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Reddit Conducts Wide-Ranging Purge of Offensive Subreddits (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Wednesday, [Reddit] announced a new policy clarifying its rules against content that incites violence. "We will take action against any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people," Reddit administrator landoflobsters wrote. Promoting harm to animals is also against the rules. Within minutes, moderators started to ban a long list of controversial subreddits, including /r/Nazi, /r/DylannRoofInnocent, /r/SexWithDogs, /r/WhitesAreCriminals, and /r/PicsOfDeadKids. The bounds of propriety remain fairly wide at Reddit, however. Commenters pointed out that /r/WatchPeopleDie -- which is exactly what it sounds like -- is still around. Landoflobsters said that site administrators have "no plans to remove it for now." The self-explanatory -- and horrifying -- /r/CuteFemaleCorpses is also still active. Evidently, merely depicting violence is fine as long as people in a subreddit don't glorify violence. In practice, of course, the line between these things is pretty thin. A subreddit devoted to merely discussing violent acts is naturally going to attract people who like to promote violent acts -- especially after bans of related subreddits where those people previously hung out. Reddit's new policy seems like the basis for an endless game of Whac-A-Mole as the Internet's creeps search for new places to exchange disturbing content.
I hope the relevant authorities have been using such filth as a honeypot and keep an eye on some of the people that post and/or consume that shit. Should get their heads examined.
Precisely who are the "relevant authorities" whose job it is to police what people say or read and what do they do if somebody says or reads something they're not supposed to?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
(Or did I miss it 10 years ago?)
10 years ago people were saying the same thing. The only thing that happens more frequently than the death of Slashdot is the year of the Linux desktop.
lucm, indeed.
It has been clear for the last year or two they are trying to clean themselves up to be sold to someone. They just are not sure who. They had a pretty sweet system going on. They have been caught a couple of times manipulating the system. Their advertisers HAVE to be saying 'if they can manipulate some stuff down then they can manipulate other stuff up'.
When you build a 'free speech' platform do not be surprised when every wacko shows up and states whatever dribbles out of their mouths.
I vote on Verizon buying them. They seem to be buying every other dying internet company out there.
OMG a business is doing what they want with their own platform as is there legal right! Cue the masses of idiots to defend the 1st Amendment where it doesn't apply.
The Anarchism subreddit isn't a problem. They never do anything except argue about how to define anarchism.
Reddit is different. It is like a rocky coastline full of little tidal pools where tiny fish pretend they are giant sharks. Their tidal pool is the entire world, full of empty threads with little or no comments. Some of the tidal pools are not bad to dip into to get some specialist info out of but making your life a tidal pool, all the fish swimming in the same direction, in the same circle, really rather pointless, much like Reddit has become in the age of for profit censorship rather than leaving it to the courts and the justice system (yeah I know Reddit managements ego are way above the justice system and the law for the lessor people than Reddit censor). Reddit seems to believe the censoring more people and kicking them off will result in more end users because, I just don't know, they think people like to be censored and attacked randomly by the lamest of SJWs of which ever brand (hitler's brown shirts were SJWs, the Klu Klux Klan are SJWs, social justice activists good - social justice warriors really fucking bad, why can you not understand that the word war and social justice are mutually opposing, you can not win a war, you only lose less than the other guy).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Freedom of speech has pretty simple limits. It shouldn't be used to attack one of the classic unalienables. In other words, one shouldn't be allowed to promote violence, murder, slavery, unending harassment, or directly create chaos by trying to incite panic. So I won't suggest you shut your whore mouth. I do suggest you have a whore mouth though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Peopl...
I hope the relevant authorities have been using such filth as a honeypot and keep an eye on some of the people that post and/or consume that shit. Should get their heads examined.
Precisely who are the "relevant authorities" whose job it is to police what people say or read and what do they do if somebody says or reads something they're not supposed to?
Police, FBI, Etc. If someone makes a death threat verbally in a mall, the idea is for them to find out, catch the perpetrator physically, and send them through the courts. If someone makes a death threat via text post on a forum, same basic shit should happen. It's not actually more complicated than that. Though there are some dynamics of policing that become more apparent after you've watched all 5 seasons of HBO's 'The Wire'. Fiction, of course, but one wonders about how much of policing reality inspired that fiction. Be forewarned, you may encounter no small amount of offensive 'lockerroom talk'.
+2 Insightful? Hardly.
There are sites years older (fark.com comes to mind) that threw out their dumpster fire residents, and those people just take up residence somewhere else, so 4chan is the path of least resistance unless you're into furries or child porn, and those creeps go to 8ch.
Just like a every other social media network before it, Livejournal threw off it's creeps, so people migrated. DeviantArt threw out its's creeps, and they migrated. 4chan threw out it's creeps, and they migrated. reddit is throwing out it's creeps, and they migrate.
Slashdot hasn't done anything to throw out it's creeps, and that's largely because the subject material is high-level nerd interest moderated by humans, rather than the unmoderated cesspool that *chan sites are. reddit is actually moderated rather well as long as you're sticking to fandom and local communities. Where reddit falls apart is in attracting advertisers to pay for it's hosting cost. So like Youtube/Google (who has a very shitty ad policy in general (they will stop showing ads if you show a censored cartoon butt) is the one calling the shots in advertising.
