opinions of truly stupid people. You have to be. There are too may of them for their opinions to matter. If we weighted each of them as some very low number then multiplied that by how many of them there are... you'd get knocked by consensus every time.
There are a lot of people that think getting people to agree with you means you're right about science or anything factual. They don't grasp that literally one person can contradict an infinite number of people and be right and the infinity can be wrong.
You be confident in yourself and if the twits want to circle jerk each other off that is their loss. They want their echo chambers which means they don't deserve you.
There are better communities. The small ones are often very clicheish. And the big ones have lots of idiots in them. Slashdot for example. But you want a community where you can a moron a moron... and when they get offended you can start pointing and laughing.
Childish? How else are you going to communicate with morons? They don't understand anything else.
Reddit has been a censor's paradise for years. It is why so many companies wanted to move their boards to reddit. Really easy to silence people that say your new product is bullshit/designed by cross eyed kittens. Anywho, the trick is to not take these people more seriously than they deserve to be taken. Which in the case of the truly stupid is not at all.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Fark is small enough that a lot of the users know each other by name, it seems like. It's just snarky commentary on odd news stories; kind of meaningless, but some people have fun with it.
Reddit isn't one coherent site. It's 5,000 places, each with a different focus, different content, different rules, etc. I've seen discussions that are better than what I've seen on Slashdot in a long time, but I've also seen some of the most rabidly ignorant chains of messages ever, there. Some of the "communities" aren't organized enough to call them that, but a lot of the subreddits with very specific focuses stay wonderfully on-topic and have insightful contributors. "Reddit" is defined by the subreddit subscriptions held by each specific user, though; my experience of Reddit may be quite different than yours.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Tolerance means everyone gets to say things they like.
Many, many submissions critical of the new selectively-enforced policies were voted up and made it to the front page (and especially r/all). They've now vote-locked subreddits where those posts tend to come from, meaning those subreddits' users can't vote them up any more (nor can they even affect the order of posts in the subreddit itself).
This is blatant, shameful astroturfing by the admins and ownership hide content and opinions before they have a chance to take off. It couldn't be clearer that the reddit regime is afraid not of harrassment, but widespread, popular criticism.
fatpeoplehate got shut down for brigading and doxxing, not simple hate
imgur started removing fatpeoplehate images and in response the reddit sub posted pictures of (chubby) imgur staff and a thread topic about harassing them and identifying specific imgur personnel exploded
you can argue about imgur's removal of fatpeoplehate images as censorship, but you cannot call reddit's actions censorship, as removing threats and harassment is not logically the same as censorship
you could say there are double standards if and where other subs have engaged in doxxing in the past, or if and where other subs still do it, but on a smaller scale. but then the solution is to ban those subs as well, not let fatpeoplehate get away with abusive behavior
there are still plenty of repugnant and hateful subs on reddit that are not shut down. because they aren't doxxing
if voat is going to accept brigading and doxxing, then voat is going to get sued and shut down when, not if, someone gets hurt in real life because of ignorant internet hate
reddit did the right thing, as a matter of simple morality, and as a matter of self preservation in the face of legal standards
if you harass and threaten someone specifically, you're not engaging in free speech anymore, and you, and the forum you are doing it on, are culpable for any harm stemming from that. freedom of speech is not limitless. it is no longer free speech when you threaten specific people
any comment or discussion here about censoring hate is inaccurate
any comment or discussion here about preventing harassment and threats is on topic
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
it is no longer free speech when you threaten specific people
Amen. It's a good thing, then, that reddit provided specific evidence of such a threat in their ban announcement . . . oh wait . . .
They created new rules very recently about reddit being a "safe space". This is something that is, of course, extremely vague. What the hell is a "safe space"?
So suddenly some long time subreddits are getting banned for violating that. They are all shitty splaces, but then other shitty places seem to get left alone. As such people are rightly saying "What the fuck?"
Basically the rule is an arbitrary one. They are saying "We can ban you if you say things we don't like." Now its their site, they can do that if they wish, of course, but that is why users are reacting so negatively. It isn't a clear rule that is being consistently applied, rather it is deliberately vague and being targeted in a scattershot fashion.
Your rights end where my feelings begin! Shut it down!
Just do it in the name of feminism and the admins will let everything slide.
The reason I post as AC (despite having an account) is that Slashdot is a pain in the ass to login to.
Huh?
I bookmark the login page and when I click on it I get the login page with my username and password already filled in, courtesy of the password save function in Firefox.
Another click and I'm in. What's so hard about that? It even works when I'm traveling and just dipping in to Slashdot using a tablet.
a small oligopoly of corporations
That might be a major reason for this crackdown. Reddit has unbelievable traffic and reach, so stuff that earns popularity there gets spread to virtually everywhere and everyone.
It's exposure that marketers (of anything: products, politics, whatever) would kill for. They want to buy their way in, but not if some dirty peasant can tell the truth and (through sheer merit) get voted up and be taken just as seriously (or more seriously) than their bought & paid for message.
