Slashdot Mirror
Reddit Updates Content Policy, Bans More Subreddits
AmiMoJo writes: Reddit's new CEO, Steve Huffman, announced new a content policy and the banning of a small number of subreddits today. Additionally, some subreddits will be "quarantined", so users can't see their content unless they explicitly opt in. "Our most important policy over the last ten years has been to allow just about anything so long as it does not prevent others from enjoying Reddit for what it is: the best place online to have truly authentic conversations.I believe these policies strike the right balance."
The names of the nixed subreddits make clear that they're not exactly neighbors exchanging pleasantries.
So, it's banning communities of people who draw distasteful pictures, and those who are racist against black people?
1) Abhorrent as the former are, who are they harming? i.e. what is the objective justification for banning them, beyond, "These people are fucking sick" - probably true, but so what?
2) While the latter appears may include some groups dedicated to posting gore videos posted without subject consent, there seem to be some fairly mild groups among that list when contrasted with other non-racist harassment groups that have not been banned.
* but watch what you say
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Do what every other exile from Reddit has been doing, move on over to voat. It's a lot more reliable now. Every day there's more content. And the users aren't shitty (mostly)!
among the list of banned subreddits:
/r/CoonTown, /r/WatchNiggersDie, /r/bestofcoontown, /r/koontown, /r/CoonTownMods, /r/CoonTownMeta.
not exactly sterling content that spurs thoughtful collaboration and debate. It harms the reddit brand, but id argue this is less censorship and more spam control. Reddits purpose is entertainment, social networking, and news. If you want flagrant unsubstantiated and indefensible racism, most routers still manage to handle connection requests to the servers at stormfront and about a hundred other different sites.
Good people go to bed earlier.
All kinds of forums, from Facebook on down to unheard of boards with a dozen members, have their rules. Some of them really piss me off, because they want only language, thoughts, and images that would be acceptable in kindergarden, or Sunday School. They REALLY piss me off.
On the other hand - "/r/WatchNiggersDie" - WTF? Hey - you don't have to like black people. You don't have to love them. You don't have to live with a black person. You don't have to talk to them. If you're so bigoted that you can't abide a black person in your life, well, it's your loss. Hate, all you want. You have no right to expect normal people to accept, or even tolerate, the kind of shit I would expect on that forum.
If you're that hateful, go post on Stormfront. You'll be welcome over there, I believe. But, they DO have some rules that you'll have to abide by.
Funny - every community has rules to live by. Even a community of haters. Don't like the rules, go elsewhere, or make your own board.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I've spoken with reddit users and have heard accusations that shadow bans are being abused. What's involved in shadow banning someone? Are people being shadow banned for being involved in unpopular sub-reddits?
If you want flagrant unsubstantiated and indefensible racism, most routers still manage to handle connection requests to the servers at stormfront and about a hundred other different sites.
That's exactly what I figured, too. There's already perfectly good places on the Internet for these folks to go. Maybe these sites aren't as cool 'n hip as Reddit, but then, coolness and hipness aren't so much of a concern for racists, are they? :-)
I kind of can't help but wonder if the older-school douchebags on Stormfront et al. will be happy to get the influx of new blood, or if it'll be their equivalent of Eternal September....
Your rights end where my feelings begin! Shut it down, goyim!
Banning this one sounds like a bad idea to me. I know there are people who e.g. have issues with rage and are unable to control it, even with medication and therapy, unless they can find a safe outlet for it every now and then and for some of them violent videogames have been a great alternative. I would imagine imaginary CP could serve as a similar outlet. The people who get tickled too much about such and then go and do things for real will do it anyways, so banning such won't stop those people, but providing an outlet for people whom such content would help control themselves might, indeed, prevent them from taking it out on a real person. Of course, IMHO, there should still be some sort of therapy in addition to such, but our society makes it really difficult for people to admit such a problem even to professionals.
If I own a restaurant or some other type of public establishment and people come in and have a discussion that is upsetting other customers I have a right to ask them to leave, correct? That is not censorship and that is exactly what Reddit is doing. They are not prohibiting people from expressing themselves, they just aren't allowed to do it on a website provided and maintained by Reddit. If they want to set up their own website they can feel free to do so.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Essentially, the commenter was complaining about a double-standard. Why are communities focused on hate for a group removed when other communities that focus on brigading (actively downvoting comments in a thread on a different community) and attacking people for their views. The OP posted a comment 4 years ago about r/rapingwomen and r/beatingwomen and how they should not be banned. This was in the context of reddit standing for freedom of speech. His logic was "if you want a truly free reddit, you can't ban communities like these, despite how terrible they may be." Someone dug up his comment, reposted it in ShitRedditSays, and people started attacking him from all angles - calling him a rapist, etc. He's feeling like reddit is picking and choosing which "harassing" subreddits are ok, and which aren't.
