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Reddit Bans Subreddits Related To Selling Guns, Drugs, Sex, and More (bloomberg.com)
New submitter cornholed writes: Yesterday, Reddit updated their Content Policy forbidding transactions for certain goods and services. From the formal announcement on Reddit: "As of today, users may not use Reddit to solicit or facilitate any transaction or gift involving certain goods and services, including: firearms, ammunition, or explosives; drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, or any controlled substances (except advertisements placed in accordance with our advertising policy); paid services involving physical sexual contact; stolen goods; personal information; falsified official documents or currency." Bloomberg has an interesting write-up on how Reddit is wading into the gun control debate. See this post on Reddit for a full-list of all subreddits banned. "Reddit has been something of a Wild West for users building communities by curating and commenting on content in subreddits," reports Bloomberg. "Sometimes, as in the case with gun sales, marketplaces emerge in the course of conversations within specific communities. With Reddit's increased popularity -- the site is the sixth-most-visited in the world -- has come introspection and stricter content guidelines. The company recognizes its responsibility for having provided a platform for hate groups to flourish and, more recently, the possibility that Russian propaganda on the site may have played a role in influencing the 2016 presidential election."
USENET is/was a purely peer-to-peer system with no effective censorship. The downside to this, of course, was massive quantities of spam, which killed it. If someone could effectively solve the spam issue without censoring...
A lot of these have dropped in the last few days.
YouTube Bans Firearms Demo Videos
Citi sets restrictions on gun sales by retail clients by adding arbitrary rules (can only sell to 21+ years-old, no standard capacity magazines, etc)
Sheep often move en masse, as though there was some coordination in effect.
Perhaps that's news to you.
Do you think these policy changes for companies like Citigroup and Youtube happen overnight? I'm sure these companies have been working on these for a while - it's just strange they ALL get announced within 24-48 hours of each other.
I'm not saying there's a conspiracy. I'm just pointing out the timing is coincidental.
Those born before Netflix might remember network TV shows with bland family content where you never see naked people or hear swearing. When Lucy, of 'I Love Lucy', got pregnant, she was not allowed to be seen on screen in that condition. We listened to Lawrence Welk music and saw the art of Norman Rockwell on magazine covers. We waved the flag on 4th of July and cheered for our baseball team and joined Boy Scouts. Yes, youngsters, that was life before the internet. We had to read National Geographic magazine to see naked people.
But why was that so? Because of the Religious Right. Because of the Moral Majority. Because of Puritans who ran the country. But mostly because of advertising sponsors who were afraid to be associated with anything 'immoral'.
We now swim in porn of all kinds with Game of Thrones and other films by Amazon, Netflix and other new media innovators. We have chat rooms where we are free to swear and say outrageous things. We freely criticize politicians and corporations and media and each other. The internet has freed us from Moral Morons and Patriotic Pimps and Advertising Assholes who suppressed free thought since the Dark Ages.
But it's happening again. The Wild West internet is gradually coming under the thumb of the Pompous Puritans. Facebook, Twitter and even Reddit are shutting down free speech bit by bit. And yes it's largely due to advertising sponsors and partly due to threats by governments around the world.
Was Reddit the last major bastion of Free Speech? Is the internet going to become as bland and mindless as 1956 television?
...omphaloskepsis often...
Guns are not illegal. The purchases on gundeals were all above board NFA licensed businesses that required NFA transfers that included background checks. So, there was no illegal activity going on there. What's next? They ban communities where people hookup because some people consider it immoral? So posting pictures of your genitalia is ok, but getting a good deal on a scope isn't?
It's definitely trying to make the news cycle, and if there are any lessons to be learnt from gamergate, it's being orchestrated, and, I'm not surprised to see some of the same companies involved again.
The rhyme of history is sounding again. When the printing press was invented in Europe, it didn't take long for establishments to see that sharing information was not always in their interests, books got banned, notably political ones. I think we're just in a similar phase as then; some companies are taking it on themselves to consolidate and control what gets shared.
Voat is contaminated by the racist fuckheads who went there after Reddit purged them. Now any self-respecting person who goes there comes back looking for the clear history button in their browsers.
Better to let that one be and find another alternative instead.
Christianity perfected these techniques but didn't invest anything in marketing in order to update it's business model and messaging for modern times and, as a result, lost much of it's influence. However those techniques are now being wielded by those with a progressive agenda many of whom were probably one-time church members.
Companies see the writing on the wall and it very well may be the case that, at some point, stores have to have (D) and (R) after them just like our elected officials. This forces them to look forward and figure out which views the majority will hold and engage in virtue signaling in this area.
This is a terrible outcome because it means that it will become much harder to challenge majority views. I think it's a shame, but it's unavoidable. The clocks aren't going to turn back so life is always going to be somewhat progressive. But we need strong conservative voices to ensure that policy doesn't get ahead of the data or ignore critical facts (like not being able to borrow infinite amounts of money.) Unfortunately, the only "conservative" voices we have in the US are always making impossible promises to turn back the clock rather than trying to argue for smoother transitions.