Every page I visit is now a private community... really?
Yes, it's a wonderfully successful boycot:
Twitch: https://m.twitch.tv/reddark_247
Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
551–560 of 696 posts
Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean it's also worth noting that spez was CEO of Reddit and subreddits like that were allowed to exist for many, many more years.
And it would in turn be worth noting that the creators of reddit had a philosophical and political commitment to free speech that drove their light-touch approach to moderation. It's not like the existence of that subreddit is evidence of an endorsement on their part.
Hi! I've done a bunch of trust and safety work and I see this trope a fair bit. Please help me understand what the difference is between, say, platforming racist harassment because of a "political commitment to free speech" and platforming racist harassment because you just kinda like racist harassment?
I get that it might be different in the heads of the people who have worked very hard to create those platforms. I'm just not seeing any different in its effects on the world or on the targets of the racial harassment.
Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#553Lots of speculation on Twitter about this—a failed attempt to re-open all closed subreddits and instate their own moderators. I can't imagine it'd be that, although I do enjoy the conspiracy, and more likely they were using the window of reduced traffic to make some larger changes and they went awry
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Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is partly why I now prefer the term "free exchange of ideas" over "freedom of speech". I believe it more closely captures the essence of what makes free speech worth protecting, while also conveniently excluding stuff like this (among other things, like spam or antisocial behavior).
Wouldn't that potentially also exclude "obscene" things such as nudity? Or things like flag burning, or provocative art?
I think flag burning and provocative art are unquestionably intended to convey "ideas". In fact, they fit into that category far more cleanly than they do into "speech" in my opinion.
Nudity... depends on the purpose but probably not. I agree that's unfortunate if your stance is that there should be no restrictions on porn, but I'm not sure the arguments for why freedom of speech is a good idea really apply to porn in the first place. I think it'd be better to make that argument on its own merits rather than try to conflate the two.
Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds more like - we don't want anyone to know it's a ghost town here (metrics will prove protestors correct) - so let's say it was a system down issue - and then claim there was no meaningful protest.
Yeah you must be onto something! It must be that! I'm sure spez set that all up with the same lizardmen that organized 9/11 for the CIA!!!
Reddit faked their initial users to make the site seem used. Pulling the plug during protests surely is in the realm of possibility for what they could do.
Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wild guess: visiting a private sub requires an extra call to a service/db to check if the user can view it. Normally there are only a small number of these checks because private subs were usually small communities. Now, many large subs having switched private is causing some poor mircoservice somewhere to get hammered.
I would imagine that a normal visit generates more backend traffic, given that it needs to fetch posts, thumbnails, etc. whereas a visit to a private sub wouldn't need to check more than authorization. I could easily be wrong though, I haven't done web development for years.
All that other stuff's easy to cache. Authorization's cacheable, too, kinda, with some trade-offs, but they may not have bothered if it'd never been a problem before. Or this particular check my have been bypassing that caching, and it'd never cause a problem before because there weren't that many of those checks happening.
You start getting a lot more DB queries than usual, bypassing cache, the DB's remote, it's clustered or whatever, now you've got a ton more internal network traffic and open sockets, latency goes up, resources start to get exhausted...
Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
A meme pointing out that u/spez was a mod of r/jailbait in 2008 was the top post on r/all a few hours ago
Doesn't seem that unbelievable when you look into some of the other stuff he's done. For example he secretly used his admin powers to edit user comments from users he didn't like or who criticized him.
It is really really wild for other comments to try to pretend the comment above is about something other than the admin (spez) using his powers to edit reddit comments of people he didn't like or political opponents.
Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lascivious pictures of clothed children count as CSAM in many jurisdictions. Free speech is fine but did they not have lawyers until 2015?
This is partly why I now prefer the term "free exchange of ideas" over "freedom of speech". I believe it more closely captures the essence of what makes free speech worth protecting, while also conveniently excluding stuff like this (among other things, like spam or antisocial behavior).
Ooh, that's good.
It also makes it clearer what's going on when people are waving the "free speech" banner over things like harassment and abuse. Allowing abuse not only doesn't increase the free exchange of ideas. It also often directly decreases it because it drives off people who get targeted by racism, sexism, et cetera, ad nauseam.
Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#559Allowing Apollo to operate would cost $20M in opportunity cost for Reddit. But not allowing Apollo to operate has an opportunity cost in website downtime. I am amused!
Not sure that's a fair value. In this case the opportunity cost would be the amount Apollo would have actually paid (maybe $1M max) rather than $20M.
Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#560Earlier quoted context omitted.
A meme pointing out that u/spez was a mod of r/jailbait in 2008 was the top post on r/all a few hours ago
It's worth noting that a very old user (/u/andrewsmith1986 IIRC) responded that at that time it was possible to add arbitrary users as mods without needing interaction/feedback/etc. from the user in question. If that was the case, then any user being a mod on any particular sub at that time doesn't really mean much. Obviously I can't reference the comment in question right now, but I'll try to remember to circle back…
Oh man that's a username I have seen in a log time. Wasn't there a theory that they were multiple people using a single account?