Reddit's Main Code Is No Longer Open Source (reddit.com)

An anonymous reader quotes an announcement from Reddit's founding engineer: When we open sourced Reddit back in 2008, Reddit Inc was a ragtag organization and the future of the company was very uncertain. We wanted to make sure the community could keep the site alive should the company go under and making the code available was the logical thing to do. Nine years later and Reddit is a very different company and as anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed, we've been doing a bad job of keeping our open-source product repos up to date. This is for a variety of reasons, some intentional and some not so much:

Open-source makes it hard for us to develop some features "in the clear" (like our recent video launch) without leaking our plans too far in advance. As Reddit is now a larger player on the web, it is hard for us to be strategic in our planning when everyone can see what code we are committing. Because of the above, our internal development, production and "feature" branches have been moving further and further from the "canonical" state of the open source repository... We are actively moving away from the "monolithic" version of reddit that works using only the original repository... Because of these reasons, we are making the following changes to our open-source practice. We're going to archive reddit/reddit and reddit/reddit-mobile. These will still be accessible in their current state, but will no longer receive updates.
The announcement has been condensed slightly, but Reddit's founding engineer insists that "We believe in open source, and want to make sure that our contributions are both useful and meaningful. We will continue to open source tools that are of use to engineers everywhere." In addition, "Much of the core of Reddit is based on open source technologies (Postgres, python, memcached, Cassanda to name a few!) and we will continue to contribute to projects we use and modify..."

"Those who have been paying attention will realize that this isn't really a change to how we're doing anything but rather making explicit what's already been going on."

Comments

Neither is Slashdot's

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine that: Companies only embrace open source when they benefit from it.

Re:Neither is Slashdot's

[ShanghaiBill]

Imagine that: Companies only embrace open source when they benefit from it.

Companies are often poor at deciding what is in their best interest. Reddit's explanation is that going closed source will allow them to do secret stuff. But is keeping secrets really beneficial? Might it not be better to discuss changes openly, and get feedback from users, before committing development time?

I once worked for a company that was considering going open source. There was huge internal opposition from people that feared giving away the "crown jewels" and allowing competitors to "steal" code. After months of debate, we went ahead and opened everything up.

Over the next year, we had a total of this many downloads: 0.

Re:Neither is Slashdot's

[Ramze]

That's an interesting point. Just because source code is published doesn't mean it will be incorporated into other projects.

I imagine a lot of companies could do the same and their competitors wouldn't bother to use their code -- either because they have their own code base that is tried and true or because they don't have the resources to analyze and/or run the code properly given their hardware and network architecture.

I personally wouldn't know what to do with a sizable chunk of quality code for a commercial web site. I can deal with small sites and run simple Apache server with some scripts and HTML5... maybe even get a decent SQL back-end, but once you get to multiple servers, load balancing, thousands of users, etc... it's beyond my skill-set. I imagine such things would be most useful to organizations that already have their own solutions... and why would they be tempted to switch? Why would they trust millions of lines of code from a competitor that's been open-sourced so every hacker on the planet can view it and poke holes in it? It would have to be an order of magnitude better than the current code to be worth the manpower to check the code for bugs / design flaws and re-purpose it for their use.

Re:Neither is Slashdot's

[ShanghaiBill]

Successful companies listen to their customers rather than watching their competitors.

Re:Neither is Slashdot's

[TheRaven64]

There was zero wasted time and effort open sourcing it. The work was done either open or closed, they just put the code in a different electronic place. You should be fired from your business.

That's very unusual. Typically, open sourcing a proprietary codebase requires at least a basic audit to ensure that you actually own the code, that it doesn't contain any third-party proprietary data that you're not allowed to release, and so on. Open sourcing code in a commercial environment is not just a matter of copying the code to GitHub, and if that's how you've been doing it then the grandparent isn't the one in this thread who should expect to be fired.

Re:Neither is Slashdot's

[drinkypoo]

Typically, open sourcing a proprietary codebase requires at least a basic audit to ensure that you actually own the code, that it doesn't contain any third-party proprietary data that you're not allowed to release, and so on.

There are plenty of codebases that simply don't involve anything like that. If you were smart enough to use only libraries to which you could link freely to begin with, then you don't have that kind of work to do. Granted, most such projects are relatively small, but so what? That doesn't make them not exist.

Re:Neither is Slashdot's

[TheRaven64]

There are plenty of codebases that simply don't involve anything like that. If you were smart enough to use only libraries to which you could link freely to begin with, then you don't have that kind of work to do.

Sure, unless the software is purely internal but contains business logic (i.e. most internal software in the category that you describe), in which case you still need to audit it to ensure that it doesn't contain anything proprietary from your partners.

Re:Neither is Slashdot's

[drinkypoo]

Isn't this once again an issue of development style? Shouldn't all of that stuff be abstracted away into portions of your program that can be easily replaced just for your own convenience, in case the company you're licensing it from goes away, or goes insane, and you need to replace it for non-OSS reasons?

