Reddit takes a new direction • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#231

Post by xxpor » Tue, Feb 14, 2012, 5:10 AM UTC

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #202

Jun8 wrote: post #118

I can't believe the narrow-minded approach a lot of comments here suggest. Most of the people seem to subscribe to the argument, which in simplified form says, (1) the subreddits were full of child pornography (2) the people who frequent these were "pedos" and therefore (3) it's a good thing that these got axed. The terms CP and pedophilia are being thrown around without much thinking, the same way the general public…

>What is legal and morally right usually does not overlap 100%. This is the key issue that almost NO ONE here understands and it's evidenced by high profile HN members calling people they disagree with "disgusting" because they don't understand that morality is relative and that slippery slopes are only absurd until they come true. I, along with most everyone here it seems, have no desire for peoples' children to be…

>morality is relative

I agree with you, but you are going to have a really hard time making that argument with a lot of people. In fact, I believe John Paul II called moral relativism the greatest evil of our time or something like that.

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#232

Post by drivebyacct2 » Tue, Feb 14, 2012, 5:24 AM UTC

xxpor wrote: post #231

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What is legal and morally right usually does not overlap 100%. This is the key issue that almost NO ONE here understands and it's evidenced by high profile HN members calling people they disagree with "disgusting" because they don't understand that morality is relative and that slippery slopes are only absurd until they come true. I, along with most everyone here it seems, have no desire for peoples' children to be…

>morality is relative I agree with you, but you are going to have a really hard time making that argument with a lot of people. In fact, I believe John Paul II called moral relativism the greatest evil of our time or something like that.

In my opinion this thread is already littered with examples that morality is relative. Sure, if you have an invented set of ideological morality that is blessed with divinity, it's easy to believe in absolute morality. The wide variety of subreddits and topics covered in those subreddits contain a whole plethora of things that I think are unethical but are legal and vice versa.

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#233

Post by pjscott » Tue, Feb 14, 2012, 5:24 AM UTC

Anderkent wrote: post #105

ugh wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s grade A victim blaming.

How so? If a girl posts a picture of her in her underwear on the internet and she gets ridiculed for it, how is that victim blaming? She did something stupid, she got teased about it, case closed.

In general, I would prefer for people to be more accepting of harmless eccentricity.

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#234

Post by pjscott » Tue, Feb 14, 2012, 5:27 AM UTC

Mordor wrote: post #19

It's simple, shutdown anything criminal and keep the rest open.

To be clear: that's what they were doing already. This whole hullabaloo was caused by their announcement that they were going beyond that.

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#235

Post by drivebyacct2 » Tue, Feb 14, 2012, 5:29 AM UTC

sixothree wrote: post #88

kijin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exchanging child pornography is illegal in the United States (as well as in many other countries). There's nothing unreasonable about stating in your TOS that you can't have a subreddit the very existence of which breaks the law. Sure, people can try to reopen these subreddits under different names, but once the rule is in the TOS, they can be reported on and shut down as a matter of routine. The same applies to ware…

One of the reasons for removing /r/jailbait originally was that users were trading illegal files behind the scenes. I've heard of the same thing in /r/trees; Eg. seed exchanges and more.

What? Where on earth do people hear these ludicrous things? Besides, what you've described is not illegal.

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#236

Post by pjscott » Tue, Feb 14, 2012, 5:39 AM UTC

harshreality wrote: post #135

_delirium wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't grandfathered in; it's unconstitutional, in the U.S., to ban Lolita . It would be pretty unfortunate if literature couldn't even seriously deal with the subject! (Incidentally, it's pretty hard to read Lolita as being pro -pedophilia; if anything, it's an extended, mostly negative investigation into the protagonist's psyche, although many pages in literary journals have been spent arguing over how to interp…

Lolita the book is protected because it fails the third prong of the Miller test. Nabokov's Lolita is considered to have " serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific" value. However, that test sets the bar at a completely arbitrary level: What about Adrian Lyne's 1997 movie, Lolita? It has artistic merit, but arguably not as much as the novel. What about girls' dancing and gymnastics? Should photography of…

In the case of Christopher Handley, the prosecution ignored the vast majority of his collection, and pursued the handful of manga that actually were straight-up child porn.