So Reddit sees advertisers chomping at the bit to throw money at it, but first Reddit has to demonstrate that it can crush contrary opinions at will.
This is not something about harassment.
Board critical of the neogaf forums was killed and no public notice was given out.
Coontown is still up.
I guess reddit loves to be considered "gnaa" central, right?
I had also have significant experience (PhD researcher) in some narrow topics that are frequently discussed in ask science. I've never been forceful enough to get banned, but I did stop contributing because the 6th grade understanding always trumps the nuanced answers, often in a rather hilariously aggressive way. I see that a lot here as well. Non experts also generally fail to understand the dynamism of their topics. I deal enough with this in the real life, what is the purpose of further subjecting myself to this in an environment where I have nothing to gain?
I was never a user of fat people hate. But i watched it play out overnight.
The way they did it with instant ban. While giving the disingenuous hypocritical bullshit excuses they did.... Just dumb.
Don't the people running reddit know how the internet works? How people work?
Instead of having 'those hateful FPH users' in one contained easily ignored spot. Now they're spread all over and multiplying.
And have the support of most everyone who really hates censorship too.
And all the random users who think they should have been left alone, contained in their own sub.
They've since deleted HUNDREDS of subs that sprang up from the fatpeople users. An ongoing fight they can never 'win'.
It's just so bizarre.
You're allowed to hate and make fun of gays, trans, blacks, asians, jews, women, men. and every other group.
Talk about raping women, little kids, animals. And exchange tips on how to do it.
But oh lord you better not offend some fat people who had to intentionally opt in to your sub!
Seriously. Look at the subs that DIDN'T get banned.
http://www.reddit.com/r/SomeRandomReddit/wiki/sickandweirdsubreddits
Why do those still exist? They've proven they can and will ban a sub for 'reasons'.
I think reddit might be run by morons. Or at least clueless about how people/theinternet works.
I'd say it's days are numbered now. It's jumped the shark. It'll be a geocites in 5 years.
Wait, what? You don't believe that the people that go through the effort of creating and maintaining their own forum should have the ability to exercise some control over the content being posted on that forum? The comments they host become a reflection of that site and mold its reputation.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely hate censorship and I think Reddit is doing a great job of tearing itself apart from the inside out. But if you really believe in liberty, then you also have to recognize the liberty of the owners and moderators to shape their content and the liberty of the users to migrate to other forums.
I've found that Reddit's forums in general are moderated quite horribly. It seems that almost everyone there seem to think that the downvote option is meant to be used as the "I disagree with your opinion" button, even though they clearly post that it's not for that purpose.
You end up with a system where everyone who agrees with the groupthink of that particular forum gets rated highly, and any differing opinions get silenced. Basically, it's what would happen to Slashdot if they gave everyone Moderator points including the troll accounts.
The key is to be utterly immune to the opinions of truly stupid people.
The problem, of course, is that it is impossible to be immune to the opinions of truly stupid people if they can down-vote each and every one of your posts with no limits. This plus the same with up-votes is where the Reddit circle-jerks come from. Slashdot's system where you get 5 or 15 votes every few weeks only if you're a regular reader works so much better it's like night and day.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I agree with most criticism of Reddit but THIS has one error. MODS cannot hand out shadowbans. ONLY administrators, who are "paid" (probably minimum wage) to sift through anything someone clicks the "report" button on.
That's what happens when early adopters are allowed to cybersquat, or when participation and enthusiasm plus a large degree of echo-chamber dictate policy.
This is nothing new in the electronic medium. I've seen it happen in Newsgroups back when the World Wide Web was still competing with Gopher, I've seen it in domain-name acquisitions, in IRC channel and network management, in mailing lists, in forums, and most recently before Reddit blew up, in Wikipedia. Anywhere that self-important busybodies can reaffirm each other's beliefs and are free to ban others that they disagree with regardless of merit can have this happen.
Hell, I've even seen it happen on bulletin board systems and on Fidonet. There's a throwback for you...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
A better way: let each user customize their own viewing experience. Don't make choices for others. Give each user the ability to use shadow bans, but only for their own client so you do not affect my ability to read posts you don't happen to like.
I was shadow banned from a science related subeddit that is my professional field (40 years) and whose main posters I would bet a large sum of money couldn't pass a high school science class.
So go somewhere that people give two shits about your education when you write, like Everything2. There's a community there of people who support one another. Go write with them, and leave alone the boards known for assholery.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Getting Shadow Banned means that no one can see your posts except for the logged in user that posted them. In effect it's a particularly devious and underhanded way of censoring posts. Usually carried out by some immature moderator that don't agree with you.
Moderators of a subreddit cannot shadowban you. Only actual Reddit admins are capable of doing so.
At the top of the comment section, there are two sliders. The left slider is which posts are fully expanded, the right slider is which posts are completely hidden. You have to slide them both fully right if you want to see all posts.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The sliders above the comment section.
Move them.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Agreed. And that's what causes subreddit drama. But it's part of the platform. Like I said, I think they're in the process of making new tools to manage these issues better. Give moderators more options to deal with comments and posters that they think are problems, and then it's up to a subreddit and its community to figure out which rules to apply to meet their own standards.