Re:Neither is Slashdot's

[TheRaven64]

You're thinking in terms of code. In much business software, it's more about the embedded data that's proprietary and confidential. Details of contracts, price calculations, and so on, can all easily end up embedded, or details of internal infrastructure (or a partner's infrastructure) that's commercially sensitive. All of this needs auditing before you can open source proprietary code.

Re: Neither is Slashdot's

[haruchai]

"Trump Acceptance Resistance Disorder...."

I remember how calmly the conservatives / right wing/ Tea Party/ GOP acted towards Obama.
Gosh, only in an alternative universe would they imply he was illegitimate, a homosexual serial killer, a foreign-born Muslim, the son of a black militant terrorist, that his grades were faked, that his election to the Harvard Law Review was solely because of Affirmative Action, or that his wife is a fatass ape in heels.

Was anyone using it?

[Yaztromo]

Does anybody care? I only spent five minutes researching the subject, but from what I can find virtually nobody is using Reddit's Open Source code to run their own websites.

Reddit's reasoning seems dickish -- they benefitted from being Open Source when it benefitted them, but as soon as it didn't, they decided to stop. I find their reasoning for making the code closed source specious -- does having video really give them some sort of competitive advantage? Video is hardly new on the web -- every major service already supports it. I doubt they're doing anything so new that nobody else can figure out how to do it on their own competing websites.

Sorry Reddit. It's a dick move and your reason sucks, but somehow I doubt anyone really cares all that much how your code is licensed, as virtually nobody is using it anyway.

Yaz

Re:Was anyone using it?

[ModernGeek]

It does show a huge culture shift. I remember making a snarky comment about starting a new site because they did something stupid, and the current owner/admin of the site replied to my comment with something like, "Well then you better start with our codebase then!"

It's something about how bubbly/happy/engaged/accommodating their admin staff was, was just .. infuriating; it also somehow kept me on the site. Today is now another story, with rampant censorship, vote manipulation, and a site-wide hive-mind mentality that's enforced by the admins themselves. Their utopian hands-off philosophy love-your-enemy philosophy has morphed into some weird dystopian-esque love me or leave me world where censorship is seen as a virtue.

Re:Was anyone using it?

[serviscope_minor]

censorship is seen as a virtue.

Moderating private forums is a virtue.

Free speech means you won't get jailed so you can criticise the government without fear of arrest etc. It doesn't mean you won't get ostracised, disinherited and thrown out of the private clubhouse.

With all these cries of censorship no one has actually been prevented from their legal speech. Some people have fonud it tricky to find somewhere to host them but in the end there are options.

So yes the system works and no you have no legal, moral or ethical right to say whatever you want where ever you want whenever you want.

Re:Was anyone using it?

[Jack9]

> So yes the system works and no you have no legal, moral or ethical right to say whatever you want where ever you want whenever you want.

Whoa there. I would definitely say you have a moral right to say whatever you want where ever you want whenever you want, in some respect. I would even go so far as to say it's moral that you should have a way for any message to be heard.

Truth is relative (truth is not the same as fact). Personal truth is based on experiences, biology, psychology, etc. Then maybe choose to add that speech is the preferred conflict resolution method (to violence or shame) when negotiating reality of truth. Admittedly, competing assessments of truth cannot necessarily be completely resolved and there's a frustration with that, everyone feels. Out of this, I find that stifling speech *in any form* is immoral to that end, regardless of the legal underpinnings. It's an integral part of our practical efforts to progress toward some resolution of truths, for the human culture at large.

Granted, many articulations (shitposting), are not practically, philosophically or even temporally useful. There's a moral truth that emerges from that observation...among many others, that would not necessarily be identifiable if we interfered with a series of filters or qualifications. A complex enough logical system has an indeterminate end state, per the halting problem. Trolling, fake news, or any number of other incidental and malevolent purposes are all valid ways to express truth (discovery of fraud is the revelation of the weakness of systems, paradoxically). People's interpretation of reality relies on feedback loops regardless of how frustrating our conceptual mismatches along the way.

I whittle down my feelings to a single assertion that's relevant to the subject. "It's always useful to have an unrestrained channel of global communication". Such a mechanism is not immediately available to everyone today and reddit is obviously not a suitable proxy for that axiom. Saying that it's immoral to have some form of unrestrained speech is a conceptual misstep, from my perspective. I think we're slowly correcting it in a haphazard crucible of tests in the internet over time. The idea that the internet routes around censorship might be seen as a metaphor for the actions of progressively moral individuals, to that end YMMV

Re:Was anyone using it?

[mikkig]

i cant even figure out how to post to reddit to where my posts ever get bumped......whats the secret?

Re:Was anyone using it?

[serviscope_minor]

Whoa there. I would definitely say you have a moral right to say whatever you want where ever you want whenever you want, in some respect. I would even go so far as to say it's moral that you should have a way for any message to be heard.

No absolutely not.

Your right to free speech does not in any way trump the right of others to not listen.

Truth is relative (truth is not the same as fact).

I disagree. That's partly true, partly not. Some people believe lies, that does not make those lies the truth.

Then maybe choose to add that speech is the preferred conflict resolution method (to violence or shame) when negotiating reality of truth.

