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Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

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Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#261

Post by ggggtez »

jl2718 wrote: post #173

There’s no winning this game. Soon they will be considered liable for anything they didn’t censor, especially from the extreme left, as they are making the appearance of support. I hope they’re paying Michael a massive amount of money to associate himself with this dumpster fire.

Bizarrely, the reason that there is even a discussion of making them liabile for user speech to begin with is because of prostitution, pedophiles, and terrorism.

I would hardly call those issues "extreme left". This change is actually from the conservative view point a lot of the time, especially as it comes to speech about sex. See cases against Backpage or Craigslist and prostitution.

Once a company is criminally liable for user speech, you're going to get this situation where it's easier to just ban speech that even approach the line. But I don't think anyone is going to say that a company should be willfully blind to pedophiles on their platform. So this is the world we get.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#262

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

ryankemper wrote: post #210
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you'd be in your other community and one day I don't think so? So if TD was a mastodon community, many others would blacklist their content, but unless members of TD go and make accounts elsewhere that'd be the extent of it, no?

I believe they mean other communities in the sense of "other subreddits", although I can't speak for them.

Maybe? But we're in a subthread about decentralized solutions, so I feel like it makes sense.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#264

Post by mouldysammich »

TheGrim-888 wrote: post #204
komali2 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then the site exploded, and it had to learn how to handle things like actual nazis calling for the deaths of jewish people. I'm not sure I see where the joke is - this was inevitable.

I spent years on that subreddit and never once saw somebody that identified as a Nazi calling for the deaths of Jewish people. I bet you can't find any such examples. Your viewpoints of the world are based on hearsay and propaganda, not facts and logic.

Perhaps not literally, however the subreddits namesake literally retweeted a video of someone exclaiming 'white power'. Most people who are not facists and are not nazis wouldnt exclaim something like this and would not support someone who retweets such things.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#265

Post by dang »

samfriedman wrote: post #159

The title should be updated, as T_D was just one of a large number of subs banned today; even then, it has been largely irrelevant since the admins' earlier decision to quarantine it and impose other restrictions. Other larger banned subs include /r/GenderCritical (anti-Trans) and /r/ConsumeProduct which was ostensibly for criticism of consumerism and product promotion, but hid a large strain of antisemitism below th…

OK, I've updated the title above to have both sides now.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#266

Post by duxup »

ryankemper wrote: post #207
duxup wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would something decentralized help? I don't think people want that. The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc. Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content? I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. The sheer volume of users at its height…

> I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. It was very clearly a real community, as you can see evidence from the fact that they migrated to thedonald.win when Reddit made it clear that they wouldn't be treated fairly. > So you'd be in your other community and one day they all show up and down votes and the vitriol begins... it was no mystery that this happened, it was spoken of openly in The_Donald…

>so it seems bizarre to single T_D out

I don't consider myself required to provide an overview of all the subs on a platform if I'm talking about group's actions and why that would be undesirable in the context of an moderated platform.

More specific to reddit:

When it came to TD they spoke of it openly and clearly on their own sub for a time, it was no mystery, same goes for calls for violence, racism, and etc.

I certainly saw users from TD claim that anything they saw as voting going differently than they wanted as brigading... the plot line of them being perpetual victims on reddit and in life was consistent and applied to everything.

Back to my point, who wants to be exposed to that kind of behavior when you're looking for a community to interact with?

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#267

Post by newacct583 »

ryankemper wrote: post #207
duxup wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would something decentralized help? I don't think people want that. The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc. Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content? I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. The sheer volume of users at its height…

> I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. It was very clearly a real community, as you can see evidence from the fact that they migrated to thedonald.win when Reddit made it clear that they wouldn't be treated fairly. > So you'd be in your other community and one day they all show up and down votes and the vitriol begins... it was no mystery that this happened, it was spoken of openly in The_Donald…

> And yet Reddit happily ignores vote brigading and other negative externalities from any subreddit that toes their party line

Which subreddits do you think they should have banned, specifically? What is the "party line", exactly, that these subreddits "toed" to get themselves out of enforcement?

Look, I mean obviously Reddit's moderation isn't always going to be fair. Moderation never is. It can't be. Nonetheless T_D spent four years as a cesspool before they pulled the plug. I mean really, did you read it? If anything, they were protected by virtue of being a policical fan group of the POTUS.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#268

Post by emerged »

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #95
teej wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is what Reddit said directly, vs through a media outlet - https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/hi3oht/updat...

The inactive claim is hilarious, let's remove all the mods so you have to close the community so we can claim you are inactive... The funny thing was they removed mods because of the lack of moderation... which was unfounded as they never said what content went unmoderated. It's annoying to be persecuted based on political ideology, but we all know what Reddit is now, the most extreme liberal echo-chamber on the inte…

The irony is you can't even post factual information about T_D in this thread because it gets immediately downvoted away. In a few months, they will remember your comment above as being racist or sexist and feel great when you are no longer here.

I don't understand how this irrational totalitarian mind virus has grown to such a prevalent scale, but on HN at least I'm no longer going to be bullied away from making reasonable statements.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#269

Post by champagneben »

cultus wrote: post #29
champagneben wrote: post #8

If black people (or perhaps more specifically, subreddits focused on issues pertinent to black communities) were banned on reddit, but they had a much smaller website where they could discuss issues, would it be an outcome that supported their free speech?

You are drawing an equivalence of discrimination against those with dark skin to discrimination against the profoundly immoral and hateful. You are a racist, and are not engaging in good faith arguments.

How was anything I said racist? I'm genuinely curious. And what are the guidelines on HN for this kind of language?

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#270

Post by AgentME »

epa wrote: post #165
nullc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just hate you, but stalk, threaten and harass you. There are some people where even just saying-- as a moderator-- "Hey, can you chill out and at lease pretend to treat other posters with some respect" will trigger a full on war against you. There aren't many people like this, but it only takes a few because even a single obsessed person can spew a lot of hate.

You realize that it is possible to log out and walk away right?

The internet is a huge part of many of our lives, especially with the quarantine. I think we should be more hesitant before deciding on "harassment victims should just stay out of it" as a general solution to harassment. For some reason we rarely consider that a legitimate solution to harassment in physical locations; if a stalker shows up to you whenever you go to any park in your city, people generally agree that the solution isn't to say that you specifically should just stay out of parks.
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