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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.
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
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!
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.
I've spoken with reddit users and have heard accusations that shadow bans are being abused. What's involved in shadow banning someone?
A shadow ban is a ban that is difficult for a bot to figure out (in theory, but it doesn't seem difficult to me). The user cannot tell the difference when logged in. However, their content is not being shown to anyone else. It should be as easy as clicking a permalink to one of your comments, then logging out and viewing the same permalink. If the comment is there when logged out, you are not shadow banned. I believe you can be shadow banned on both a subreddit and sitewide basis.
I have one non-throwaway reddit account, and I keep it away from the front page or anything controversial. For front paging, I used to use throwaways. Nowadays, I pretty much try to avoid reddit. But, yes in the past, shadow bans seemed to be quite zealously applied. Sure, I've said some controversial and even borderline trolling things. You can basically get shadow banned from a subreddit for offending a moderator. In my experience, shadow banning happens usually because you merely expressed an opinion that diverges from the normative or expected normative position of userbase at reddit, the so-called hivemind. It's permanent. That account is effectively toast.
Are people being shadow banned for being involved in unpopular sub-reddits?
That I do not know. Maybe someone should do some experiments.
NO. Stop going to a single site for everything.
<Back in my day> There were forums dedicated to separate topics. I didn't have to worry about someone judging my post on VWVortex by what I said on Slashdot. I kept separate usernames. Now everyone uses the same username for *everything*. And now every site has a 'facebook' login. I *DO NOT* want all of that stuff linked.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.