In most cases yes. In some cases no. Not all confilcts can be resolved peacefully and not all people are prepared to listen to reason.

Admittedly, competing assessments of truth cannot necessarily be completely resolved and there's a frustration with that, everyone feels.

Yes especially when one set of "truths" are outright lies designed to turn people against a particular group. See for example all the lies that Nazis (neo and otherwise) seem to believe about the Jews.

Out of this, I find that stifling speech *in any form* is immoral to that end, regardless of the legal underpinnings.

That's BS. If a guest of mine starts spouting off on how I should be gassed, then I'll kick him out of my house. That's stifling speech in some form and it is absolutely not immoral.

Feel free to invent other examples, but there are plenty of people who do in fact espouse those views about people from my background.

Trolling, fake news, or any number of other incidental and malevolent purposes are all valid ways to express truth

What? No. The definition of "truth" is not "something someone believes".

It's always useful to have an unrestrained channel of global communication

We have Tor.

Such a mechanism is not immediately available to everyone today

It's called Tor and it's available to everyone very easily.

Saying that it's immoral to have some form of unrestrained speech is a conceptual misstep, from my perspective

I don't know what you mean. Are you advocation the position that solitication of murder (a type of speech) is OK? I doubt it, but seriously I don't get your point.

Re:Was anyone using it?

[Jesus_666]

Nobody uses Reddit's code because Reddit's code is terrible. It's a jumble of Python that relies on some very specific (and long-deprecated) Python packages, which means that you can only run it on one specific version of Python on Ubuntu 14.04. Trying to run it anywhere else (even Ubuntu 14.10) will typically end in failure.

We're in full agreement about them dropping open source sucking, though.

Re:Was anyone using it?

[drinkypoo]

Whoa there. I would definitely say you have a moral right to say whatever you want where ever you want whenever you want, in some respect.

Absolutely not. Your right to free speech ends where my face begins. You don't have a right to force me to listen to you. That's why we have a thing called harassment.

I would even go so far as to say it's moral that you should have a way for any message to be heard.

You do! You find a receptive audience.

Remember, even if you talk right to someone, they won't necessarily hear you. Talking is about you, you have a right to talk. Hearing is about someone else, you don't have a right to make someone else hear you. That is violence.

Truth is relative (truth is not the same as fact). Personal truth is based on experiences, biology, psychology, etc.

Your "truth" can go fuck itself if it doesn't agree with facts, and no one should be making excuses for people who want to promote their vision of the truth over the facts.

I whittle down my feelings to a single assertion that's relevant to the subject. "It's always useful to have an unrestrained channel of global communication".

That's not what you said at first, though. You don't even know what you believe. You said that people should be able to force other people to listen to them. You may not realize that's what you said, but that's what your words mean to someone who understands the language and who can follow a thought to its logical conclusion.

Saying that it's immoral to have some form of unrestrained speech is a conceptual misstep, from my perspective.

No one said that but you. You simply failed to understand the argument.

Re:Was anyone using it?

[Whibla]

What a day to have no mod points.

+1 Insightful

Re:Was anyone using it?

[Jack9]

> That's stifling speech in some form and it is absolutely not immoral.

This is the core of what you object to, as far as I can tell. I think you missed the important element of your own example. They said it, you heard it.

The consequence is obvious and practical. That's fundamentally separate from your own allowance that they might vocalize something to you. As social creatures, all humans accept that human vocalizations are both expected and worth interpreting as part of a subcortical network like in other primates. Even when some of it is bad, more is better because the otherwise immoral actors do not benefit as much as the moral actors (also there are usually consequences for the bad actors). This is a characteristic of the species, which is partly the basis for my morality interpretation with regards to the virtue of unrestrained speech. Maybe we're equivocating about what "restrained" means, but I'm talking about the initial conceptual physical restraint. Then I make the leap that proximal communication is equivalent (putting someone in a cell isn't much different than duct-taping their mouth) QED - there is a moral imperative to have a channel that humanity can communicate on without a priori restraint, in the face of ALTERNATIVELY making a tacit acceptance of the status quo (restrained speech existing via proximity). This all fits within my moral framework of spoken truth as the highest value in service to humanity (the US Constitution is nice and all, but I don't derive morality from regional legality).

> no you have no ... moral or ethical right to say whatever you want where ever you want whenever you want.

I still think you misstated this and I've laid out my reasoning, the best I can and you are perfectly sane to reject it. I can hope that some of this is bordering on interesting to you.

> Your right to free speech does not in any way trump the right of others to not listen.

I have not proposing forced acceptance of content. I have proposed that there should be a channel available that is optionally accessible by all.
The internet is the beginning of such a system, albeit not yet accessible by all. It might be useful to think about the fact that about 10% of the population on the planet, has an IQ under 90. Similarly, there is no channel for say a member of the Saan (other than physical speech) and that necessarily limits the audience. I get that you don't really understand the precept anyway (so you feel that you need to reject it explicitly), but Tor is a hellishly complicated thing that does not meet the criteria of accessibility in many ways.

> Truth is relative (truth is not the same as fact).
> I disagree. That's partly true, partly not. Some people believe lies, that does not make those lies the truth.

