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

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

#301

Post by ipaddr »

nindalf wrote: post #200
caslon wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the harm in such a pointless joke? It was silly, but it's not like the meme subreddit he did it to was a super serious one like AskHistorians is.

I get where you're coming from, but to the users of the_donald, it wasn't a meme subreddit. They thought they were the main reason he got elected in 2016 and were looking forward to playing a similarly pivotal role in 2020.

It was so close they could have made an impact. The Clinton email address / wikileaks dumps were being mined as a collective in the forum. That probably brought to light some emails the press would have ignored.

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

#302

Post by serial_dev »

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…

Just replace spez and reddit with Zuckerberg and Facebook and you'll immediately understand why it is bad. Just imagine Mark editing your posts. CEOs shouldn't be monkeying around without a transparent changelog with user content.

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

#303

Post by hartator »

sp332 wrote: post #13
kyrieeschaton wrote: post #3

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

Quotes in headlines are not scare quotes. They're just quotes. It's a quotation.

Yes, a “quotation”. Doesn’t carry any meaning making the word less impactful. /s

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

#304

Post by Accujack »

Spivak wrote: post #156
slg wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That old reddit was also a haven for near child porn and other sorts of immoral or illicit content. Reddit needed strong moderation to become a functioning business and probably for the good of society as a whole. Maybe their current approach to moderation is overzealous, but let's not look at "old reddit" through rose-colored glasses.

Hahahahahha. Reddit was a haven for literal child porn and is still today a haven for "jailbait" content. God I hope the "waiting"/"grooming" subs that were for lewding over pics of under-18s got banned. Reddit might have cleaned their act up a bit but it still a gross wild west.

Nope. Reddit has never developed/deployed the tools to clean anything up... today (literally) it's virtually guaranteed that someone on the site is trading child porn, someone else is arranging the sale of illegal narcotics, and someone else is selling sex work in a location it's not legal.

On an unrelated note, isn't spivak a gender?

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

#305

Post by filoleg »

notahacker wrote: post #261
maxk42 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit's automoderator is not a wild animal that gets "aggressive." It's a simple regex: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/automoderator/full-documentation Someone edited the rules to deliberately block any mention of the name in question site-wide.

Tbf admin real names seem like quite a reasonable thing to include in such a regex (unless they're so common it's likely to be an accidental collision or publicly known) which is consistent with Reddit's explanation The allegation is that the name was only mentioned in the body of a linked (paywalled) article though...

> admin real names seem like quite a reasonable thing to include in such a regex (unless they're so common it's likely to be an accidental collision or publicly known) which is consistent with Reddit's explanation

The "publicly known" part is the key here. She is a public figure who held prominent political positions. She has her own wikipedia page. There were plenty of news articles featuring her name since forever ago.

>The allegation is that the name was only mentioned in the body of a linked (paywalled) article though

This is imo just a cherry on top.

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

#306

Post by SamBam »

caslon wrote: post #174
esja wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the harm in such a pointless joke? It was silly, but it's not like the meme subreddit he did it to was a super serious one like AskHistorians is.

Would it be ok if Twitter employees secretly changed people's tweets without informing them?

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

#307

Post by irrational »

lolsal wrote: post #202
caslon wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the harm in such a pointless joke? It was silly, but it's not like the meme subreddit he did it to was a super serious one like AskHistorians is.

The point is not the joke, the point is the betrayal. It eroded confidence that any post or comment on reddit is real or authentic.

Is this a joke? Why would anyone think that any post or comment on a place like Reddit is real or authentic? The entire thing is an anonymous black hole. It is as far from real and authentic as I can imagine anything being.

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

#308

Post by phpnode »

commandlinefan wrote: post #238
Spooky23 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many tech enthusiasts are stuck living in 1999 when the internet was this mythical paradise of unrestricted freedom. The problem is, it's 2021, and the raging dumpster fire of social media platforms has created a world where extremist insanity has become mainstream public discourse. People who believe that reptiles posing as human beings run the earth are have a platform and some sort of earnest following! People lik…

> People who believe that reptiles posing as human beings run the earth are have a platform and some sort of earnest following Those people have always existed. When I was a kid in the 80's, supermarkets carried tabloid newspapers with headlines like "Boy born with head of a bat" or "leading telekinetics agree that world will end in six days". The difference now is that while most of us just shook our heads and dismi…

The difference is that in the 80s the few people that believed this nonsense were unable to instantly find hundreds or thousands or millions of equally deluded people to reinforce and amplify their beliefs and subsequently amplify the harm they can cause.

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

#309

Post by s_dev »

notJim wrote: post #253
pumaontheprowl wrote: post #66

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.

What's the issue with it? I see nothing but hate, but I honestly don't mind the new design. Edit: lol, I participate in a lot of contentious threads here, but this simple question where I am genuinely trying to understand something has generated the most downvotes.

People who are used to it are mostly power users generating content for reddit and their subs. It's absolutely reddits right to ignore their preferences but also at their peril.

Reddit is precariously close to doing a 'Digg'.

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

#310

Post by oauea »

elliekelly wrote: post #218
caslon wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sure he could just connect directly to the database if he wanted to. At some point people have enough access to systems to bypass any security checks put in place.
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