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#237

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Feb 14, 2012, 5:52 AM UTC

DannoHung wrote: post #199

jquery wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> basically child pornography Nothing that got banned was "basically child pornography." That's why there is blood in the water.

It was a collection of subreddits for the purpose of eroticism focused on children. It wasn't child porn, but it's as close as you can come without actually getting arrested. You're full of shit if you're trying to tell me otherwise.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#238

Post by sophacles » Tue, Feb 14, 2012, 6:28 AM UTC

Steko wrote: post #226

sophacles wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to the real world. Oh you let kids in your site? Kids have parents. Parents demand standards for places their kids go. Want to startup a reddit clone with no standards? Have at it! Let us know how it works out for you. You know, perhaps it's ok for us to suggest the parents do the parenting, and let us grown ups hang out at the reddit? Oh wait, right its actually just a strawman argument so you can be the mor…

"so you can be the morality police for the world. Sorry for the confusion." If your post were a New Yorker cartoon I'd have the perfect caption for it. I'm not the morality police, I'm pointing out that morality exists and reddit, as a community was not above that. I'm dreadfully sorry if you're only now finding out that community morality exists and that there are commercial consequences for for-profit private busin…

We can debate whether the rule is good (not all rules are as clear cut as the one we have for murder). I don't think you will win on those merits though re: this reddit policy.

I never have said "this reddit rule is bad". Read extra careful, and you will find no evidence whatsoever of that, only evidence of me discussing human behavior in light of rule changes, and how it is a particularly sensitive topic in the "anything goes spaces". Further I am pointing benefits of those spaces, without actually taking a stance on them. This is how I know you are the morality police, you are choosing to invent words to put in my statements without actually bothering to read them. Those are not the actions of a reasonable person, but rather a lynch mob.

Bullshit. Let me clear up this analogy. I'm saying we have a rule against murder and it's a good rule. You're saying it's a dangerous rule that will lead us down the road to serfdom.

Again not sure where you get this idea... I am simply discussing how people react when rules start encroaching on free-form places, and discussing the consequences of them. This is not declaring serfdom or anything else nearly as dramatic. It is merely me not instantly jumping on a bandwagon. Sorry to be that guy you hate: the one who looks at the world around him and asks questions before deciding.

There's a rule at most community pools that you don't crap or piss in the pool. Somehow this hasn't led to widescale pool tyranny, it's pretty much just a rule not to piss in the pool. Just because there's a slope doesn't mean anyone is going to slip down it.

And yet, you see stories occasionally about how some toddler is banned from the kiddie pool for an accident. This is not tyranny of pools, but it certainly is someone overstepping bounds. Perhaps the public outcry over such things has something to do with it?

Anyway, you are now just tiresome to me. Good night, be well.

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#239

Post by redslazer » Tue, Feb 14, 2012, 7:20 AM UTC

trb wrote: post #136

Policing a community is where humans excel and policies/computers fail. I ran a community once, with around 30k active users. Definitely not big, but we faced the same problems. Our solution was simple, aside from adhering to the law: "Mods delete what looks icky". We felt that automated systems would always fail (users would use "4" instead of "a"), and strict policies always led to debate about whether something wa…

The problem is that reddit mods are self selected from within their communities by the other mods in that community. The quality of the moderators varies wildly and most subreddits are not run very professionally (obvious exceptions like /askscience exist).

Sure reddit has overall mods but they do not usually get involved and communities manage themselves which usually leads to a lack of coherent policy in regards to what is acceptable and not.

Re: Reddit takes a new direction

#240

Post by ubernostrum » Tue, Feb 14, 2012, 8:27 AM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #63

People tend to think of online communities as democracies where the freedoms they're accustomed to from their normal lives apply. So when a post gets deleted by a moderator, people tend to think of it as a freedom of speech issue. There's a whole constitution out there specifically defending anybody's right to create a pro-Nazi subreddit, and to otherwise post anything they please on the site so long as it's not ille…

In writing this article I tried to stay away from drawing comparisons between sites, because that would've distracted discussion away from the actual topic.

Also, to be perfectly honest, there's a lot I could say about HN that would not be particularly flattering, not least of which is its superiority complex when comparing itself to other sites.