I am not talking about facts. What's factual and what's not, is a different issue. Lies are not truth, but white lies are a kind of truth. What truth means, has to do with human experience unless you're just going to dispense with trying to separate the meanings because you don't want to engage into epistemology. As an exercise, think about the statements: "the wriiting of Shakespeare contain truth" or "the Mona Lisa can reveal a truth". There's nothing factual in those constructs, but people can derive meaning from both (depending on the person). For sake of argument, I'll just agree that people have different beliefs and leave it at that for simplicity. It was really a warm up to explaining my morality from a deeper philosophical level.

> Not all confilcts can be resolved peacefully

Would you agree that generallly, you try communication first, as the preferred method? Even if it's just a warning? I think the shoot first and sort it out later approach is antithetical to western culture (ie the golden rule). I'm not sure of your specific beliefs, but I'm making an assumption about your sig, which may be in error.

> Are you advocation the position that solitication of murder (a type of spe

Re:Was anyone using it?

[Jack9]

> That's not what you said at first, though. You don't even know what you believe.

I'm very sure I do.

> You said that people should be able to force other people to listen to them

No, I did not. - "a way for any message to be heard" is not the same as "anyone should have to listen". One is an available channel, the other is a forced acceptance of content (or something?). I really don't understand how that interpretation can make sense conceptually. My ongoing responses to serviscope_minor may clarify the issue.

Re:Was anyone using it?

[drinkypoo]

No, I did not. - "a way for any message to be heard" is not the same as "anyone should have to listen".

Yes, yes it is.

One is an available channel, the other is a forced acceptance of content (or something?).

No, you're missing it; that's my point. What you have a right to is the right to share your message with anyone who wants it; you have the right to speech, and not the right to be heard. It's like the difference between implication and inference. The speaker implies; the listener infers. The speaker speaks; the listener hears. You have the right to speak. You do not have the right to force others to hear. And that is why you don't have the right to force any particular communications channel to carry your message, and you don't have the right to scream in people's faces. There's really no meaningful difference.

Re:Was anyone using it?

[Hentes]

It's not just about using it, but about reading it. Reddit has become big enough that rankings on it can make or break a project, so understanding how its algorithm works under the hood is important.

Re:Was anyone using it?

[doom]

Does anybody care? I only spent five minutes researching the subject, but from what I can find virtually nobody is using Reddit's Open Source code to run their own websites.

There are people complaining that their pull requests have been left to die on the vine-- they were trying to add features and fixes to reddit itself.

There are multiple attempts at reddit-alternatives out there, and I would be very surprised if at least some of them weren't using an older version of reddit code as a base. (If you care, most of them look to me like failures of imagination-- "we be just like reddit, but better... somehow".)

One of the big complaints about this move is that it looks like a move away from transparency in general-- reddit's stated reasoning for what it's doing doesn't make a lot of sense-- unless there's something they're developing that they know would piss off their users: time to keep the advertisers happy, right?

(Every other day I wonder why everyone gave up on usenet. Something or other about spammers is what they usually say, but compared to other crap we've got to deal with, there had to be some hack that could cover for that problem...)

Re:Was anyone using it?

[Yaztromo]

(Every other day I wonder why everyone gave up on usenet. Something or other about spammers is what they usually say, but compared to other crap we've got to deal with, there had to be some hack that could cover for that problem...)

I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you there. Sure there were heavily spammed and toxic USENET communities (comp.os.os2.advocacy, I'm looking at you here...), but a decentralized discussion system that allowed you to use any client, and for which you could get offline capabilities is something I too frequently miss. For every really bad USENET group, there were a number of amazing communities, and if you wanted to ensure you got as far away as possible from the junk, you could always find a .moderated group to your liking.

Yaz

Re:Was anyone using it?

[david_thornley]

Whoa there. I would definitely say you have a moral right to say whatever you want where ever you want whenever you want, in some respect. I would even go so far as to say it's moral that you should have a way for any message to be heard.

The right to free speech does not mean a mandate to listen, or to provide a podium. You want to say something, you grab a soapbox or get your own website or something like that. Taking your words literally, you are saying that someone should be able to come into my house and say what they want, and I shouldn't be able to avoid it.

Truth is relative (truth is not the same as fact).

Nope. Truth is truth. We have limited understanding of the truth. You're talking about beliefs.

I find that stifling speech *in any form* is immoral to that end, regardless of the legal underpinnings.

Then you won't mind if I show up in your bedroom at 2AM to tell you about Pastafarianism?

People say things because they want them to have consequences. If speech doesn't have consequences, it's pointless. Some of these consequences will be favorable and some unfavorable to the speaker, and this is always potentially gong to happen. You can't remove unfavorable consequences without removing favorable ones.

Also, I was around back when unmoderated Usenet groups were quite useful, serving as public discussion forums on their topics. The inability to stifle speech meant that these became completely useless. No forum that doesn't have the means to stifle speech can possibly survive in a useful form.

Why bother?

[kamapuaa]

Why use Open Reddit when Slashdot code is easily available?

