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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.

10 of 410 comments (clear)

  1. Truly authentic conversations* by NotDrWho · · Score: 5, Funny

    * but watch what you say

    --
    SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
  2. the partial list, for the unititiated. by nimbius · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    Good people go to bed earlier.
    1. Re:the partial list, for the unititiated. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It harms the reddit brand, but id argue this is less censorship and more spam control.

      I'd argue that it is censorship, and ultimately it does damage the reddit brand.

      People are being racist and horrible on your internet site. Get over it. Supporting free speech means defending people's rights and ability to speak, even if it is about things you do not like, be it pornography or racism. The increasingly shill excuses that these people in sites and subreddits most of us have never heard of people are "harassing" others is simply a hysterical veneer on a coldly calculated censorship drive.

      Ban these racist sites today, what comes tomorrow? I'm sure there's a subreddit for so called "interracial porn". Is that racist? Does that get banned? What about subreddits promoting interracial marraige? Same sex marraige? Gay rights? You can easily find LOTS of people who think all of those are offensive. Do they get quarantined so reddit can maintain a cleaner media image? Go the other way in the US culture wars. What about subreddits against gay marraige? Against divorce? Promoting conservative religous values in society? Again LOTS of people are offended by those. Do we quarantine those too? Subreddits covering islamic terrorism? Incidents in the West Bank? Systemd criticism?

      What is the condition for quarantine here? When does free speech break down? Answer: After a 2-3 year slow burn media campaign to demonize reddit for allowing subreddits to exist which offend media owners.

      Reddit started off as a free speech site. Create the forum you want. For the last few years the presence of these relatively small racist or unpolitically correct subreddits has drawn the ire of those with media influence, and reddit has been placed under gigantic social and media pressure to effectively, enforce "basic standards of decency". Hence this quarantine.

      You may agree that reddit was justified in conforming to the pressure in this case. But the next group to put media pressure on the site may not be the group you agree with. Reddit has made a decisive turn away from its free speech principles, and some of those applauding now will come to regret the loss of the promise that site once offered.

  3. Top voted post of that thread, interesting point by vivaoporto · · Score: 5, Informative
    The top voted comments on that thread, an interesting enough point that is not being dealt with in these last rounds of purges. Reposted here without changes for benefit of the Slashdot audience.

    Last week an SRS user went nearly four years into my history and posted this in /r/ShitRedditSays:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/3fkp3m/010212_petition_to_ban_rrapingwomen_sorry_cant/

    Taken with zero context, and without considering this happened in the midst of Reddit banning a few subs and /u/violentacrez getting doxxed, SRS users decided that I was tolerant of rape, or beating women, that I was lazy, a shit-poster, pandering to my "audience", suggested SRS users go to Amazon to see what a piece of shit I was, that I thought "rape" was "freedom of speech", and that I was objectively wrong and thought "freedom of speech" was moderating a website.

    They hadn't bothered to read the rest of my comments, where I said "If this were MY company and these subreddits were on MY board, I'd delete them in a heartbeat, because I find them personally offensive."

    I was banned from SRS years ago (not for commenting, just because one of the mods thought I should be -- that's their prerogative) so I messaged the SRS admins and asked for a chance to respond, considering this post was #1 in SRS.

    http://imgur.com/Z8EJh1c

    As you can see, the only response was "ROFL".

    /r/Fatpeoplehate was created to mock people based on a subjective perception.

    /r/Coontown was created to mock people based on a subjective perception.

    /r/Shitredditsays was created to mock people based on a subjective perception.

    This is their stated purpose:

    "Have you recently read an upvoted Reddit comment that was bigoted, creepy, misogynistic, transphobic, racist, homophobic, or just reeking of unexamined, toxic privilege? Of course you have! Post it here."

    They exist to mock and harass Reddit users.

    we 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.

    Your words.

    Please explain to me how holding other people up to ridicule without even allowing them to respond is good for reddit, encourages participation, and makes Reddit a safe place to express our opinions and ALSO differs from the subs you've banned.

    EDIT: And this comment was already linked in SRS:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/3fx49i/meta_spezs_new_content_policy_unveiled_ctown_and/ctsvdrb?context=3

    mfw /u/WarLizard[1] pulls the "WHAT ABOUT SRS" card after being linked here. He regularly contributes to /r/KotakuInAction [2], not sure why he feels like he'd be welcome here at all. He's also complaining about the existence of SRS, so yeah right there he'd be banned. Oh no, a sexist/racist/homophobic/transphobic post was made and got linked here. WOULD ANYONE THINK OF THE RACIST'S FEELINGS?

    This is a perfect example.

    I have posted in KiA, and it has been fascinating to talk with the people there. Much like it has been fascinating to talk to the people in GamerGhazi.

    But without context, someone might assume that because I've posted or commented there that I'm racist, mi

  4. Re:Top voted post of that thread, interesting poin by vivaoporto · · Score: 5, Informative

    /r/Fatpeoplehate being banned for harassment of individual redditors while /r/ShitRedditSays/ not being banned while their stated purpose is harassment of individual redditors.

  5. Re:Top voted post of that thread, interesting poin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:Voat by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:Top voted post of that thread, interesting poin by meta-monkey · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
  8. Defending scoundrels by claytongulick · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

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    Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
  9. Re:Top voted post of that thread, interesting poin by nine-times · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.