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Reddit takes a new direction

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Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#91

Post by ugh »

sophacles wrote: post #72
jasonkester wrote: post #63

People tend to think of online communities as democracies where the freedoms they're accustomed to from their normal lives apply. So when a post gets deleted by a moderator, people tend to think of it as a freedom of speech issue. There's a whole constitution out there specifically defending anybody's right to create a pro-Nazi subreddit, and to otherwise post anything they please on the site so long as it's not ille…

* And I think we can all say the result is a lot more pleasant than a less tended place such as Reddit or 4chan.* I am honestly not sure we can say that at all. I thoroughly enjoy both hn and reddit, for completely different reasons . Sure, from a strictly legal standpoint, it isn't censorship or a constitutional issue, but at the same time, the "anything goes" attitude in places like 4chan and reddit allow for a lot…

For fucks sake. Is that really so hard to understand? Pedos can’t trade their images anymore (whether legal or not). That’s the extent of the limitation. How the fuck is that supposed to turn Reddit into something radically different? It’s this one tiny thing. It’s not some big change that changes Reddit.

It’s not so hard. Some people just want to be deliberately obtuse. The slippery slope is a fucking fallacy!

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#92

Post by Anderkent »

blhack wrote: post #75
Anderkent wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Well then you are incredibly naive. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." please. >Do you understand what "exploit" means? They're exploiting either the naivety of the children taking these photos, or the naivety of the people who posted th…

>I don't find anything wrong with a teenage girl being teased about a photo she posted to the internet. Well that's telling.

Telling how? I believe if you do something stupid then you should be ridiculed for doing it. How is this case something special?

Perhaps we have a different understanding what it means to tease someone. For me it means (and the free dictionary seems to agree) to annoy, make fun of, mock playfully without degrading the person.

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#93

Post by alecco »

tptacek wrote: post #86
alecco wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep editing your post. My original "I stand corrected" is now out of it's meaning and it makes no sense to keep editing my answer. I expected better of you, tptacek.

I didn't edit it to change the meaning of your comment. On this particular thread, I'd like to make sure my comments are as clear as I can make them: Reddit did the right thing, and the only complaint I can make is that they took too long and their reasoning wasn't great.

IMHO, they did the right thing in the wrong way for the wrong reasons at a very troubled time for the community. Also now there's blood in the water so I doubt this will be the end of it.

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#94

Post by zotz »

tptacek wrote: post #48
zotz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Back when there was usenet NNTP is still alive. : )

This shit killed Usenet. Not just child porn, but that and a lot of things like it. (I ran a Freenix-competitive server in the '90s and hacked on INN). (Disclosure: it's sad it took Reddit this long to apply this rule, and more than a little repulsive to see people up in arms about it.)

> more than a little repulsive to see people up in arms about it.

Agreed. Equating free speech with the ability to trade in sexual images of children is about the low-water mark for political philosophy applied to communications tech.

All that being said, I miss the pre-AOL usenet.

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#95

Post by DannoHung »

Y'know, it's one thing to be against laws that are ostensibly made in favor of prosecuting child pornography because they can be abused to censor things that are politically unpopular... it's a whole other bucket of beans to be against removing stuff that's basically child pornography because you think something that's politically unpopular might be removed.

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#96

Post by ugh »

Anderkent wrote: post #31
blhack wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh for crying out loud... The stuff that was allowed on reddit would get you an instant, permanent ban on pretty much every website on the internet. Do you even know what SOPA, PIPA or ACTA do? Reddit has voluntarily taken the stance they won't allow the trade and index of child pornography on their website. That has got nothing to do with DNS takedowns for linking to copyrighted material. It was a private decision m…

He mentioned SOPA PIPA and ACTA because somethingawfuls stance of these reflects its general trustworthiness. No one argues that illegal content should not be removed, and uploaders banned. Which was already being done. Child pornography was never allowed on reddit, and was removed as it was reported. This is not preventing 'exploitation of children', it's just a majority censoring topics it finds inconvenient/distur…

SA is in favor of SOPA and PIPA? Huh?

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#97

Post by Confusion »

tptacek wrote: post #48
zotz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Back when there was usenet NNTP is still alive. : )

This shit killed Usenet. Not just child porn, but that and a lot of things like it. (I ran a Freenix-competitive server in the '90s and hacked on INN). (Disclosure: it's sad it took Reddit this long to apply this rule, and more than a little repulsive to see people up in arms about it.)

This kind of response, using words like 'repulsive', is a form of thoughtless polarisation. I expect better from someone always up-in-arms about the quality of posts here. This is just flamebait.