Other than spammers, nobody bothered us when we used alt.binaries.pictures.grotesque for this purpose.
For the record, I was in no way responsible for the "Di Death Pic" hoax... but I know who was, an a.b.p.g regular. It was an accidental hoax anyhow, it was not meant to be taken seriously. We didn't know lurkers would forward it without the disclaimer.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
For the most part. But things than might be considered some kind of threat or indicate an illegal action might occur
If the police have enough time to investigate every post that has a 0.000001% chance of being a real threat, then we have way, way too many police.
or libal...
Libel is a civil matter, and the police have no business getting involved in it.
They're also following the usual hypocritical pattern of retroactively banning everyone guilty of wrongthink while allowing latestagecapitalism, anarchy, SRS and its owned subs, and the like to get away with posting a sticky saying "Guys no more doxing and violence, we're super duper cereal this time"
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
You have unrealistic expectations of what a business will do to protect free speech. On the individual level it's likely that someone high up in the organization will decide they don't want to host that stuff, like someone high up at Cloudflare decided they didn't want to provide services to Nazi sites. On a corporate level they can't exist on their own, they need ad revenue, they need sales revenue, they need hosting and peering.
And the real kicker (for you) is that Reddit's purges work. They move most of the asshats over to the Voat cesspit and the majority of Reddit users find that there is less trolling and abuse on the 99.99% of boards that are not affected.
https://arstechnica.co.uk/scie...
What you need is some billionaire to run a free speech site at a loss. But even then you won't be happy, because it will be like Gab or 8chan - small, few people pay any attention to it and it quickly becomes an echo chamber for extremists rather than a paradise of reasoned debate.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This argument over the relative badness of one sub to another is just a distraction. It's one of the most common logical fallacies these days - "he is terrible, but she is worse," or "okay Nazis but what about these guys?"
It's not hypocrisy to not be omnipotent and capable of evaluating everything on a precisely calibrated scientific scale and then enacting a mass cull in one single hit for maximum fairness. It's just the nature of large web sites with limited resources to do a difficult job.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I draw line art figures of nazis.
1. The folks interested in these things will definitely find other places to congregate, but here's the key: possibly not at reddit. Which is reddit's goal.
2. In terms of it being Whac-a-Mole, it shouldn't be too hard if they implement a user-based reporting / flagging system. Let your users flag suspect subreddits, then every day a reddit employee looks at the top few "most redported" and determines if they meet the criteria for removal. Users who abuse the flagging system lose the ability to flag.
Freedom of speech has pretty simple limits
No. As soon as you limit freedom of speech to things you like (and yes your proposal damn well is that) you've severely crippled it. "hate speech" starts to obtain the definition of disagreeing with the status quo. "harassment" starts to obtain the definition of vigorous debate. I've seen those examples and more. The question at hand is who decides what hate speech and harassment are. When a certain disliked group on Twitter started to engage those posting a certain hashtag and winning them over that's when lively debate via twitter started to be called harassment. When "hate speech" became illegal that's when opponents of certain points of view defined them as hate speech. When the question of which speech is hateful is politicized the law against it becomes a tool for oppressing certain points of view, and that is unacceptable.
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. -H. L. Mencken
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Conservatives want less government. Interesting that liberals think that we want government control of anything.
Conservatives claim to want less government, but in fact whenever they have power they expand the powers of government.
(I think you may be confusing conservatives with libertarians, who would prefer a corporate dictatorship with no government oversight.)
corporate dictatorship with no government oversight.
Nice Strawman. It is exactly wrong too.
Remember who grants Corporate Charters? It isn't the Corporation, it is the Government. As a Libertarian, I have a simple solution to Corporate malfeasance, the Corporate Death Penalty. I also support the incarceration of Corporate Boards and CxOs when systemic abuses occur. If both of those were real legal options after a court decision, you'd find a lot lot less of the kind of crap you see today.
As a Libertarian, I support laws that protect people from harm done to them. That is the purpose of government, not control and regulation which actually causes harm.
Here is a simple test. When government fails, who pays? When Corporations fail, who pays?
THAT, in a nutshell, is why I support way less government. Most of the problems we see in Corporations are caused by government rules that prevent competition.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
libertarians, who would prefer a corporate dictatorship with no government oversight.
Nice Strawman. It is exactly wrong too.
Unfortunately, it's not a strawman. It is the elephant in the room for libertarian philosophy. Governments limit corporate power. Without governments, there would be no limits on corporate power. Once corporations own everything that can be owned, this is dictatorship. Game over: corporations own everything, you do what they tell you.
Remember who grants Corporate Charters? It isn't the Corporation, it is the Government.
Exactly. Governments are the limit on corporate power
As a Libertarian, I have a simple solution to Corporate malfeasance, the Corporate Death Penalty.
Show me one citation -- just one single citation-- to a libertarian source suggesting that "the corporate death penalty" is something that is considered a good idea anywhere in libertarian philosophy.
But: a citation to somebody other that yourself.
Its been interesting to read that apparently some of the limits reddit instituted last time (amid much controversy and gnashing of teeth) were in reducing hate speech.
The take-home to me is that groups online should define and enforce their standards; doing so will determine what sort of people participate and whether the site is a "cess pool". Seems obvious now.
Either way, libertarians would be opposed.
Well, that's nice that they would be opposed,shame they wouldn't be able to do jack shit about it.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!