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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

#171

Post by jfuhrman »

leereeves wrote: post #137
lnanek2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think banning the fatpeoplehate subreddit wouldn't have gone over so badly if it wasn't for the fact that Ellen Pao was already kind of hated on the site for constantly banning and deleting anything disagreeing with her viewpoint about her law suit. Even political cartoons with her driving the tank and the reddit alien with a down vote in front were getting deleted, which were quite funny and appropriate, since she…

They even censored https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/39ddnb/if_you_dont_... "If you don't believe in freedom of speech for those you loathe, you don't believe in freedom of speech." (1600 points and gone from http://reddit.com/r/bestof )

It wasn't even removed by Reddit. It was removed by subreddit mods who essentially have full control of a sub. Anyone can create a sub and enforce their own curation or arbitrary rules which is not the same as censorship. From the sub sidebar:

>This is a curated space. >The moderators reserve the right to remove posts, users, and comments at their own discretion.

If I create a subreddit where I ban all posts start with A, is that censorship, or is that freedom for me to run and build my online space as I wish?

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

#172

Post by leereeves »

felixgallo wrote: post #166
leereeves wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wrong, it's not ironic at all. Censoring a post criticizing censorship is perfectly consistent. Though not entirely consistent with their statement that "we do protect the right of people to express their views".

You will doubtless learn, in your travels, that not every corporation will die on the hill staying true to the maximal interpretation of a throwaway sentence posted on their free service.

That statement was posted 10 hours ago in their official announcement of these bans.

Would remaining true to their statement for one day really have killed them on the hill?

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

#173

Post by colept »

wetmore wrote: post #134
colept wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reddit admins failed to consider the Streisand effect: they made all of reddit an outlet by taking away the container that kept the hate isolated.

It wasn't isolated. It showed up on the front page of /r/all frequently. This will die down/blow over in a week or so anyway.

And now the hate is unconfined. The lesser nuclear solution to that problem would be to filter out undesirable content from /r/all to isolate it.

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

#174

Post by cousin_it »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #130
baby wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

When you claim that an extreme emphasis on free speech originates from people who secretly wish to silence others, you might be inadvertently revealing something about yourself :-)

My idea of free speech is that large privately-owned communication networks shouldn't engage in censorship, just like the government. If you disagree with that, say goodbye to free speech on the internet, because most of it is privately owned. Large websites are already cooperating with each other in censorship, and it's only a matter of time before ISPs join as well.

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

#175

Post by kayamon »

im3w1l wrote: post #128

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…

That's not an especially useful comparsion.

If Google didn't let people search for what they wanted, they'd just go use a different search engine.

If reddit doesn't do what people want, there are other websites for them.

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

#176

Post by tomphoolery »

txru wrote: post #120
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…

Here's /r/all as of about a half hour ago. Not cool. http://imgur.com/a/5KMCS#0

This is what I'm doing about it: http://i.imgur.com/E5tIRGg.png

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

#177

Post by tdmule »

im3w1l wrote: post #128

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…

If we accept the premise of Reddit not as a forum, but as a host, perhaps a more apt analogy would be other hosts.

For example, both AWS (http://aws.amazon.com/aup/) and Google (https://cloud.google.com/terms/aup) have very broad acceptable usage policies that allow for doing anything deemed legal by US law.

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

#178

Post by philwelch »

baby wrote: post #123
smegel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "stupid, more vocal minority" has done for the word "feminist" what stupid, vocal minorities have done for other well-intentioned ideas like "Christian".

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

#179

Post by obstinate »

infinitone wrote: post #163
zxcvcxz wrote: post #8

I don't know how to feel about this. On one hand I'm against censorship, on the other I'm against internet bullying. /r/FatPeopleHate was engaging in both. In the end reddit is a private site that can do what it wants. Wikipedia removes things all the time and sites like 4chan remove all sorts of extremely offensive material. I'm glad the mods of the hate oriented subreddits have been shadow banned, I actually think…

Just like the great Digg v3 Migration to Reddit happened years ago... its happening again from Reddit to Voat.

I think you mean "I hope it will happen", because there is no evidence that it is actually happening.

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

#180

Post by MBCook »

infinitone wrote: post #163
zxcvcxz wrote: post #8

I don't know how to feel about this. On one hand I'm against censorship, on the other I'm against internet bullying. /r/FatPeopleHate was engaging in both. In the end reddit is a private site that can do what it wants. Wikipedia removes things all the time and sites like 4chan remove all sorts of extremely offensive material. I'm glad the mods of the hate oriented subreddits have been shadow banned, I actually think…

Just like the great Digg v3 Migration to Reddit happened years ago... its happening again from Reddit to Voat.

If the people leaving are the obnoxious hate monger, bandwagoners, and other general trolls that's fine with me.

If Reddit wants to get some of the amazingly creepy stuff under control, I'm all for it.

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