Came to post this.
Admins must be trollin'. There is absolutely no way they are not aware that SRS is the most toxic sub there is. They do more direct damage to individual users than every other sub combined. And not a peep from the admins. Double-U Tee Eff.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Just because it's not government censorship doesn't mean it's not censorship. It's legal, because Reddit doesn't owe anyone the use of the site to say what the owners of Reddit don't want to be said, and you may even agree with them, because after all they did start by banning truly despicable stuff, but it's still censorship.
There's this old joke that has been attributed to many famous people:
A man asks a woman if she would be willing to sleep with him if he pays her an exorbitant sum. She replies affirmatively. He then names a paltry amount and asks if she would still be willing to sleep with him for the revised fee. The woman is greatly offended and replies as follows: "What kind of woman do you think I am?" To which he responds: "We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling over the price."
It's all too easy to give up principles, but there's no coming back from it.
To carry your analogy further, your restaurant would have to be called "Anything Goes" and be launched on the idea that anyone can say anything and that freedom of speech is paramount - superseding all other concerns. The press interview you and have you on record saying that you're proud of the restaurant being a place that is uncensored and self-moderating (in that if people don't like the conversation at a table they are welcome to move to another), with each table out of earshot of all other tables, thus underlining how accepting of all opinions your restaurant is. Jump forward to the present and if you're surprised that patrons are upset that you're banning certain conversations on the basis that you don't like them, perhaps you shouldn't have opened this kind of restaurant in the first place.
SRS (/r/shitredditsays) is a subreddit (forum) in which users post links to comments in other subreddits they find "offensive." The other users then follow that link to exact bloody revenge. And I mean bloody. They do not just "brigade" (which is also against the rules), downvoting en mass and posting insults. They go through somebody's post history and downvote everything they've ever said. They go farther still, "doxxing" people, breaking their pseudo-anonymity by going through their post history to try to uncover their real identity. Then they go further still, harassing that person in real life, and contacting their employer and trying to get them fired for opinions they expressed on the internet. It is the definition of harassment, in violation of the terms of the service of reddit and common human decency. Yet, SRS is never disciplined, never banned.
And in case you're wondering "well maybe these people deserve it!" No. Not by any stretch of the imagination. It's not like they're uncovering child abusers or something. They take anything that even maybe hints of "privilege" or insensitivity and spin horror stories out of whole cloth. In Warlizard's case (the guy who wrote the comment the GP reposted), he, talking about censorship, said that if reddit stands for "free speech" as they claim to, then no they shouldn't ban offensive subreddits like /r/rapingwomen. He goes on to say that if he had a private forum that he hosted, and someone made a subforum for that topic, he would ban it in a heartbeat because it's horrific and offensive. However, SRS took the first part of that and ran with it, called him a "rapist," followed him around, harassing him, and leaving nasty reviews on Amazon of the books he's authored.
They do this to lots of people. They want to be Social Justice Batman, but they're kind of like Batman if he were mentally retarded and high on crystal meth, programmed to punch anybody who utters certain words, regardless of context.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
If they want to protect sensitive ears, then they should set-up an opt-in flag that will hide inflammatory reddts from searches and casual browsing.
Sound slike that is exactly what they are doing with the quarantine feature, where you have to explicitly opt-in to see the content.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Why not allow the USER to decide what they do or do not want to see, rather than using corporate sponsored censorship? I dunno maybe some kind of "block list" they can set for their own account?
The point of free speech principles is that you can't protect the important speech without bringing along all forms of speech, even stupid ones, because the alternative is the slippery slope of censorship and deciding who should have the power to do it. But even in the ideal case, it is the right of *each person* to decide what they want to listen to.
Crazy idea, I KNOW!
I love 'em so much I have a beowulf cluster of hot grits down Natalie Portman's pants...
Never thought I'd be nostalgic for Slashdot trolls.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
— HL Mencken
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
Slowly but surely, Reddit has deliberately reformed itself to be a politically correct echo chamber. The policies only touch those who voice politically incorrect opinions. This is nothing more than thought policing.
This will ultimately be its undoing, and will significantly improve the quality of discussion in whatever follows, as the signal to noise ratio will be considerably higher when the usual parrots are left to their own devices.
This kind of behavior is normal in media once it reaches certain traction, and has happened here in Slashdot as well. This is no longer news for nerds in the sense it used to be, but much more focused on egaliatarian, progressive policies etc nonsense.
See you on the other side.
Sincerely,
-Nearly two decades of Slashdot.
Ps. Captcha: Expelled
As mentioned in another comment the behaviour of that subreddit goes way beyond simply brigading but in the realm of raiding, doxxing and harassing individual users.
The difference in remedies here is what makes this interesting: if Reddit is not banning for ideas but for behaviour what is the difference between SRS and FPH that justifies the difference in treatment?