Re: Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot's code is NOT easily available. In fact, it's not available at all. The code that you can download is from 2009. No additional updates have been released to the public. For all intents and purposes, Slashdot's code is closed source.

There is a fork called SoylentNews, which has modernized Slash. However, that code has substantial differences from what you see on Slashdot. That's as close as you're going to get to a modern version of Slash.

The management could very easily make Slashdot's code open source again. It was hosted on Sourceforge. It would be a meaningful gesture toward restoring trust in Sourceforge if Slashdot released its code there. This is actually one of the easiest ways for Slashdot management to regain trust with users, but it hasn't happened.

I strongly advise against using the 2009 code on Slashcode. It probably won't work very well on a modern Linux system, plus there may well be vulnerabilities and other bugs in the 2009 code that you don't want on a website. If you want a Slashdot-like site, please use the SoylentNews code instead.

Re: Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Soylent news supports unicode, so we know its not the same code as slashdot.

Re: Why bother?

[sg_oneill]

Psssst there are more countries than America

Re: Why bother?

[nadaou]

Psssst there are more countries than America

A number of other continents too.

Re: Why bother?

[MMC Monster]

True, but it's generally good to build on the work of others rather than re-make the same mistakes.

There was another guy who made a modern forum system from scratch in the style of slashdot. I believe he made the source available as well. The forum is http://pipedot.org/ . The software is available at http://pipedot.org/ .

Re: Why bother?

[MMC Monster]

Opps. The source is available at https://pipecode.org/ .

Re: Why bother?

[drinkypoo]

Why would anyone even want to use ca. 2009 Slashcode over a codebase that properly handles 1991 technology like Unicode? Why would even Slashdot want to run it? It boggles the mind.

Re: Why bother?

[Nicopa]

There are more countries in America, even.

Re: Why bother?

[doom]

Dude: it's possible to try to reply to something on slashdot, cut-and-paste a quote into a TEXTAREA, and then find that it doesn't display correctly. Slashdot's input doesn't understand it's output. That's PFD.

Re:Why bother?

[dougmc]

In addition to the other answers you've received, Slashdot is very *different* from Reddit.

I haven't looked at any of the code of either, but looking at the sites -- Slashdot is a fairly typical news site that lets you comment on things, and reddit is basically a web based evolution of Usenet. There's plenty of overlap between these things, but the differences are still huge.

There's lots of CMSs out there that can do approximately what Slashdot's code seems to do for it. (That said, again ... I haven't actually looked at the code -- this is based on my experience with the site.) What reddit does ... that seems to be a lot more rare.

Either way, I would say that these two are very much not interchangeable -- they do very different things.

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Reddit jumped the shark.
Now it's just a propaganda outlet for leftist bullshit.

Wrongthink will be punished.

Re:Meh

[bn-7bc]

Hmm, the ftont psge maby, but I frequent several sub reddits /r/ipv6 , /r/postgresql, /r/irc, /r/blackmagicdesign, and I might have missed it but I’ve not seen any leftist propaganda , nor any evidence of a reddit hive mind mentioned earler in the comments. Well I tend to miss things, or are thise sub reddits I mentioned not thst politicsl / borg like? Input apreciated have a nice day

Re: Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Because non-leftist viewpoints equate to bring a dickhead?

You are part of the problem.

Re: Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the desperate need to both be offended and to signal ones "virtue" via absolute intolerance that characterizes the new left. (Not dissimilar to the Khmer rouge.)

Re:Meh

[AmiMoJo]

But what is the alternative? Voat isn't very popular, quickly devolved into a cesspit and bans any wrongthink left leaning boards.

Same with PewTube. The number one video on that site was about communism, and was quickly banned along with all left leaning channels.

Seems to be like you can have Reddit which allows 99.9% of material including some very extreme stuff like the "incel" boards and far right politics, or you can have a right wing echo chamber that bans anything contrary to the approved narrative.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Reddit has been the base of white nationalists, red-pill incel douche bags, and the_retard supports for years. The general rise of racist shit bags has me staying off reddit entirely.

Re: Meh

[serviscope_minor]

Because non-leftist viewpoints equate to bring a dickhead?

No one got kicked off for being a right wing moderate.

Re:Meh

[swb]

I just started using Reddit when IMDB canned the forums. It's a poor second for that particular use case, but I find it reminds me a lot of USENET 15-20 years ago. Lots of trash, but lots of pretty interesting and dedicated subreddits with no identifiable political content.

If anything, I see lots of complaints about left-wing proselytizing but not much in the way of actual evidence of left-wing anything. I figure how left-biased can it be if you see a lot of complaints about left-wing bias? Wouldn't that kind of thing be moderated into oblivion?

Re:Meh

[doom]

And this particular story-- true or false-- is a fine example of the problem of suppressing speech... The racist idiots crawl off into a corner and tell themselves that they're the iconoclasts in touch with the real truth, which never gets challenged, because their persecution complex keeps their beliefs safe.

The hyperbole here is a bit thick ("stalinistic"), but my fellow lefties could indeed, for example, take the trouble to learn how to make a logical case against racism. Just screaming "racist" at people has limited utility. (Not that I expect a lot from going around making logical cases, but you know...).

