Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

331–340 of 970 posts

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

#331

Great, I hope r/politics is next. And then they can start censoring anti-semitic far-leftists.

Don't hold your breath, especially regarding any action taken against /r/politics or an effort to make it actually politically neutral.

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

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This resonates with my experience moderating a local facebook group. I get attacked and threatened by racist instigators and BLM supporters alike because people feel that any moderation against them is solidarity with the other side. I point to the group rules violated and they still assume bias on my part. I AM biased (in favor of BLM) but still get treated like crap when I'm doing my best to moderate fairly, for fr…

This is exactly why moderators ultimately quit and are replaced by activists with no interest in balanced speech. Any platform with unpaid moderators tends to biased activism.

See also "the long march through the institutions."

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

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also banned gendercritical, which was an extreme left, radical feminist (as in, Valerie Solanas radical feminism) board.

Gendercritical was not "extreme left". It was an anti-trans (TERF) subreddit hated by actual leftist subs.

Confusion caused by attempting to sort human beliefs in a one-dimensional space strikes again! To be clear I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with you or the parent poster, just commenting on the ambiguity.

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

#335
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reddit administration honestly does very little active moderation. It's a shocker that they actually enforced their rules in the title. Almost all censorship is moderation. And that's "decentralized" and not part of the company itself. Honestly, Reddit would be better if they started laying down the law.

Reddit removed The_Donald from showing up in All, changed their search algorithm, and changed the number of active users showing up on T_D (they screwed up and you could see the true number on their ad buy portal). Those were all 100% admin actions to censor, not moderator actions.

And T_D should be banned years ago for blatant doxxing, brigading, and threats of violence, all clear violations of Reddit's rules.

The admin has repeatedly been too scared to enforce their own rules, just doing half measures like that to pass the buck.

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

#336

Since the 2016 election the left has been consolidating their vast cultural power by exiling opposing views that don't pass their ever-shifting purity tests. It remains to be seen whether or not this will bury conservative thought or cause an underground resurgence.

Social media companies and "the left" are not the same. Although they surely have some overlap (just as social media companies and "the right" surely have some overlap), conflating them entirely with each other is simply false. We cannot assign political conspiracies to entire industries.

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

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The largest lefist subreddit was banned today. The T_D ban was purely symbolic, it was already dead. This isn't "the left" this is liberalism.

They banned /r/politics?

/r/politics is a liberal subreddit. It regularly censors leftists and people on right. Don't call something "left" when you mean liberal.

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

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's moderated a community, this is exactly what things feel like. Especially given that our community has an explicit focus on freedom of expression (and what a thorn in our side that's ended up being) We've adopted pretty vague rules as a result, with a lot of room for interpretation, and rather than changing the rules often we've just updated our interpretations and communicated them with the community…

> because the tone of the internet seems to have shifted slightly. Over the time I've used it (94 to 2020) it's shifted radically, it used to be kooky, niche, fun or just weird (and it is still that on the edges) but by and large rarely mean/cruel, the main sites are just a torrent of bile spouted by morons venting their spleen at the universe. Comment sections on any news article, youtube videos - pretty much everyw…

Even back in '94 the Usenet could get ugly. The Usenet is where Godwin observed his famous law in practice.

As a community grows the probability that it includes disruptive assholes approaches 1. Unmoderated communities do not scale.

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

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In my own opinion this was a long time coming, and Reddit has long since shown that the original hands-off model is woefully inadequate in the face of communities that are willing to expend the effort to argue continuously in bad faith, organize to influence and control opinion in other communities, and attack the platform itself in their campaigns for hateful speech. Just ask /r/BlackLadies if you think these users…

So if we assume you are right then those users are going to behave like arseholes in either case, better they behave like arseholes off reddit is likely reddit's point of view - not least for PR/legal issues.

I'd probably agree with that, but someone upthread is saying Reddit is anti-censorship, which doesn't quite match with "better they['re] off reddit"?
Post reply on HN