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

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241–250 of 561 posts

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

#241

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.

The politics subreddit is among the worst. It seems like it is essentially run by operatives of the DNC. (I’m entirely non-partisan: I believe both major parties are right-wing parties, and neither serves our public interests well).

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

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one in their right mind would tweet something like that. You must be blissfully unaware of the child-oriented fetishes that exist online. I know kink-shaming is a no-no, but I find it hard to believe that adults who participate in these activities don't have any desire to include real children. Just like I find it hard to believe that someone who uses an "islamic terrorist" target at a gun range doesn't have any…

Do you think it's wrong to target a terrorist?

it depends? when I was a kid, my tennis instructor used to prop up pictures of osama bin laden on hitting targets. a little odd to do with young children, but not a big deal I don't think. if "islamic terrorist" means a picture of someone wearing typical pashtun garb holding an ak, that's a bit less okay.

it's kinda like people who are really into home defense. there's nothing wrong with people who train a lot to defend against a home invasion. but with some of them, you get the impression they actually hope it happens. not a great look.

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

#243

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...

You left out some context: he did that in a (failed) attempt at lulz. It was a long thread where (IMHO) he was fielding tough questions pretty frankly and honestly, as one might hope he would, but he ruined it by editing someone's post to troll them. In context, it was obvious that he did it, he wasn't trying to be sneaky. I'm not justifying it; obviously it was dumb, given that people are still using it to denigrate…

I can't imagine Twitter/Facebook/etc. actually changing what a user wrote, in any context. This does reveal something about Reddit and I would be less surprised to learn they are editing other posts.

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

#244
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on this? I haven't noticed any change in comment section usability and I've been on reddit for 10+ years.

The new design collapses all responses below the second level (and then every two levels) while adding extreme amounts of visual distractions to gilded/awarded/... comments (personal opinion). This annoys me to no end and I presume the grandparent is referencing that.

They also require you to login to expand comments on the new site which seems insane to me.

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

#245
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 company had “communicated clearly” with the affected party as they resolved the situation https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/mbbm2c/welcome_... It sounds like things are still very much opaque.

Reddit needs to fire their entire PR team and just start communicating directly and frankly. The community would be a lot less upset without all the PR speak.

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

#246
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit administration seems pretty ad hoc, undisciplined, at times weirdly disconnected from the community, and uncoordinated as it could possibly be. Then again so are all its subreddits, and the volunteer mods are about as opaque and strange as the admins, with the added excuse that they're doing it for free. The fact that the ecosystem has survived seems more like happenstance.

This doesn't seem to be particularly different from H.N. , most other websites, or even the political leaders of many nations. More often than not, the man who seeks power is ill-suited to have it.

It's not entirely different, but at least in a democracy a politician still has to mingle with their party members / tries / does, maybe even try to get some votes. Admins, sub moderators, don't have to at all.

Not that I think there's a way to force that, but the disconnect is still there.

Agreed about the folks who want power. When I moderated a large forum and we picked new moderators we had a rule where anyone who lobbied 'too hard' to be a moderator was automatically out. What is funny is that if you followed those users they often ended up banned later on ...

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

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one in their right mind would tweet something like that. You must be blissfully unaware of the child-oriented fetishes that exist online. I know kink-shaming is a no-no, but I find it hard to believe that adults who participate in these activities don't have any desire to include real children. Just like I find it hard to believe that someone who uses an "islamic terrorist" target at a gun range doesn't have any…

Do you think it's wrong to target a terrorist?

It is wrong to want to. To be clear, it is laudable to train for the situation. But to eagerly anticipate it, to hope for enemies to attack your country and community, is abhorrent.

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

#248
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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- al…

> 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.

Yeah this is an issue, but let’s be real here, this matters to you me and a few other people here, and outside in the real world no-one cares. Even this expectation is new, any admin who was hosting phpbb forums or whatever else had this freedom to change a few entries in their Mysql Db, heck there was an engineer who was able to go inside people’s private gmail (https://www.wired.com/2010/09/google-spy/) — and Google is a company we expected to have better safeguards. Better security measures, sophisticated software architecture to prevent this, these things only happen after a startup reaches a high level of maturity in its timeline, Reddit hadn’t quite reached that point when this happened. I would be concerned if such a thing happened now though. Now these safeguards do exist on Reddit so there’s that.

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

#249
post #72

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.

www.reddit.com --> old.reddit.com

This plugin redirects you to old.reddit automatically:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

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

#250
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

Just consider HN to be actively moderated. It's an opinionated community that does not strive to be a democracy.
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