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

gamerevolution.com

161–170 of 561 posts

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

#161
Ugh, what a ball of mud. Well, I think there are two problems here: first, that Reddit has a bug in its anti-abuse software, and second the mob decided to abuse Reddit for hiring this woman who's history is, at worst, questionable.

This is "cancel culture" in a very dangerous form, one that if taken to its conclusion, could prevent someone from ever being employed again. That is a very harsh punishment, handed out without a trial or defense, it is NOT justice.

Furthermore, it puts a potentially chilling effect on employers, and harm employees. The first reaction of employers will be to keep their employee identities entirely secret, and to enforce that secrecy in the work contract. This will harm workers who want to move to a different job, and talk about the work they did.

My firm hope is that this protest is more an emphatic bug report than a mob looking to murder someone's career after spending about 30 seconds thinking about it from all sides.

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

#162
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO himself admitted to going into The_Donald subreddit (before it was banned) and editing user comments. I don't think this guy is leading the charge to admin transparency. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/reddit-ceo-edits-user-comment...

This gets brought up a lot. And it's a bit of a doozy to make sense of. First, consider the context: the CEO (spez) was an easy punching bag on the_donald subreddit, in fact it was a bit of a meme there to attack reddit's admins (and those in the know do know that the attacks were often crossing a line, like accusing them of being pedophiles and things of the nature). The change that spez made was a bit of a joke its…

There is really no excuse for what he did and most other businesses would have fired him immediately. Reddit simply has a very immature corporate culture. Post-IPO (if they get that far) I would expect a massive clean-out.

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

#163
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.

https://www.aclu.org/other/what-censorship

"You know, a free press is not freedom for the thought you love, but rather for the thought you hate the most. People need to tolerate the Larry Flynts of the world so they can be free." -Larry Flynt

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

#164
post #138
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You said:

  Being unaware of something is orthogonal to being affected by it.
You truly believe that being aware of something and being affected my that same thing are independent and uncorrelated? So if a bomb goes off, my awareness of it is not at all dependent on, or correlated with, whether or not I was in the blast zone (and thus affected by it)?

Edit: The parent has edited their comment since my reply to be more specific. I'm not sure I agree, but it's now not as obviously wrong as I outlined here.

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

#165

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 because diversity trumps qualifications, and Silicon Valley companies are desperate to get their diversity numbers up.

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

#166
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a single time, and in a way that was an obvious joke (literally just regex to switch his name with mods' names). It's not exactly heinous, what he did.

> It was a single time That we know of that he admitted.

He's been remarkably open every time he's changed user content (once with a post in 200...7? I think, and the single time he edited comments).

I don't like reddit, and I don't like spez for other reasons (downgraded from Lisp to Python), but what he did was literally just a harmless joke. All reddit posts and comments are publicly archived by services like pushshift; we'd know if they had a habit of doing this.

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

#167
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm exclusively on old.reddit.com too. The new interface was the start of the worst, and while we're not directly in the firing line in terms of viewing content and navigation on old.reddit.com we are at the mercy of the general winds of change over the site.

The problem is that all of the mega content creators and moderators use old reddit due to RES and the other extensions (and the better UX). I think they’ll build a equivalent to TweetDeck that can be used for more powerful content creation (automatic xposting, timed posts, performance stats) and sunset old reddit, maybe with a throwback theme on new reddit. And then I’ll finally quit.

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

#168

Reddit feels very Soviet lately. Everything is heavily manipulated and it seems like users are aware of that fact but are powerless to change anything.

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…

Exactly this. The comment sections of all but obscure interest subs have been complete garbage for years. The only interesting content is if you sort by controversial but most don't even know about that.

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

#169

Reddit feels very Soviet lately. Everything is heavily manipulated and it seems like users are aware of that fact but are powerless to change anything.

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've tried posting a few times but it just doesn't work. Absolutely everything is censored or sent to auto moderation immediately. And I'm not posting anything remotely controversial. E.g. one time I moved to a new place and wondered about banking in that location. Nope, can't post that. Even worse, messages look like they're posted when they're actually not visible. It's dishonest. They're orchestrating the conversation based on what they want you to see.

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

#170
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 photo…

I'm confused. Your comment talks about her father and her fiance. What did she do? "Amiee Chancellor is a despicable human being" is pretty heavy, but the only thing related to her in your comment is that "she forged documents in order to hire him as her election agent." Not cool, but is there more here?

"photos on her phone" is pretty damning.
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