If Reddit shuts off the supply, how will anyone express an opinion on the internet? Nobody has the capability to reverse engineer the decades or proprietary research and technology that enables posting comments on an internet forum.
http://dictionary.reference.co...
http://dictionary.reference.co...
Done. Do you have a better argument or are you just butthurt that other people are butthurt and you feel that you just have to spit as much shit into the shitstorm as them?
> I have a right to ask them to leave, correct?
Sure you do, but stop claiming your restaurant is a bastion of free speech.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
The complaint is about the difference in the treatment of two similar problem subreddits: FPH and SRS, along with the current batch of banned ones.
The former got banned (according to the official explanation) not because of their ideas but because of the behaviour of their members (doxxing, harassing). The current batch was banned because (according to the official explanation) they "are banning a handful of communities that exist solely to annoy other redditors, prevent us from improving Reddit, and generally make Reddit worse for everyone else".
SRS exhibits the same behaviour that got FPH banned (brigading, harassing) and arguably exhibits the same behaviour that was used to justify the banishment of the current batch: existing "solely to annoy other redditors".
The above posted explanation from the admin admits SRS is a problem but only touches the brigading and anti brigading measures.
It gives the impression that existing "solely to annoy other redditors" was not the real reason for banning the current batch and that "doxxing and harassing" was not the real reason for banning FPH.
The funny thing about having to do something is that you only have to do something if you want something and his statement is perfectly valid in trying to identify what results in the best outcome for them and society at large. That's right, society at large. If you want to participate in a society, you have to learn how to be responsive to the constantly changing situation of that society.
Actually if you own a shopping mall in the USA and a self-appointed preacher enters and starts to sermon about the end of world being nigh, you have to tolerate that. Since the mall floor is open to the general public, including those who just want to admire the shop window displays for free, you can't discriminate
That's total bullshit. If that were true, there's be tons of preachers at malls every night, bothering shoppers. No, the mall does not have to tolerate that; that's why they have private security. Anyone who causes a disturbance (and public speaking is a disturbance in a mall) is thrown out. Malls are private property, no different from a Walmart. You're not allowed to go into a Walmart and preach either. You're only allowed to stay there as long as the management decides you're not a problem. Every business open to the public in America is like this.
This is why you only see those annoying preachers on street corners in areas with lots of pedestrians. Those are actual public spaces where people are allowed to exercise their freedom of speech. Not on privately-owned property.
The "private club" thing only affects who you can allow in. If you're "open to the public", you can't discriminate. That's why some golf courses are "private clubs", so they can only have white people.
Pretty good summary. I made a comment on it and within the hour I had SRS harassing me along with somebody making a new account with a nearly identical username as mine.
Not really worth my time so I just deleted my account. They started threatening to "dox" me, but considering I currently use 6 different unrelated usernames for websites along with following the golden rule of never giving the internet personally identifiable information, they're going to have fun wasting their time.
In Warlizard's case (the guy who wrote the comment the GP reposted), he, talking about censorship, said that if reddit stands for "free speech" as they claim to, then no they shouldn't ban offensive subreddits like /r/rapingwomen.... SRS took the first part of that and ran with it, called him a "rapist," followed him around, harassing him, and leaving nasty reviews on Amazon of the books he's authored.
I had something very much like that happen on reddit a few years back. I forget the context, because the context was so amazingly innocuous. It was something like: Someone said of a suspected child rapist, "This guy doesn't deserve rights. He should just be dragged out into the middle of town and beaten to death." to which I responded, "No, obviously everyone should get a trial. We don't know what happened or what extenuating circumstances there might have been, which is why we have trials."
There was no response for a couple of hours, and then my inbox got flooded with people threatening me. I found that someone had responded to my post claiming that I was defending child molesters, and therefore must be one. The response was upvoted a couple hundred times, and there were a bunch of responses like, "Yeah, this guy is a piece of shit. How dare he defend child molesters."
The whole thing was so insane to me that I didn't even bother responding. I immediately deleted my account. It was one of those moments that makes me a little terrified of the Internet. I don't know exactly why my post became a target, whether someone linked to it on another subreddit or something, but I was pretty disturbed by the experience. I had the distinct feeling that if any personal information had been associated with my account, I would have been harassed and possibly assaulted in real life, simply because I made the mistake of advocating for due process and rule of law in a public forum.
Like the last few purges of counter-narrative content, SRS continues to exist despite violating every rule in the book.
If you're an SJW, harassment/doxxing/etc. is encouraged - especially if it causes RL harm. Reporting it to the admins does nothing.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
just ignore amimojo, the person obviously has a vested interested in reddit and srs specifically.
you're trying to explain something to someone who already knows fully what a crappy thing is that is going on but defends it anyway.