I rather prefer the /. model, where you can say anything you want (that isn't literally illegal) and everybody takes turn moderating, and judging the moderation of others. It's organic and allows standards of behavior to emerge and shift over time instead of being statically declared and then potentially arbitrarily or strategically enforced.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Fark is small enough that a lot of the users know each other by name, it seems like. It's just snarky commentary on odd news stories; kind of meaningless, but some people have fun with it.
It was then they tried to appeal to the larger market and grab more market share. That's when it went to shit.
Boobies left the front page. They tried to ban harassing comments. Most things were tongue in cheek inside jokes. (I'm waiting for Natalie Portman to be banned from /.)
Fark, Slashdot and Reddit have left a lot of Internet refugees trying to appeal to the current 15-25 year old demographic or trying to milk a lot of profit out of something. If I had an internet time machine I would love to sit and chat in 2001 Fark or 1999 Slashdot about the current news.
I kind of wish Slashdot has Reddit's threading features, where you'd be notified when replies were made. I think it encourages active discussion.
You do realize that you can get email for replies, right? It's in the account settings.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
They banned fatpeople hate but these subreddits still exist: (And I'm not directly linking to them for your own safety)
Then if you want to talk about specific hate speech there is /r/CoonTown and a few anti-Semite ones.
I am not immune to leaving dbag comments when annoyed, sorry.
No, no you are not immune ;)
(okay, neither am I, but that's not why I posted, so let me get to that...)
Also, the moderation system which prohibits commenting and moderating in the same story guarantees reduction in quality.
I believe that's a rule which is put in place as a balance, to prevent someone with mod points unduly influencing an argument in which he or she is an active participant. Sure, 5 points doesn't go very far, but in the right places one could definitely put influence and pressure in a sub-thread against whomever you are crossing mental swords with.
Personally, I don't mind it at all, as it does something I find enjoyable as a challenge: do you mod, or do you jump in and clarify? It forces you to think carefully about whether or not what you want to say is worth undoing the influence you placed into the thread. If you haven't modded *or* posted anything yet, you again have that bit of decision-making to do before you apply a mod anywhere... you get one or the other, your pick.
It's a neat way to force you to pre-consider a course of action, which IMHO is something that most of the Internet has a severe lack of.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Speaking as a different AC who has always posted here as AC, while I support your view that posts should be evaluated for what they say rather than who says it, attacking people personally doesn't serve any purpose and kind of undermines your point.
So, good point, bad implementation. I also agree with Karmashock that you have to let stupid people have their opinions and ignore them rather than let them get under your skin too much. You have to be willing to toss your comment into the wind and see what happens to it, even if it is beseiged by idiocy you think you know is wrong. It's actually pretty funny to have first-hand professional experience in a research topic, make a comment, and then see it downvoted to hell because it isn't what people want to hear. [Shrug] You have to be willing to toss up your hands and say "Well, I tried. Their loss." Especially for scientists, we have to be willing to step out and "speak truth to power", even if that power is just a bunch of basement dwellers in an obscure subreddit with their mouse cursor hovering over the upvote/downvote buttons.
Honestly, that's one of the benefits of AC here: you don't even think about the moderation implications, because you have no identity or moderation points. The post has to stand on its own. It's also a downside in that you may not get noticed, but I've seen enough +5 Insightfuls over the years, and even some +5 Funnies, to know that people do read the ACs from time to time and throw mod points at them when they make a good point.
Yeah, it's frustrating to be operating in a potentially moderation-enforced echo chamber, but I think you underestimate the potential for getting through to people despite that if you are patient enough. The shadowbans on reddit are a pretty nefarious thing that might interfere, but for the sake of excluding bots they are useful, and as a non-bot you can always ask about the possibility it's a factor and fix the problem.
Value my life? What would threaten it? Some furious 12 year olds?
Please cite a real world example of cyberstalking leading to actual harm.
I'm not aware of any.
I've seen some people get sent creepy shit in the mail or have their employers called, or had people call in false police reports... beyond that. Not a whole lot.
The worst thing I can credit as possible would be swatting. And I don't think I'd get hurt. I think I'd be embarrassed because the police would see my skull and crossbones boxers that I'm wearing right now. They glow in the dark. :D
Will the police shoot me with their automatic weapons? I really doubt it. I think they'll yell at me and maybe zip tie my hands until they're sure I'm not going to reach for that spoon in my bowl of cheerios.
As to your fear about getting doxxed... again, only an issue if you're dumb enough to post your personal information online.
I have fake identities. As in... legit fake identities. And use those when people want me to log in with address, email, phone number, etc.
All fake. The address links to a PO box I have, the email goes no where.... the phone number is totally fake.
I had a youtube channel that got DCMAed and I had to give google my information to unlock it. They got my fake info. :)
Unless you're law enforcement you're not going to doxx me. So this paranoia about getting found out is a absurd. Its a stupid worry. You can keep your real life identity a secret really easily. So do that. This is no excuse to be AC. Give me a break.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.