Re:Meh

[doom]

But what is the alternative?

That's a pretty good question. Let me try some answers.

You could suck-it-up and simply admit to yourself that user moderation on a mass scale is inevitably going to gravitate toward a middle-of-the-road lowest-common-denominator, and minority opinons, even sizeable minorities like Trumpsters or Chomskities or what not, are likely to be dismissed.

You could just suck-it-up and presume you're creating a place for like-minded people and write that into the ground rules. Let's call that idea "the dailykos but preferably not run by an idiot". It has the unfortunate side-effect of not scaling terribly well-- as it increases in importance (presuming it does) then you need to put more efforts into policing attempts at subversion.

You could rely entire on hired, vetted moderators who are instructed on how to enforce a certain standard of intellectual integrity (and yes, probably "politeness", much as that crap drives me up the wall).

You could draw from a pool of volunteers, but require them to pass a training course in rational thinking and discourse-- and if that sounds silly, ask yourself what "science" is, and why does it work?

Re:Meh

[doom]

The people complaining do appear to be pretty far right, and tend to see left-wing bias under the bed.

But then, it's pretty easy to have a post modded down into oblivion (I think the threshold is something like two blackballs), particularly if you're someone like myself with an obnoxious sense of humor. (Can you believe the people at /r/firefox didn't like my suggestion that the new dark blue fox icon should be named "the death spiral"?).

If you look at a place like /r/politics, the bias isn't so much "left" as toward the middle (but it's the actual middle, not the Very Serious pundit middle). During election season, every single opinon piece at WaPo got posted there and modde way up, to the point where I was wondering if Bezos had a merry band of hired astroturfers acting in concert with Hillary's Brock-puppets....

Reddit often does feel like a bubble-factory... a group of people can create a sub-reddit, and then camp out there enforcing their own view of reality, or standard of politeness, or whatever. If that's what you're looking for, maybe reddit works well for you... myself I'm constantly looking for the magic tool that's going to fix our badly broken collective intelligence, and as far as that goes, reddit blewit.

Re:Meh

[swb]

I avoid most political anything online (except maybe historical) because 99% of people are willing to start fights over anything seen as deviating from their accepted norm, right AND left.

There is a sub for my city and there was a local scandal with a hipster nightclub whose owner apparently gave money to a David Duke campaign at one point. There was a subscriber who basically defended hounding the nightclub employees as complicit in white supremacy over it, and if they lost their jobs due to the boycott it was acceptable collateral damage.

In that sub, nearly everything not hard left gets downvoted to oblivion. I mean, we're a lefty city but in my 50 years of living here I never thought it was like Cultural Revolution-bordering-on Khmer Rouge left, but maybe it is.

But overall the subs I pay attention to (some shows, some history, etc) seem more or less normal and not reactive or vindictive.

Re:Meh

[AmiMoJo]

You could suck-it-up and simply admit to yourself that user moderation on a mass scale is inevitably going to gravitate toward a middle-of-the-road lowest-common-denominator, and minority opinons, even sizeable minorities like Trumpsters or Chomskities or what not, are likely to be dismissed.

Slashdot proves that isn't the case. Reddit does too, but in a different way - it has ghettos for those people to create their little echo chambers in, with sympathetic moderators.

You could rely entire on hired, vetted moderators who are instructed on how to enforce a certain standard of intellectual integrity (and yes, probably "politeness", much as that crap drives me up the wall).

That would likely exclude a lot of of the "rationals" and especially the alt-right. The rationals tend to just google stuff that supports their established view and fall for obvious fake news and memes. The alt-right generates a lot of that fake news and memes. Any kind of intellectual integrity standard would have to set the bar incredibly low to avoid them tripping over it.

Yeh right

[trawg]

Imagine the 'strategic disaster' of the broader Internet and reddit competitors finding out they were working on the innovative new feature of 'video'.

Re:Yeh right

[ckatko]

VIDEO ON THE INTERNET?

JESUS CHRIST.

They may have removed open source but they LEAKED THE AMAZING IDEA.

Expect countless competitors yesterday!

Re:Yeh right

[93 Escort Wagon]

Expect countless competitors yesterday!

Wow - in the short time it took you to post, somebody already got a site up and running!

Re:Yeh right

[Jesus_666]

Eh, it'll never catch on.

Just who does Reddit think it is surprising?

[hackwrench]

Reddit is so feature poor.

Re:Who cares? By this time it's probably a big mes

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a shame voat is just a far right mirror image of the far left toxicity that is Reddit.

Well, I heard

[JustOK]

Rumors abound that Digg is going to buy reddit and call it rediggit

Re: I'm so mad Trump won

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet you've been fooled by a tranny.

Re:THIS is why the AGPL is so important.

[hord]

They own the source and would just re-license it as is their legal right. They don't have to give you their changes, ever.

Re:Well that was a load of BS.

[Whibla]

Mine too.

Re:Censorship

[bill_mcgonigle]

so they can hide the bad think

This.

Re: I'm so mad Trump won

[Anonymous Coward]

A man has none of it. Never will.

