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Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

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31–40 of 561 posts

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#31

I find it interesting that Reddit still manages to find themselves invoking the Streisand effect in full force.

I think the decision makers at Reddit are fully aware of the Streisand Effect but they don't care because they know the userbase has a short memory and things will go back to normal within a week or two.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#32
post #15

Do we need scare quotes around "censorship" when reddit is telling them particular names are unmentionable in any context?

Some people would argue that "censorship" would not apply to a private company owned platform. That only governments and their agents are qualified to perform act of censorship.

Those people are (intentionally?) confusing censorship with the legal right to censor.

What Reddit is doing unambiguously qualifies as censorship. It is also perfectly legal, but that's not the point.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#33

I find it interesting that Reddit still manages to find themselves invoking the Streisand effect in full force.

Well effects do not systematically happen. I'd say that as a general rule people don't care, even if they should. So if a Streisand happen it would mostly be because of a tini active and loud minority and maybe a medium sized passive community of "retweeters", the vast majority being as always passive and silent.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#34
post #11

I'm still shocked Reddit is allowed into the wider ecosystem of tech infrastructure. Between hosting explicit gore content and very extreme pornography with borderline legality at best (Including under Alexis's and Steve's leadership allowing a jailbait subreddit to continue for years) I would have thought they'd be booted from AWS etc.

Well, that would be improper, so I'm glad they haven't been.

Booting people off core infrastructure (IaaS, colo, DNS) for reasons outside violation of law is a very slippery slope.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#35
post #15

Do we need scare quotes around "censorship" when reddit is telling them particular names are unmentionable in any context?

Some people would argue that "censorship" would not apply to a private company owned platform. That only governments and their agents are qualified to perform act of censorship.

>Some people would argue that "censorship" would not apply to a private company owned platform.

You're mistaking the argument here. The argument is that a private company exercising censorship isn't violating a US person's constitutional right to free speech because the two things are different. It doesn't mean its not censorship and it doesn't mean it can't be unethical. It just means that the company has the legal right to censor whatever they want.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#36
post #11

I'm still shocked Reddit is allowed into the wider ecosystem of tech infrastructure. Between hosting explicit gore content and very extreme pornography with borderline legality at best (Including under Alexis's and Steve's leadership allowing a jailbait subreddit to continue for years) I would have thought they'd be booted from AWS etc.

Well, that would be improper, so I'm glad they haven't been. Booting people off core infrastructure (IaaS, colo, DNS) for reasons outside violation of law is a very slippery slope.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#38

Reddit as a whole is less useful since comment sections were demoted from first class citizens to something barely usable. I think they saw imgur as a threat and wanted to better replicate that experience.

their page load times have gotten dramatically worse, now that you mention it

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#39
post #23

Do we need scare quotes around "censorship" when reddit is telling them particular names are unmentionable in any context?

In this case, yes. For one, the original title has them. Secondly, as stated in the article, Reddit denies the allegations: > [...] admin u/landoflobsters explains that it was not the company’s intention to remove any mention of Knight’s name, but that there had been “overzealous automaton” when it came to preventing doxxing and harassment. The admin explained that an internal error had led to the suspension of a mod…

> the affected party

That's mismanagement that doesn't even see it's mismanagement.

A policy problem that affects a person in leadership affects everyone in the group. They should have communicated with the affected parties and it sounds like they left it to the moderator to sort everybody else out.

They chose... poorly.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#40
post #15

Do we need scare quotes around "censorship" when reddit is telling them particular names are unmentionable in any context?

Some people would argue that "censorship" would not apply to a private company owned platform. That only governments and their agents are qualified to perform act of censorship.

I think you are mixing US constitution first amendment with common censorship. Censorship can happen anywhere.
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