There are several possible discussions here that you can't just sweep under the rug by declaring those opposing you as 'repulsive' beforehand. Here's a simple question: should they also ban the lolicon subreddit? The children's-pageant subreddit? The bikini subreddit, because it allows posts of children? Almost everyone agrees child porn is repulsive. Not everyone agrees that means you have to ban /r/jailbait. Read the article, linked in the OP, by Neil Gaiman and please respond civilly instead of inciting a flamewar. Your dismissiveness is unacceptable in a reasoned debate.

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#98

Post by geoffhill »

jasonkester wrote: post #63

People tend to think of online communities as democracies where the freedoms they're accustomed to from their normal lives apply. So when a post gets deleted by a moderator, people tend to think of it as a freedom of speech issue. There's a whole constitution out there specifically defending anybody's right to create a pro-Nazi subreddit, and to otherwise post anything they please on the site so long as it's not ille…

There is truth to the assertion that sites that run on user contributions must be pruned. Reddit has strived hard to make the community self-policing. The Reddit methodology has always been that users have to be the gardeners. It's more scalable that way. Smaller users garden with upvotes and downvotes. Moderators can use shears.

It's hard when an issue comes up where the game-theoretical approach produces a bad result. The current Reddit structure works well when it assumes that good content is the paramount rule, but now we have a new paramount rule: obey the law. The site structure and the ranking algorithms don't meet the new requirements, and as a result, manual pruning is required.

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#99

Post by cbs »

jasonkester wrote: post #63

People tend to think of online communities as democracies where the freedoms they're accustomed to from their normal lives apply. So when a post gets deleted by a moderator, people tend to think of it as a freedom of speech issue. There's a whole constitution out there specifically defending anybody's right to create a pro-Nazi subreddit, and to otherwise post anything they please on the site so long as it's not ille…

people tend to think of it as a freedom of speech issue

First-amendment speech is only a subset of free speech. Unfortunately people seem to hear "freedom of speech" and think that the ONLY place that freedom exists is under the scope of the 1st. Its not.

The Bill of Rights only says that our government can't take it away. Other people are still free to take it away. But when they take it away (and are within their rights to do so) it is a free speech issue. The difference is the argument is not a you can't or you shouldn't be able to, its just a you can but shouldn't.

What people are railing against is not that that reddit, or whoever, has decided not to adhere to the restrictions placed upon congress, but that they've fundamentally changing what it means to be reddit. This is the article's "Very Serious Discussion About What Sort of Community We Are".

It's your garden, so you have the absolute right to pull weeds. The weeds get no say.

Yeah, reddit has complete control. But unless they're happy exercising that control by disabling all user submissions and posts, or actively banning anyone who they don't like discussing the nature of reddits rules, they have given their flowers a voice about the weeds.

Perhaps, when you say that people should STFU and take it, you might be interesting in hearing the thesis of (reddit co-founder) Ohanian's TED talk on social media: "You No Longer Control the Message, and That’s Okay"

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#100

Post by baddox »

kijin wrote: post #73
baddox wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of this policy shift is that it's no longer about child pornography, just like the jailbait banning wasn't about child porn. The post makes it clear that they've always followed the law regarding child pornography, but that they're now voluntarily banning all suggestive or sexual content involving minors (so, not just child porn). Their main excuse is that they don't have the resources to moderate on…

The fact that the admins are painting their policy with a broader brush doesn't mean that the policy is any less about child pornography than it was before. If "creepy" was the new standard, /r/creepy and /r/wtf should be on the chopping block, too. If "no nudity or sex" was the rule, /r/nsfw wouldn't have survived. What a subreddit's policy says is less important than what actually gets posted there and/or what peop…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know, the high-profile subreddits under scrutiny didn't contain child pornography regularly or at all. The jailbait one was depicted on Anderson Cooper's show as having pictures likely grabbed from Facebook: e.g. teenagers in swim suits. There was also mention of a single commenter claiming to have more revealing pictures of an underage ex-girlfriend (which sounded like they would have qualified as child pornography), which prompted other commenters to ask him to privately message them with links. I was under the impression that this was the most illegal thing on that subreddit, and that the main problem was that people thought it was creepy to have pictures of minors in swim suits. More realistically, I think the banning was more about the news segment, since everyone already knew about that subreddit.

> What a subreddit's policy says is less important than what actually gets posted there and/or what people expect to find there.

What's the line? What if someone posts a single nefarious link on /r/nsfw, or for that matter, something completely unrelated like /r/askscience? It seems like you're proposing that outlier illegal content should result in the banning of a subreddit if the subreddit is "creepy," but not if the subreddit is "normal."

> the expectation is that those subreddits will contain child porn or something similar.

You're hinting at the important problem of defining child pornography. Are pictures of minors in swim suits child pornography? Sure, it's creepy to think about adults surfing for those pictures, but is it even borderline illegal? I don't think so. I think reddit has every right to ban whatever they want (although it seems to go against the stated purpose of their site), but it seems a bit disingenuous to claim that it's at all about legality unless it truly is.

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