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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.
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.
+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.
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
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.)
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.