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

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131–140 of 561 posts

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

#131
post #41

why do these posts keep being removed from the HN front page? eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26567842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26557175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26554697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26556187

Well, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26557175 was also flagged when the post was getting popular. HN has really been going on a censorship spree lately as well. What's even worse with HN is that sometimes your comments appears to have been posted, but if you log out or go in private browsing, your comment cannot be found at all!

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

#132

Reddit has addressed the situation here, in a mealy mouthed sort of way: https://www.reddit.com/r/modsupport/comments/mbqgx2 However they seem to be denying the accusations that admins (possibly including the individual in question) were manually editing contents containing her name. This whole situation is incredibly bizarre to me. In the first place, why would reddit hire a 23 year old admin whose greatest accompli…

The obvious answer is they probably didn't, this is probably a pseudo QAnon/Pizzagate conspiracy theory where people were "censored" for the harassment of a random person.

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

#133
post #8

This is the Reddit "Out of the Loop" thread that sort of explains what's happening: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/mbeycw/whats_... It's still somewhat difficult to find a clear explanation because the admins were banning people who mentioned her by name (despite the fact that she is a public/political figure in the UK). That had an extremely chilling effect on the discussions, but now the Streisand E…

This all feels very witch hunt like to me. If there's any evidence that she's a danger to children, I feel like people should put up or shut up. All I've seen is people slandering her for the actions of her father (proven) and some comments that might have been made by her partner about his own interests (completely unprovable). It's kind of disgusting what conservatives are trying to turn this into without a shred o…

The accused internet accounts are all linked via Keybase. The usernames and content go back as far as 2004. Lots of this information is already common knowledge in the UK because of previous scandals.

At what point do you acknowledge that her partner has been doxxed as a self-confessed paedophile? The alternative would involve an incredibly elaborate plot targetting a random US citizen years before he happened to meet the person involved.

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

#134
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss humor and authenticity from old reddit the most. E.g. the classic: "I also choose this guy's dead wife." or the AMA with the vacuum repair guy. These days just about any popular thread that I wander into, I see wide swaths of "deleted" comments. I'm sure they were deleted for many good and valid reasons. IMHO, reddit's aggressive moderation suppresses spontaneous comments and is off putting to lurkers. The wit…

Are we on the same Reddit? All of the comments in popular subs are off-topic rehashed jokes. It's a struggle to find on-topic discussion in anything but the smallest subs.

Discussion is almost useless in most reddits unless you know most people are using the old.reddit.com url. All of the reddits I used to follow have essentially died since the change a few years ago. It is very sad.

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

#135

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.

Reddit comments were doomed in the long run, anyway. The fact that most Reddit commenters are on mobile phones, and not proper keyboards, has led to ultra-short comments light on information or nuance, like Twitter. This is true even on special-interest subreddits for various hobbies, where rich discussion is wilting and image posts and memes have taken over.

Sure, you yourself can still write a couple of solid paragraphs about a topic (the norm on Reddit until just a few years ago), but you will very look out of place among the one-line comments. With time, you feel pushed out of what used to be your own community.

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

#136

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.

The new UX on the site is unusable. I don't use anything except old.reddit.com and if they ever try to get rid of that, I'll surely stop visiting the site altogether. You have to wonder how long they'll continue to maintain two different web frontends for the site, though.

They have maintained i.reddit.com (an actually useful mobile site) for years at this point.

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

#137
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss humor and authenticity from old reddit the most. E.g. the classic: "I also choose this guy's dead wife." or the AMA with the vacuum repair guy. These days just about any popular thread that I wander into, I see wide swaths of "deleted" comments. I'm sure they were deleted for many good and valid reasons. IMHO, reddit's aggressive moderation suppresses spontaneous comments and is off putting to lurkers. The wit…

I'd argue that it's not Reddit's aggressive moderation, but that Reddit is now so popular that the racist, illegal, fickle beast that can no longer stay on topic. If they weren't so aggressive, they'd have a much bigger problem of everyone thinking they're a cesspool of hatred.

Your phrasing could be a lot better but I think your main point holds some truth. Just like the conspiracy equation that models the difficulty of keeping a secret in terms of the number of people involved the same principal applies to online communities that have a significant number of hateful members but try to fly under the radar. It gets harder and harder for the community to moderate their members that /unjerk and then it snowballs once the seal is broken.

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

#138
post #127
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being unaware of something is orthogonal to being affected by it. I was similar to you - mostly non-defaults, which made me miss how bad the larger site had become over time. It’s easy to overlook.

I don't think that's correct. Certainly you're less likely to be aware of something if you aren't affected by it. I think maybe we programmers just overuse the word orthogonal. But regardless, as concerning as these policing decisions are, it's not clear how any of this stuff affects a reader of only apolitical, non-default subreddits.

I’m not a programmer. I’m a statistician. I think your observation about orthogonality is correct from your industry’s perspective, though I’ve used it correctly from the context of mine (meaning statistically independent, or uncorrelated, variables). And I disagree that awareness is correlated to personal impact when it comes to sociocultural concepts like racism, or sexism, or the dynamics and behavior of an online community.

I appreciate the attempted correction despite it being wrong.

Edit: Sigh, HN being HN. I’m rate limited and can’t respond to persistent, sustained miscorrection over a single word choice in a much broader point, because I spent all my thought tokens defending the word choice, which matters approximately zero, instead of the point.

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

#139
post #86

Reddit has addressed the situation here, in a mealy mouthed sort of way: https://www.reddit.com/r/modsupport/comments/mbqgx2 However they seem to be denying the accusations that admins (possibly including the individual in question) were manually editing contents containing her name. This whole situation is incredibly bizarre to me. In the first place, why would reddit hire a 23 year old admin whose greatest accompli…

> due to her connections to multiple pedophiles? You mean, her own father? The article says her fiancee also had been accused of saying he feels attracted to children but they claim his account was hacked, which may be true as no one in their right mind would tweet something like that.

Stop defending pedophile apologists before you know the full facts of the case.

Her father raped and tortured (a car battery was involved) a ten year old. This happened over multiple days whilst the child was tied to the rafters in the attic of the family home. This is the same house Aimee Chancellor was living in at the time. But she claims she didn't know and she was not on trial. Regardless, during the trial photos of Aimee with the victim were discovered on Amiee's phone.

After her father was arrested and charged with 22 counts of sexual violence, she forged documents in order to hire him as her election agent. This is a position where he would have had contact with children. She was kicked out the Green party when this came to light.

She then joined another political party, and was kicked out of that after her fiance was found to have tweeted:

"I fantasise about children having sex, sometimes with adults, sometimes with other children, sometimes kidnapped and forced into bad situations."

They were both contacted by the media about this, she claimed he had been hacked, he claimed that these were only fantasies, and would never act on these urges... She later married him.

Amiee Chancellor is a despicable human being who can only be viewed positively if she is compared to the people she chooses to surround herself with.

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

#140

Reddit has addressed the situation here, in a mealy mouthed sort of way: https://www.reddit.com/r/modsupport/comments/mbqgx2 However they seem to be denying the accusations that admins (possibly including the individual in question) were manually editing contents containing her name. This whole situation is incredibly bizarre to me. In the first place, why would reddit hire a 23 year old admin whose greatest accompli…

I agree, but a minor nitpick: Aimee was forced out not just for being connected to pedophiles, but also for lying about and/or endorsing them (among other issues). A massive failure of safeguarding from the Greens and Lib Dems, and now from Reddit.

It's astonishing to me that a person like this can become an admin on a website used by millions of teenagers. We already know that admins can access private messages and other personal information.

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