Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by oska » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 7:33 AM UTC

IvyMike wrote: post #241

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. I liked that reddit bent over backwards to allow a wide variety of opinions, even ones that were ignorant or hateful. I viewed it as a noble stance. But once upon a time, the "ugly" subreddits were ignorable and mostly self-contained. (At least to me, usually) > that attract more and more people like that, that makes the community as a whole worse. Yu…

Two subreddits I like to browse from time to time are /r/darkenlightenment and /r/natalism, just to see people putting forth views that are very far from mine. I think that's the good side of a free speech stance.

But individuals being singled out to slander and poke fun at is not acceptable in my opinion, regardless of whether you define it as free speech or not. There's a world of difference between simply saying "I hate fat people" and putting up a specific image or video of a fat person and then gathering around to verbally abuse them. Quite happy to see that sort of behaviour banned.

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

#282

Post by Johnwbh » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 7:42 AM UTC

powrtoch wrote: post #104

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…

The front page is pretty worrying. The situation seems almost identical to when Reddit axed r/jailbait: one of their more embarrassing communities started to get too much attention, its users were increasingly behaving in a way that was damaging Reddit, and Reddit decided to kill it (ostensibly for the greater good of the site). But even though that pissed plenty of people off... I don't recall the front page being t…

> "But even though that pissed plenty of people off... I don't recall the front page being totally dominated by calls for anyone's head on a silver platter. Reddit's userbase seems to feel especially threatened by Ellen Pao, and it's hard for me to believe that the difference is anything rational."

I mean its almost like her being an asian woman rather than a white male makes a difference

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

#283

Post by chjohasbrouck » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 7:43 AM UTC

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, that /r/all. I really thought Reddit was better than that.

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

#284

Post by lmm » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 7:49 AM UTC

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.

This is absolutely censorship. Censorship doesn't have to be done by governments (this seems to be a weird American blind spot).

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

#285

Post by digitalzombie » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 7:55 AM UTC

Ugh... the majority of the ban was pretty reasonable. The fatpeoplehate was the one that got many redditors' panty in a bunch.

Now I'm stuck with all these fatpeoplehate post on the front page.

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

#286

Post by arfliw » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 7:57 AM UTC

jfuhrman wrote: post #155

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…

Please stop spreading this nonsense. I expected better from HN. >constantly banning and deleting anything disagreeing with her viewpoint about her law suit. There are multiple posts on multiple reddits, each with thousands of points and comments that were not deleted. Some posts were deleted by sub moderators(not the same as Reddit staff or Pao) on some subs because they were offtopic and were being vote brigaded and…

Finally somebody else except me saying this. I've probably gotten -1000 comment karma saying that over the last couple months.

It's complete fiction that she is censoring anything. Every time it is sub moderators removing stuff that violates the rules of their sub. And there are massively upvoted threads bashing her everywhere with huge comment threads full of vicious attacks on her and nobody is deleting those.

If she is trying to censor criticism of herself on reddit, she is fucking awful at it.

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

#287

Post by arfliw » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 8:03 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #212

jfuhrman wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit admin staff don't touch any posts in subreddits unless it is something against the site rules like doxxing,personal info or child porn. Some subs leave a flair or a moderator message on removed submission, if not you can modmail them and ask.

Used to; that's what's changing.

No, that part is not changing. What is changing is more rules getting added. They still don't remove anything that doesn't violate the rules.

The only new rule is no harassment.

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

#288

Post by arfliw » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 8:05 AM UTC

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #271

jfuhrman wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit admin staff don't touch any posts in subreddits unless it is something against the site rules like doxxing,personal info or child porn. Some subs leave a flair or a moderator message on removed submission, if not you can modmail them and ask.

I thought they'd added the harassment stuff as a site rule though, presumably that's how they justify pulling subreddits? So admins could now be pulling posts on that basis?

Yes, theoretically they could. And banning users.

If they were abusing that, we'd know about it. There would be a shitstorm just like this. There has not been.

I reported a user harassing me all over reddit, stalking me everywhere I went for weeks. They did not even ban him. Anecdotal but the bar seems to be pretty high.

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

#289

Post by arfliw » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 8:06 AM UTC

brimanning wrote: post #252

jfuhrman wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User keeps seeing their comments, but other users cannot see their posts or their user page. Only Admins can shadowban. Mods can use a tool called automoderator to remove posts by certain users but only in their subreddit.

To add to this, you can also be automatically shadowbanned by spam filters which, at times, can be quite aggressive. I was once shadowbanned for "getting caught up with a spammy IP address" according to a mod.

That happened to some guy and he kept using reddit as normal for three years until he found out. Took it pretty well. His history is painful to look at. Just talking to himself, nobody ever responds or upvotes him.

Was in /r/TIFU recently, too lazy to get the link.

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

#290

Post by arfliw » Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 8:10 AM UTC

finnn wrote: post #251

jfuhrman wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User keeps seeing their comments, but other users cannot see their posts or their user page. Only Admins can shadowban. Mods can use a tool called automoderator to remove posts by certain users but only in their subreddit.

Minor correction: Posts of shadow banned users are visible, but only after a mod of that subreddit manually approves each one. Basically everything they post is flagged as spam.

That explains a lot. I have a few users whose submissions to my sub are always flagged as spam even though they are fine. They must be shadowbanned.

Interestingly, one of them submits awful content. It's not spam but he is absolutely terrible. I wonder if they shadowban because the algo's figured out you suck.