Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’ • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by Barrin92 » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #155

tyho wrote: 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?

Hire her father after the allegations were known (to her and the public) as an election agent which put him into contact with vulnerable people[1], which is arguably both very reckless and borderline crony.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jan/12/green-party...

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

#212

Post by xtracto » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

sixothree wrote: post #128

testfoobar wrote: post #65

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…

Speaking of AMAs. I feel like these "Scheduled AMAs" broke the spirit of reddit very early on. I am referring to celebrity appearances where an account is created for the purpose of a two hour celebrity "appearance". I've always felt like if they aren't sticking around answering the long tail of questions then they shouldn't be doing an AMA. So I just don't participate.

I remember one of the things that attracted me to reddit back in the day was a lady who had been some character at Disney doing an IAMA. That was the beauty of IAMA with everyday people.

Then they changed the subreddit rules and only accept "Notable" people for IAMAs and r/casualiama was born. In the 10 years I've been at Reddit it has changed a lot, including some "niche" communities that I was at, as Reddit becomes more popular all it's subreddits degrade into Meme collections.

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

#213

Post by douglasisshiny » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

auser1231232 wrote: post #181

douglasisshiny wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry -- are Trump supporters not able to speak any more? To my knowledge that is not at all the case. There's even one subreddit dedicated to asking Trump supporters questions, although posts have to be approved by the moderators.

> I'm sorry -- are Trump supporters not able to speak any more? The subreddit was banned, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, a very popular conservative social media platform was kicked off of its hosting providers, etc. Regardless of your political views, it is abundantly clear that certain viewpoints and opinions are being suppressed, which is fundamentally contradictory to free speech and American values.

One subreddit was shut down. There are many other subreddits with pro-Trump users -- I visit them when I'm bored.

Donald Trump is a billionaire and a former president. He can and does call into Fox News, et. al and immediately has an audience of millions. The idea that his speech is being suppressed is absolutely ridiculous .

Why exactly should private entities be forced to host content that they choose not to host?

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

#214

Post by lordgroff » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

afavour wrote: post #67

Rebelgecko wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the new feature where subreddit visitors get quizzed on whether or not a sub contains undesirable content?

Do you know how actively free expression was repressed in Soviet Russia? Do you know about the gulags?

Not having lived in Soviet Union, but having lived in a communist system, and am old enough to very much remember it, I think you have a very mistaken idea of repression of free speech in those systems post-Stalin.

So how did it work? It worked by intense social and governmental pressure, whereby expressing a thought that was "forbidden" led to incredibly overexaggerated offense and incredulity that someone could think WRONGLY like this (pro capitalist, anti worker, bourgeois, etc).

In fact, I have to say that over time, living here in Canada, I feel increasingly like that sort of totalitarianism lite is increasingly becoming familiar, where any even very minor dissent in thought is quickly shouted down as racist / transphobic / insert-X-phobic / anti immigrant, anti-whatever, even if said thought may bear no reasonable resemblance to supposed offence.

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

#215

Post by leetcrew » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

pen2l wrote: post #152

trident5000 wrote: post #111

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…

if I recall correctly, he edited the comment outside the official moderation workflow. there was no indication that the edit was not made by the user themselves. imo, this is a pretty big deal. if it were done in a way that clearly showed the edit was spez's, it would be a harmless joke. instead it raised questions about how many admins are able to silently edit comments and how often it might happen.

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

#216

Post by brabel » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #155

tyho wrote: 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?

I don't know anything about the case that's not covered in this article... but I have the impression she's being judged by what her father did, which I find despicable. She deserves to be treated independently of that as I am sure it was not easy to live her whole life in the shadow of what happened.

Though I have no idea, I suppose her father couldn't get a job (I suppose he has paid his 22 years in jail now) so she might have felt like she had to step in to help?? I don't find that a huge problem, though if she did indeed forge documents , then of course she should be held accountable.

EDIT: I am sorry, I hadn't read the details of the case, so I assumed the crime had happened 22 years ago (as the father was free to work, I assumed he had paid his time)... but it seems he was on bail (!!!) from the crime, which happened in 2016!!! How does one get bail after such a crime?! I withdraw my comment above, this story is far too horrible and I don't want to be on the wrong side.

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

#217

Post by SV_BubbleTime » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

ncallaway wrote: post #123

postalrat wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big as in #1? Yea.

Sure, but there's #1 in a market with 4% control of the market, vs #1 in a market with 85% control of the market. The absolute rank doesn't really tell you where the next closest competitor is.

I think history has shown us that “too big to fail“ isn’t a real thing. That “big enough to get a bailout” is real, but I’m not sure if this would apply to Reddit’s future.

I have an idea that the future will not be in content silos and volunteer moderation by power hungry people... but I certainly don’t know how to get there so I’ll wait. I suspect the future will be “subscription lists” you join that block things people you generally agree with flagged, but this may bubble issue like we have now.

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

#218

Post by elliekelly » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

caslon wrote: post #196

formerly_proven wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I don't think that action in itself is a big deal, but it shows that Reddit has a lack of internal security i.e. reddit employees are admins in the old-school CMS/forum software sense: they simply can do anything. (Edit: Reply points out that spez says not all admins can do this) For comparison, I don't expect that a Google employee, or C-level executive, has an "Edit" button next to every single post on G…

To be fair, nobody has an edit button on any Google Groups post anymore. Nobody has any buttons on them, in fact. Also, when it happened, he also pointed out that most reddit admins weren't able to do this.

> Also, when it happened, he also pointed out that most reddit admins weren't able to do this.

That’s worse though, right? Why does he have this special functionality the other admins don’t have? Why would the CEO ever legitimately need to personally edit a reddit comment? Surely he has many better things to do.

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

#219

Post by Spivak » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

Number157 wrote: post #182

Spivak wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Reddit was great for a long time even when it was one of the largest most popular sites on the internet. Then it became a political platform for the US democrats.

Kinda sorta. Reddit is an odd place on the internet. It's on average really really conservative but full people who distance themselves from the political identity of "conservative" or "Republican."

Reddit is where you go if you begrudgingly vote Democrat but think that liberals and progressives have gone too far.

I do wonder what the political landscape is going to look like in the next decade if/when Republicans realize that there's huge huge swaths of young and young-ish people they could easily convert if they just dropped all the gods & guns & murica branding and gave up on social issues.

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

#220

Post by prepend » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

pen2l wrote: post #152

trident5000 wrote: post #111

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…

> pretty insignifiant in the grand scheme of things.

It was super significant in that it was evidence that Reddit employees have the ability to edit messages with no audit trail and no governance.

So while the individual edit was not important, the fact that it happened was. And there is an unknown number of other edits that were never disclosed and is unprovable. So Reddit broke the one thing it’s supposed to do- allow users to talk to each other.

Important for this article too because Knight claims her boyfriend’s Twitter account was hacked and someone else posted about fantasizing about kids. If it was Reddit we wouldn’t be able to know if it was Knight’s boyfriend, hackers, or some Reddit admin.