Here's a novel concept: If you don't want to date, fuck, or fap to someone who used to be a man - don't. Why does it have to bother you just knowing that other people view sexuality differently and enjoy it? Get a fucking hobby.

Good grief!

[s.petry]

A huge part in learning and discovery is to see what is wrong. We learn by trial and error from birth. When we want attention, we make lots of noise. When we want a different type of attention, we smile. We learn that if nobody is looking, they can't see the smile so we learn to make vocal sounds to get their attention and then smile. We learn that 2 apples and 2 pears is not 89 pieces of fruit, it's 4. And no matter what types of fruits we count, addition always works. Seeing right and wrong, or correct and incorrect, is how we not only learn, but learn to inquire.

Has a couple thousand years of Religious doctrine and wars not shown you that silencing dissenting opinions is not just a bad idea, but a hopeless endeavor? Ideas, both right and wrong, always make it to inspection. The fastest way to kill off bad ideas is by exposing them for review, because this is how humans learn and grow. The fastest way to propagate bad ideas is by making it taboo. Companies that make money selling information do a disservice by censoring. The fact that they may be "legal" to do so is quite beside the point.

Do you see now why people like you, and with similar mindsets to you, have created a generation of kids all f&$ked up in schools? Do you see why we are regressing instead of progressing in education? Probably not, but I have to try.

Re:Good grief!

[serviscope_minor]

You seem to have a pre-conceived idea what I said and have bent your entire reply around that. As a result, it makes little sense.

Has a couple thousand years of Religious doctrine and wars not shown you that silencing dissenting opinions is not just a bad idea, but a hopeless endeavor?

What's that got to do with what I said? You having free speech (something I believe in) doesn't mean you can say whatever you want whereever you want with no social consequences.

The fastest way to kill off bad ideas is by exposing them for review, because this is how humans learn and grow.

Conversely the fastest way to spread bad ideas is to expose lots of people to them. Funny, that.

Companies that make money selling information do a disservice by censoring.

I disagree. The ideas are still out there. And, importantly, material addressing those ideas is still fully available.

Do you see now why people like you, and with similar mindsets to you, have created a generation of kids all f&$ked up in schools?

I have no idea what you think my mindset it. Whatever you think it is doesn't I suspect bear much resemblance to reality.

Do you see why we are regressing instead of progressing in education?

Well the anti-science religious right has a fair hand in it. There's also the low pay for teachers and general lack of respect for the job. And there's yet another problem that beaurocrats believe something not budgeted for is free, so there's no penalty for imposing more and more paperwork on teachers, making a low paid job miserable as well. Also the attempt to hive off as much as possible to private companies to cream off profit has a big hand in it too.

And that's barely scratched the surface, but feel free to blame libruhls if you like.

Re:Good grief!

[drinkypoo]

Has a couple thousand years of Religious doctrine and wars not shown you that silencing dissenting opinions is not just a bad idea, but a hopeless endeavor

Yes, it has, but the religious still won't fuck off, because they haven't learned that message.

Re:Good grief!

[s.petry]

My reading is just fine, perhaps your writing and ideas are the issue. Example: Your claim that the right is anti-science. This is exactly why we need debate and a free exchange of ideas, because the left eat least just as guilty. If you don't know it, then you are living in a bubble devoid of facts that harm your beliefs. If you do know it and still want to stifle debate, you are an authoritarian who believes that you should be able to control what people think.

You then go off into the weeds bringing up points about teaching which have nothing to do with my post. Can't use your noggin? Mkay..

Re:Good grief!

[s.petry]

You mean like the zealots on the left who believe that anyone that disagrees with them is a nazi, homophobe, xenophobe, Islamophobe, racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic misogynist right? That is what I was thinking too! Those people have an ideological belief which is rather dangerous. They should be exposed!

Re:Good grief!

[drinkypoo]

You mean like the zealots on the left who believe that anyone that disagrees with them is a nazi, homophobe, xenophobe, Islamophobe, racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic misogynist right?

No, I mean the religious people who think they should get special tax exemptions for believing that their neighbors are going to burn in hell, and of course, actual Nazis and anyone who enables them. For example, the slavery supporters who marched next to the Nazis in Charlottesville and didn't complain about their Nazi flags. They're just less-brave Nazis.

Re:Good grief!

[drinkypoo]

My reading is just fine, perhaps your writing and ideas are the issue.

Oh yes, this will be fun.

Example: Your claim that the right is anti-science. This is exactly why we need debate and a free exchange of ideas, because the left eat least just as guilty.

Right, perhaps it's his writing and ideas which are the issue. Dolt.

If you don't know it, then you are living in a bubble devoid of facts that harm your beliefs.

[citation needed]

You're going to have a long, long way to go to show that leftists have harmed education in this nation even noticeably compared to what the religious reich has done. I look forward to seeing your bullshit excuses for why you won't provide any backup for your bullshit claims.

You then go off into the weeds bringing up points about teaching which have nothing to do with my post. Can't use your noggin? Mkay..

