Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they anticipated it, why did it become an issue?
I do not work for Reddit. Maybe they have some press contact info on their page you could try? Or Twitter or something?
That was more of a rhetorical question.
Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
651–660 of 696 posts
Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#652Earlier 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).
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.
Except it won't work. Freedom of speech limited to well composed political speech is not what it sounds. Modern day China(PRC) guarantees in the constitution that kind of freedom of speech, just they label any speeches that isn't conformant to current Party statements to be terrorism conspiracy. Even Nazi Germany had that constitutional clauses.
It just starts from porn and ends in gas chambers. And in the middle is freedom limited to "meaningful" contents and activities. If you looked up and compared state of freedom of speech, CSAM/CP regulation, internet censorship, especially authority intervention, crime rate, and standpoint on democracy-totalitarian axis for various random nations, it should all line up well against each others.
Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#653Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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? The difference is intent. Intent matters. Intent is the difference between murder and manslaughter, or between a conspiracy and mere speech.
Intent matters sometimes . To some people . But here, in either case the intent is to enable terrible people to, e.g., shout the n-word at people. So I don't see much of a difference in those terms.
Well it obviously mattered enough for the Founding Fathers of the US to enshrine freedom of speech in the Bill of Rights, and in the last 200-ish years it also mattered enough for US courts not to overturn or politicians of various parties to change it.
Now where I'm from (Germany), not just "hate speech" is against the law, but it's also unlawful to insult another person. It's complicated, but for the latter it's mostly sufficient that they feel insulted by what you said to them personally.
Now while I don't go around insulting people in person or on the Internet, I personally think - for instance - that it should be allowed to call a person an asshole, if they behave like an asshole. Yet, if I did that here, or even online to another German person, they could go to the police and press charges. If the public prosecutor is sufficiently bored, this very low barrier could also be used to dox me in an otherwise reasonably anonymous setting, since the resulting lawsuit could result in my data getting subpoenaed from, say, Twitter and my ISP. This has happened to other people here in the past.
Now while I'm neither in favor of either hate speech nor randomly and viciously insulting people online, I consider the law in Germany as outlined unreasonable in an online setting. I think freedom of speech is more important fundamentally than another person's right to not feel hurt, or for some powers that be to silence or punish me because I said something inconvenient that they merely claim to meet some of the criteria for speech that is restricted here.
Mind you, this is the case all the while freedom of speech is enshrined in the German constitution as well. But I think it is a pretty good example of why I think freedom of speech should not be curtailed just in the name of another person's feelings about said speech. Even if a person, as you do, doesn't see a direct and tangible benefit in allowing that kind of speech, I would argue that a larger fraction of people are against disallowing it, because of the indirect consequences and where that line of lawmaking leads.
Another thing to consider is this: Say you're modestly happy with the current government wherever you live, and you'd be happy for them to have an "easy" way to curtail freedom of speech. Would you also be happy for the opposing political side to do the same thing? What if some extremists came to power?
This kind of reasoning is why free speech absolutists are so staunchly defending freedom of speech, even if it may be inconvenient or insulting to themselves or others.
Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a philosophical and political commitment to free speech Surely this is a meme by now? Any CEO that has ever said this about a website they control is just pandering to the crowd. Musk's Twitter has complied with more government takedown requests than the previous regime had.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz If anyone would say it and mean it, it was probably this guy. He was quite the activist before he committed suicide.
I read his message on thie old markdown web page. this is so sad.
Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#655Earlier 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).
> This is partly why I now prefer the term "free exchange of ideas" over "freedom of speech".
What do you need in order to have a free exchange of ideas? Oh that's right, free speech. Free exchange of ideas is one of the benefits of free speech. But it isn't free speech. Also what about speech to entertain? What about speech to criticize? What about speech to just mindlessly express yourself?
> like spam or antisocial behavior
What counts as antisocial behavior? Rap music? Heavy metal? Is protesting government antisocial behavior? What about criticizing politicians? And more importantly, who decides?
It's amazing how little people know about free speech. It should be mandatory to have a class on civics and of course free speech. People have such a childish and superficial understanding of free speech. And of course these people always tend to be for censorship.
Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#656Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be clear: You mean you have timeouts and failures using Reddit's own "new and improved" web UI and mobile client? Because using RedReader, old.reddit.com, and other third-party apps, I don't actually recall the last time Reddit didn't load for me.
No, I only ever use old.reddit and BaconReader. I've never used the new UI or the official app. The official Reddit Status Twitter confirms this is a pretty common occurrence: https://twitter.com/redditstatus The "elevated error rates" always presents as an "oops, you broke reddit!" landing even on old.reddit. I imagine since it is an "elevated error rate" rather than a total outage that it might be localized to geo…
Little late, but I think I see how we have such different experiences. Assuming other comments are right, and Reddit's pulling pretty much entirely from cache, you probably just scroll longer than I do - long enough to run out of the first ~1000 (cached) posts, and hit uncached items.
You'd get timeouts, and I'd never see them - despite being West Coast (Canada) as well. Or at least, that's my best guess so far.
Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#657Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, HN is a very cynical and negative place, and it's interesting how quickly I stop noticing that if I visit a few days in a row. But if I don't visit for a week and then come back, it's starkly obvious. It's also not exclusively negative and cynical, of course, and there are some great insights to be found here. I think you're being unfair with 90%. Maybe more like 70%?
Is there any tech-oriented forum that isn't largely cynical and negative? Is there any social media that isn't largely cynical and negative? I also notice how my mindset changes when I don't visit, which really just makes me think I should stop engaging in 90% of online discourse and discussion.
> Is there any tech-oriented forum that isn't largely cynical and negative
Maybe no? I only know of two (not including subreddits): HN and Slashdot. And of the two, Slashdot is far, far, more negative, with the weird addition of American style republican political views. Which, as a European reader, makes it feel like a very right wing place.
Are there any other forums I'm not aware of?
Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#658Lots 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
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.
Not so wild IMO. I frequently have trouble loading pages on Reddit so I suspect any additional pressure could push it over the edge. It might be as simple as more users checking in to see if their favorite Reddit has gone private or shut down.
Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#659Earlier quoted context omitted.
My brother writes xkcd. In 2006 I was living at home while attending community college. At the time, his site was still hosted on the old HP desktop that used to sit in our family room and now sat in his old bedroom. One day I was playing in an unofficial Counter-Strike tournament when one of his comics (possibly "Pi Equals"[1]) got posted to either Slashdot or Boing Boing. My ping immediately went from probably ~25…
Please thank your brother! Some of his work has genuinely turned shit days into a positive ones over the years.
Aw I’m glad to hear that
Re: Reddit.com appears to be having an outage
#660Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Except it won't work. Freedom of speech limited to well composed political speech is not what it sounds. Modern day China(PRC) guarantees in the constitution that kind of freedom of speech, just they label any speeches that isn't conformant to current Party statements to be terrorism conspiracy. Even Nazi Germany had that constitutional clauses. It just starts from porn and ends in gas chambers. And in the middle is…
I dare you to make less sense.
But if you try, please start with something more related to what I actually said, thanks.