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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’

#401

Post by AlwaysRock »

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…

I couldnt disagree more. If Zuck was found out to have been manually changing posts that criticize him would that be insignificant? Not enforcing some moderation policy but manually changing posts.

Like is that really the most important thing for any CEO to do? It's incredibly stupid and worse it kills user trust. I think Reddit should have banned TD early on but I still think this act was awful.

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

#402

Post by [deleted] »

nonplussed wrote: post #180
duxup wrote: 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.

It'd be interesting to see demographics on moderators. My perception is that they must skew young because who else has time to do all that work for free? Volunteer moderation is one of those things that must baffle economists. Here you have people putting in a lot of work for free for a profit seeking enterprise.

[deleted]

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

#403

Post by luckylion »

duxup wrote: post #246
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

> Admins, sub moderators, don't have to at all.

Don't they have to mingle with whoever decides who's going to be promoted to admin or moderator? For indirect votes via party lists, I think it's quite similar, isn't it? You don't have to convince the public, you just have to convince the tiny amount of people that decides who's placed on the list.

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

#404

Post by numpad0 »

duxup wrote: post #120
Rebelgecko wrote: post #52

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…

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.

I think they’re very coherent, connected to reality and mission driven, except their mission being clearly far from that of users or what user think it is, deliberately.

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

#405

Post by jjk166 »

prepend wrote: post #229
caslon wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> remarkably open every time he's changed user content Are you sarcastic? This is logically a very useless statement due to the nature of trust. Once trust was broken it’s hard to obtain because does clearly lied about other things, why should he be trusted now that he’s been caught. “I’ve been remarkably open about all the extra marital affairs where I’ve been caught, please trust there are no others.” “I’ve been re…

The trust was never broken. He neither denied nor tried to hide that he changed the post. No one caught him, he did it in broad daylight.

If you have extra marital sex right in front of your spouse, that is no indication that you are hiding secret affairs.

If you walk into a police station and tell them you robbed the bank across the street, there is no reason to believe you have secretly robbed many others.

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

#406

Post by DanBC »

commandlinefan wrote: post #254
adzzzz wrote: post #11

I'm still shocked Reddit is allowed into the wider ecosystem of tech infrastructure. Between hosting explicit gore content and very extreme pornography with borderline legality at best (Including under Alexis's and Steve's leadership allowing a jailbait subreddit to continue for years) I would have thought they'd be booted from AWS etc.

> borderline legality There's a technical term for something that's borderline legal: legal.

That's a deficient understanding of law in a society that uses case law.

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

#407

Post by benhurmarcel »

notJim wrote: post #251
Sebb767 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The new design collapses all responses below the second level I don't follow. I just opened a random comment thread, and counted comments being shown up to seven levels deep (which was the deepest comment.) Is the behavior you describe only if you're logged out or something?

I also don't follow. Here's a screenshot of the current top comment in the current top thread. It's showing 10 levels deep.

https://imgur.com/a/itZrtRK

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

#408

Post by ALittleLight »

phreack wrote: post #150

Why did they even hire such a controversial person in the first place? It's baffling how they're doubling down on defending her after her previous actions. I wonder if this'll all cool down in a couple of days with everyone forgetting about this or if there'll be a new established rhetoric in inflammatory communities like 'reddit admins are confirmed pedophiles'.

From wikipedia Aimee's accomplishments seem to be resigning in disgrace from a couple of minor political positions and convincing a transportation department to stop using the phrase "ladies and gentlemen".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimee_Challenor

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

#409

Post by duxup »

luckylion wrote: post #403
duxup wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

> Admins, sub moderators, don't have to at all. Don't they have to mingle with whoever decides who's going to be promoted to admin or moderator? For indirect votes via party lists, I think it's quite similar, isn't it? You don't have to convince the public, you just have to convince the tiny amount of people that decides who's placed on the list.

At least as far as some subs goes there's a lot of batches of mods who seem to be copy and pasted of sorts across subs... regardless if they post across them. So I'm not so sure they have to do much at all, just know each other.

Granted its a trust thing, I get it, but it's also a disconnect.

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

#410

Post by Cosmin_C »

irrational wrote: post #338
mbesto wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there some sort of contract somewhere that says they won't edit messages and will maintain an audit trail? Legal contract? No. Social contract? Yes. > Otherwise, I think they are free and clear to do whatever they want to do with any subreddits, posts, or comments. I'm surprised this is where you went with your rationale. The parent was clearly saying that the intent of the communities is the ability for people…

Social contract? Seriously? Who in the world is using Reddit because they have confidence in it? That is insane. It's an anonymous black hole of posts and comments and come and go like dust in the wind and have no lasting permanence or value. It's not social. There is no contract. Nobody in their right mind should have confidence in Reddit or believe that anything on there is real or authentic.

You are right up until you end the sentence with the wrong cranberry. A vast majority of content on Reddit is shockingly real (going by Occam's razor), it is one of the reasons why in light of this whole debacle I'm considering never setting foot on that platform ever again.
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