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Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

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Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s also a cesspool or horrible people sharing horrible ideas. I tend to follow Voltaire's ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.' I agree with your assessment of the quality of ideas thrown around there, but I'd prefer a world where the internet allowed sites like that to exist, rather than one that's increasingly owned & distributed by giant corporate conglomerates wi…

There's nothing wrong with Reddit not wanting to facilitate and provide a platform for that sort of content, though. It's a massively popular site with mainstream appeal. They don't want to let that popularity and audience be taken advantage of to spread ideas that are hateful and likely to incite violence. Quarantined subreddits are dumb, but it's a sign that their afraid of the backlash of outright banning them - t…

To the extent that a site like Reddit tries to police content and decide what's "hateful" content versus just mildly offensive, etc, the platform becomes less valuable to me.

These policy changes have driven me off of Reddit. Not because I was part of any quarantined "communities" but just because I see where things are going.

Reddit used to actually believe in the ideal of free speech, full stop. That stopped being true quite some time ago.

> I hope most people on HN don't agree with the train of thought that websites have no duty to their fellow man to not normalize hate speech.

I suspect that most agree with your statement, but to speak for myself, I am very skeptical of labelling something as hate speech. It starts out with banning "legitimate" hate speech ("ethnic group X is secretly controlling everything and must be purged") and quickly morphs into something like "you said all lives matter which is associated with opposition to black lives matter which over the long-run is part of a system of oppression and therefore we're going to ban you". If it's not clear, these are arbitrary examples that I just made up but I think the way Reddit is going it's quite clear that we're moving towards that.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#92

There is an alternative to the group think/hive mind called https://gab.com/ but it’s also a cesspool or horrible people sharing horrible ideas. Not sure what makes sense.

So it's a hive mind and group think but with terrible people instead?

Yes that's right. They won't ban you for having non-terrible opinions, but they'll downvote you into non-existence. I tried participating in voat for a couple of days before leaving forever.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#93
post #27

Reddit has been compromised with actors who do not have free speech in their best interest. The other day there was an illuminating ask reddit post about transexuals who decided to transition back and their experiences. That post got promptly removed by moderators; even though there was no hateful content within it at all. They effectively silenced the transexual population due to an ever so slight conflict of ideolo…

How is it censored? There is a comment on that post with 5000 upvotes.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#94

I don't really get reddit's efforts to clean their site. They sometimes come up with measures like this, while routinely ignoring the development of horrible communities that they're aware of (since some users take any possible opportunity to mention them to the admins and are met with silence or half measures). They even came up with the concept of quarantined subreddits. I honestly can't think of a single honest re…

I think they just want to have their cake and eat it too, so to speak, like everyone else.

For some people free speech is like riding the train: when you reach your stop, you get off.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#95
post #68
post #27

Reddit has been compromised with actors who do not have free speech in their best interest. The other day there was an illuminating ask reddit post about transexuals who decided to transition back and their experiences. That post got promptly removed by moderators; even though there was no hateful content within it at all. They effectively silenced the transexual population due to an ever so slight conflict of ideolo…

Transexual is a porn term and derogitory. Transgender is preferred. Thanks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transsexual

The second paragraph has four sources that cite some transexuals rejecting the label of transgender, so language-policing others based on your personal preferences is quite inappropriate here.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#96
post #27

Reddit has been compromised with actors who do not have free speech in their best interest. The other day there was an illuminating ask reddit post about transexuals who decided to transition back and their experiences. That post got promptly removed by moderators; even though there was no hateful content within it at all. They effectively silenced the transexual population due to an ever so slight conflict of ideolo…

There is a whole subreddit about this topic however.

https://www.reddit.com/r/detrans/

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#97
post #11

I don't understand why you would even publicize this. Just stop counting those users' votes, if that's what you want to do? There's enough fuzz in the vote counts that no one would notice, and you wouldn't have any controversy on your hands.

The point is that the users who are upvoting this kind of content will stay on the site if they think their votes matter. Reddit clearly would rather they leave entirely, and this is a good way to encourage racists/misogynists/incels/whoever to find another platform.

It’s a good way to encourage any user at all to leave.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#98
post #27

Reddit has been compromised with actors who do not have free speech in their best interest. The other day there was an illuminating ask reddit post about transexuals who decided to transition back and their experiences. That post got promptly removed by moderators; even though there was no hateful content within it at all. They effectively silenced the transexual population due to an ever so slight conflict of ideolo…

So it goes when you take that chinese money.

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#99
post #27

Reddit has been compromised with actors who do not have free speech in their best interest. The other day there was an illuminating ask reddit post about transexuals who decided to transition back and their experiences. That post got promptly removed by moderators; even though there was no hateful content within it at all. They effectively silenced the transexual population due to an ever so slight conflict of ideolo…

I don't think "reddit is dead", but I do think the relatively intelligent and interesting userbase that was there ~10 years ago has been almost entirely displaced by clickbait and propaganda targeted at the now mostly middlingly-intelligent read-only userbase.

This almost inevitably happens when a site gets popular enough. There are only so many intelligent people actively posting on the internet, and it's impossible to have a site with 100,000 users (let alone the >400,000,000 of Reddit) with a high fraction of them providing good content.

Certainly the heavy-handed censorship of the Reddit administration is a disincentive for people who are interested in topics at the edges of the overton window (i.e. most of the interesting people online).

Re: Reddit started banning accounts that voted for content “against their policies”

#100

I don't really get reddit's efforts to clean their site. They sometimes come up with measures like this, while routinely ignoring the development of horrible communities that they're aware of (since some users take any possible opportunity to mention them to the admins and are met with silence or half measures). They even came up with the concept of quarantined subreddits. I honestly can't think of a single honest re…

Probably they profit from horrible communities and lose on some, and there are no clear distinction between the two, so they started to quarantine less profitable ones to stigmatize before banning them.

They’re profiting off anger so “old” ones being angry has no downsides.

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