Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’ • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#231

Post by LeifCarrotson » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

esja wrote: post #140

Rebelgecko wrote: post #52

Reddit has addressed the situation here, in a mealy mouthed sort of way: https://www.reddit.com/r/modsupport/comments/mbqgx2 However they seem to be denying the accusations that admins (possibly including the individual in question) were manually editing contents containing her name. This whole situation is incredibly bizarre to me. In the first place, why would reddit hire a 23 year old admin whose greatest accompli…

I agree, but a minor nitpick: Aimee was forced out not just for being connected to pedophiles, but also for lying about and/or endorsing them (among other issues). A massive failure of safeguarding from the Greens and Lib Dems, and now from Reddit. It's astonishing to me that a person like this can become an admin on a website used by millions of teenagers. We already know that admins can access private messages and…

Normal rules of balance can be twisted or broken in this case, depending on your desired outcome.

On the one hand, you've got the (reasonable) rule "always condemn and distance yourself from pedophilia". On the other hand, you've got the also reasonable rule "never discriminate against someone because of their gender". If the Greens, Lib Dems, Reddit, or anyone else involved had chosen not to hire her, she could stir up outrage against them for gender discrimination. If they did hire her, the public could stir up outrage against them for their connection to pedophiles.

It's easy to agree that both pedophilia and gender discrimination are bad. It's harder to take action, especially when people have prior agendas.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#232

Post by koolba » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

pen2l wrote: post #152

trident5000 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO himself admitted to going into The_Donald subreddit (before it was banned) and editing user comments. I don't think this guy is leading the charge to admin transparency. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/reddit-ceo-edits-user-comment...

This gets brought up a lot. And it's a bit of a doozy to make sense of. First, consider the context: the CEO (spez) was an easy punching bag on the_donald subreddit, in fact it was a bit of a meme there to attack reddit's admins (and those in the know do know that the attacks were often crossing a line, like accusing them of being pedophiles and things of the nature). The change that spez made was a bit of a joke its…

> I think what I'm trying to say is, whatever may be your feelings of Reddit and its stature, this particular act by spez was pretty insignifiant in the grand scheme of things.

In court there’s a concept called “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus”[1]. If you’re shown to have lied to the court once, then anything else you’ve said can be considered to be a lie as well. You lose the assumption of good faith of the judge and jury.

It might not be a courtroom, but the same concept applies to a so called “bastion of free speech” platform like Reddit.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsus_in_uno,_falsus_in_omnib...

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#233

Post by Blikkentrekker » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #120

Rebelgecko wrote: post #52

Reddit has addressed the situation here, in a mealy mouthed sort of way: https://www.reddit.com/r/modsupport/comments/mbqgx2 However they seem to be denying the accusations that admins (possibly including the individual in question) were manually editing contents containing her name. This whole situation is incredibly bizarre to me. In the first place, why would reddit hire a 23 year old admin whose greatest accompli…

Reddit administration seems pretty ad hoc, undisciplined, at times weirdly disconnected from the community, and uncoordinated as it could possibly be. Then again so are all its subreddits, and the volunteer mods are about as opaque and strange as the admins, with the added excuse that they're doing it for free. The fact that the ecosystem has survived seems more like happenstance.

This doesn't seem to be particularly different from H.N., most other websites, or even the political leaders of many nations.

More often than not, the man who seeks power is ill-suited to have it.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#234

Post by dannyw » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

StevePerkins wrote: post #192

testfoobar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss humor and authenticity from old reddit the most. E.g. the classic: "I also choose this guy's dead wife." or the AMA with the vacuum repair guy. These days just about any popular thread that I wander into, I see wide swaths of "deleted" comments. I'm sure they were deleted for many good and valid reasons. IMHO, reddit's aggressive moderation suppresses spontaneous comments and is off putting to lurkers. The wit…

I would LOVE to find a Reddit alternative, that is more in the vein of that early days spirit. Unfortunately, it seems like the only options out there are either: 1) Reddit clones, that attract people who are angry about the worst subreddits getting banned at one point or another. Pretty much nothing but non-witty hate speech, and meta discussion about how much Reddit sucks. 2) Random phpBB bulletin boards, that are…

I was on StumbleUpon and then Digg and then reddit. Looking for a new home just like you.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#235

Post by luc4sdreyer » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

wccrawford wrote: post #51

BitwiseFool wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the decision makers at Reddit are fully aware of the Streisand Effect but they don't care because they know the userbase has a short memory and things will go back to normal within a week or two.