You are the one who brought up "a generation of kids all f&$ked up in schools". If you didn't want to talk about education, you shouldn't have brought it up. If you have trouble staying on topic, and bring up things you didn't mean to bring up, that's no one's fault but your own. Rein in your other personalities if they're getting you into conversational trouble.

Re:Good grief!

[serviscope_minor]

You're clearly intent on misrepresenting what I said by transposing religious right with all of the right. There's little point I arguing with you because you are clearly both dishonest and impervious to reason. This bit is special though:

You then go off into the weeds bringing up points about teaching which have nothing to do with my post.

Off in the weeds about teaching, eh? I guess I hallucinated you saying:

Do you see why we are regressing instead of progressing in education?

Anywho thanks for giving me a laugh :)

Reddit doesn't want to show their Censorship.

[CherniyVolk]

The only real reason Reddit is no longer Open Source, is because they don't want the world to see their algorithms used to censor voices they don't like. To be very specific, their rewrite their algorithms to ensure that r/the_donald doesn't hit the front page. They have also implemented these modifications on individual posts within threads to make a particular viewpoint not seem popular; posts that would have 1500 up votes are reduced to just under 20. If a post that Reddit hates, proves to be too popular in spite their skewed algorithms, they automatically delete the post and often times the thread underneath it. If you only knew, Reddit's censorship is Orwellian.

Reddit is shit, they don't hire any Americans and the Americans they might accidentally hire do not, in anyway, represent actual Americans across the rest of the country. There is zero collaboration across racial, gender, political and cultural divides at all at Reddit; not a single shred. For example of Reddit's intolerance and lack of diversity, I know one of their employees who is able to get people on board, and this person has and will refuse to hire anyone who so much as admits they "like America".

yeah yeah

[schleimkeim]

Nine years later and Reddit is a very different company and as anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed

That means: We now are ruled by investors and we are part of the problem now.

Hard to be strategic?

[Wootery]

it is hard for us to be strategic in our planning when everyone can see what code we are committing

What?

Also, since when did reddit do any meaningful work on their code? Have they added a feature at some point in the last few years? Did I miss something?

false reason

[sad_]

they could easily develop their secret features behind closed doors and release it OSS once it's ready. there is nothing in the OSS license that prevents them from doing this.

selective bias

[s.petry]

By the numbers, there are less than 100,000 people belonging to any group listed as a "White Supremacist" group in the US. Or less than .03% of the population. Many of those are not "actual Nazis", but even assuming they are it's not a very big or dangerous group and has not grown by any stretch of the imagination. Yes, they have a Constitutional right to voice their opinions and people believing that we all have Constitutional rights is correct and legal, not incorrect.

Conversely, there are approximately 500,000-1,000,000 members of antifa and blm (hard to get actual numbers from any source but these seem realistic based on activity). This group has been growing because people on the left don't call them out. They are not voicing an opinion, they are a violent group who breaks the law regularly. I, and people on the "Right" (which is strangely anything right of Trotsky today) support their right to speech but denounce calls to action of violence which is illegal. They are marxist thugs, who's primary position and purpose is destruction.

In your own words, you and people on the left are at a minimum less-brave marxist thugs. We could say however, that your silence about this group which hovers on the terrorist watch list is being supported in many ways by the left. At least the white supremacist groups get negative media coverage and denounced by every politician ever asked about these groups.

Re:selective bias

[drinkypoo]

By the numbers, there are less than 100,000 people belonging to any group listed as a "White Supremacist" group in the US.

hahahaha

Conversely, there are approximately 500,000-1,000,000 members of antifa and blm

BAHAHAHAHAHA

Re:selective bias

[s.petry]

Let me see your citations mister "hahaha", because you obviously have different information than is available to us normal people. Or perhaps you have no such information, but need to maintain your delusional belief that Nazis are running rampant across the US despite any actual facts.

Re:selective bias

[s.petry]

Lets also note that you completely ignore my point and claim, "less-brave" marxist.

Re:selective bias

[david_thornley]

If the Nazis won, there would be genocide. If Black Lives Matter won, police officers who killed people without good reason would be punished severely. If Antifa won, it would be more complicated, but nobody would be killed or deported. BLM and Antifa are reactions to problems. Nazis are a problem.

So what?

[JThundley]

Why do they make such a big deal about being able to hide the fact that they're working on video? Who cares? Is that really a big trade secret that their competitors are going to act on? Develop it in the clear! Let people know it's what you're working on!

FTFY

[s.petry]

If the Nazis won, there would be genocide. If Black Lives Matter won, police officers would be killed and lawlessness would prevail. BLM and Antifa are staged marxist movements, and a very big problem. Nazis are a problem, but there are very few of them.

My position is based on facts, see the dozens of innocent police officers shot and killed (some execution style) by people believing the blm/antifa rhetoric. See the attacks against police dogs, horses, families, homes, etc... if innocent police officers. I can't fix your delusions, only point them out.

Re:FTFY

[david_thornley]

OK, how about some cites? I haven't heard of widespread violence.

In any large movement, there are going to be some assholes out to find something to break or hurt or kill. Modern Nazis are basically all assholes by design.