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Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

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Re: Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

#121

Post by yebyen »

derefr wrote: post #99
tmerr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention there's a game of whack-a-mole going on where similar subreddits have been banned including fatpeoplehate2, 3, 4, 5, 8, and 9.

If they really want to go down this road, it feels like there's only one destination: real Know-Your-Customer-esque identity verification to prevent registration of duplicate accounts, like banks and X.509 CAs do. If-and-when they do that, they will finally have an actually-effective tool (in the form of being able to ban people "for good") to stop harassment. Until then, it will just go on forever.

Urbit comes with this kind of identity management baked-in. It hasn't been shown yet to scale to the proportions of reddit. I'm not sure that even reddit has enough staff now to do that.

Re: Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

#122

Post by a89anqm2ovn »

teraflop wrote: post #30

This article dramatically understates the magnitude of the shitstorm that is currently unfolding. Check out http://www.reddit.com/r/all/ if you feel like seeing all the ugliness. (And if anyone has any doubts that this is ultimately about harassment, count how many of the posts on the front page (and their comments) are made up of personal attacks and/or obscenities targeted at CEO Ellen Pao.) I don't fault the Reddi…

Wow. Even though I'm somebody who thinks reddit has crossed the line into thought-policing the frontpage of /r/all is surprisingly ugly.

An nice juxtoposition is the top post of the default homepage is social justice outrage about a police officer shooting somebody.

Re: Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

#123

Post by baby »

smegel wrote: post #16
elinchrome wrote: post #10

Reddit has become a real cesspool over the past few years. You'll always find misogyny front and center and you don't have to dig to find racism.

Feminism too.

It baffles me that people still have trouble differentiating Feminism as wanting women to be equal to men in the world AND the usual stupid more vocal minority.

I think a lot of people here on HN are feminist in the sense that we think women should be treated equally to men in a modern society.

Re: Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

#125

Post by wisty »

Goronmon wrote: post #107
rcfox wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's moderation. "Censorship" implies suppressing free speech, which this is not. It's simply removing undesirable content from a privately-owned website.

Isn't it both? I don't see how moderation (in the form of removing/editing content) isn't censorship.

Get ready for someone to tell you that the legal definition of "censorship" is only if the government does it.

Re: Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

#126

Post by endgame »

rcfox wrote: post #70
adamnemecek wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On one hand I'm against censorship, I feel like censorship isn't the right word for this but I can't think of a better one.

It's moderation. "Censorship" implies suppressing free speech, which this is not. It's simply removing undesirable content from a privately-owned website.

People have been saying this since the forum age (at least), but privately-owned websites have become the new public spaces.

Re: Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

#127

Post by [deleted] »

Goronmon wrote: post #107
rcfox wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's moderation. "Censorship" implies suppressing free speech, which this is not. It's simply removing undesirable content from a privately-owned website.

Isn't it both? I don't see how moderation (in the form of removing/editing content) isn't censorship.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

#128

Post by im3w1l »

When something that was previously (more or less) politically neutral takes a stance people get upset. Especially when there is vendor lock-in.

Some thought experiments:

Imagine if Comcast blocked access to all liberal sites.

Imagine if Microsoft word was changed so only pro-liberal documents could be created. For extra fun imagine if people could be "shadowbanned" so all their files were silently deleted.

Imagine if Google could only be used to find websites that supported global warming.

Imagine if Facebook messages could only send "patriotic" messages (as determined by their moderators).

Imagine if Intel processors could only run non-violent games.

These may seem weird comparisons because when we think of forums, we think of moderators having the power. But reddit isn't a forum. Reddit is basically a site that hosts forums. And now it wont host some of them anymore. Not only will it stop hosting some of them. It stopped hosting them unexpectedly, with a self-righteous "fuck-you".

Re: Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

#129

Post by voltagex_ »

teraflop wrote: post #30

This article dramatically understates the magnitude of the shitstorm that is currently unfolding. Check out http://www.reddit.com/r/all/ if you feel like seeing all the ugliness. (And if anyone has any doubts that this is ultimately about harassment, count how many of the posts on the front page (and their comments) are made up of personal attacks and/or obscenities targeted at CEO Ellen Pao.) I don't fault the Reddi…

I think that's the end of my Reddit use then, the toxicity in a few fringe subreddits has spread into full blown septicemia.

That's really sad - I don't think there's many communities like /r/assistance and even /r/buildapc around.

Re: Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

#130

Post by PhasmaFelis »

baby wrote: post #98
teraflop wrote: post #30

This article dramatically understates the magnitude of the shitstorm that is currently unfolding. Check out http://www.reddit.com/r/all/ if you feel like seeing all the ugliness. (And if anyone has any doubts that this is ultimately about harassment, count how many of the posts on the front page (and their comments) are made up of personal attacks and/or obscenities targeted at CEO Ellen Pao.) I don't fault the Reddi…

I never understood why reddit was so lenient with its community. There are so many racists and hateful subreddits, that attract more and more people like that, that makes the community as a whole worse. I'm really glad that moderation actions like that are taken, and I'm sad that people reply to that by "harassing" the CEO... Hopefully such people will get frustrated by such events and will eventually leave reddit. N…

> I never understood why reddit was so lenient with its community. There are so many racists and hateful subreddits, that attract more and more people like that, that makes the community as a whole worse.

There's a large segment of the online community in general that understands the ideal of free speech to mean that no one may ever be prevented from saying anything, in any location or context. These folks believe that the banning of /r/shitniggerssay deserves exactly as much righteous indignation as, say, secret police disappearing anyone who speaks against the government. Reddit was founded on this ideal, and has only recently started to move away from it.

This understanding of "free speech" was obviously originated by petulant children on BBSes and Usenet groups casting about for a justification to (ironically) silence anyone who disagreed with them. I'm not really clear how it became something that otherwise-rational adults espouse in defense of people other than themselves.

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