I think it's even worse than that. They'll remember, but still keep coming back. You can't even blame short memory for it. They literally don't care more than the inconvenience they'd face in going elsewhere for forums. And as long as that's true, the things they dislike will keep happening.

Users will switch if there is a viable alternative.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#236

Post by jbroson » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

Rebelgecko wrote: post #52

Reddit has addressed the situation here, in a mealy mouthed sort of way: https://www.reddit.com/r/modsupport/comments/mbqgx2 However they seem to be denying the accusations that admins (possibly including the individual in question) were manually editing contents containing her name. This whole situation is incredibly bizarre to me. In the first place, why would reddit hire a 23 year old admin whose greatest accompli…

I think the idea that we should cancel people because of what their parents or partners did is incredibly wrongheaded.

Is there even a shred of evidence this person did anything illegal, immoral or unethical themselves?

they hired their dad, BEFORE he was even convicted of crimes she had nothing at all to do with. That's the worst thing this person ever did?

Usually I'm not a "cancel culture" critic but this is just insane.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#237

Post by dannyw » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

nonbirithm wrote: post #171

andrewzah wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was digg as big as reddit is now? The issue for me is I don't know of other good places for long-form discussion and good link aggregation in general. Most of the time in smaller subreddits there aren't really any issues. What alternative is there to /r/AskHistorians? Etc.

This is the saddest thing, in my opinion. Everything is a content silo. To get "genuine" opinions on anything relevant to the past six years I have to append "site:reddit.com" to all my searches. It seems that setting up independent phpbb communities has fallen out of favor with the convenience of starting off with a much larger audience. But the downsides of letting a single org host and moderate all of these commun…

The web not having frictioness and anonymity-preseving single sign on is one of the biggest missed opportunities.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#238

Post by commandlinefan » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #85

dvhh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people would argue that "censorship" would not apply to a private company owned platform. That only governments and their agents are qualified to perform act of censorship.

Many tech enthusiasts are stuck living in 1999 when the internet was this mythical paradise of unrestricted freedom. The problem is, it's 2021, and the raging dumpster fire of social media platforms has created a world where extremist insanity has become mainstream public discourse. People who believe that reptiles posing as human beings run the earth are have a platform and some sort of earnest following! People lik…

> People who believe that reptiles posing as human beings run the earth are have a platform and some sort of earnest following

Those people have always existed. When I was a kid in the 80's, supermarkets carried tabloid newspapers with headlines like "Boy born with head of a bat" or "leading telekinetics agree that world will end in six days". The difference now is that while most of us just shook our heads and dismissed those tabloid newspapers, nobody was pressuring the supermarkets themselves to ban their sale.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#239

Post by camjohnson26 » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

caslon wrote: post #166

Number157 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was a single time That we know of that he admitted.

He's been remarkably open every time he's changed user content (once with a post in 200...7? I think, and the single time he edited comments). I don't like reddit, and I don't like spez for other reasons (downgraded from Lisp to Python), but what he did was literally just a harmless joke. All reddit posts and comments are publicly archived by services like pushshift; we'd know if they had a habit of doing this.

You’re saying he was open about it in all the cases that are public. Kind of like the NSA has been open about all its tools that we know about.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#240

Post by dgudkov » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 5:58 PM UTC

throwaway5752 wrote: post #185

afavour wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Soviet” feels like a dramatic overstatement.

Immature and melodramatic. It is not accurate at all and diminishes the deaths and repression of millions of people because someone disagrees with some websites moderation policies. It is a really regrettable and out of touch way to describe it.

You probably never lived in a Soviet country. Deaths and repression of millions of people weren't the everyday reality. Censorship and self-censorship were.