Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

gamerevolution.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 561 posts

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

#51

Post by wccrawford »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #31
undefined1 wrote: post #10

I find it interesting that Reddit still manages to find themselves invoking the Streisand effect in full force.

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.

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

#52

Post by Rebelgecko »

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 accomplishment is being forced out of politics due to her connections to multiple pedophiles? Why did they taking such extreme steps to hide the admin's name, when they don't offer the same protections to mods or other users of the site? Does reddit have any audit trail or safeguards when admins edit comments? It would be interesting if they did a postmortem on the situation, but so far they seem reluctant to say that anything went wrong on their end.

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

#53

Post by unethical_ban »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #18

Reddit feels very Soviet lately. Everything is heavily manipulated and it seems like users are aware of that fact but are powerless to change anything.

Not that it relates to the article (the blackout is a very transparent action) but I agree. The manipulation of content to the front page and /r/all is more and more blatant and without repercussion. And more and more subreddits are becoming "safe spaces" where challenging a narrative gets you banned - See /r/conservative, /r/LateStageCapitalism, /r/OurPresident, /r/BlackPeopleTwitter, etc.

The refrain of "just create your own subreddit" is not practical to combat the indoctrination being manipulated to the top by these orgs. IIRC commondreams.org is behind the /r/AOC and /r/MurderedByAOC subreddits entirely.

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

#54

Post by tootie »

kyrieeschaton wrote: post #3

Do we need scare quotes around "censorship" when reddit is telling them particular names are unmentionable in any context?

Probably because it's all alleged at this point and reddit has a propensity for flipping out over complete misapprehensions.

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

#55

Post by arbitrage »

maxk42 wrote: post #30
unethical_ban wrote: post #16

reddit admins responded and specifically said their automod got aggressive, remediated it, and that talking about the admin is alright as long as it isn't a dox attempt or threatening behavior. Keep this in mind as you see other people claiming falsely that anything is still being censored.

Reddit's automoderator is not a wild animal that gets "aggressive." It's a simple regex: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/automoderator/full-documentation Someone edited the rules to deliberately block any mention of the name in question site-wide.

and whoops it took a reallllllllly long time to identify and fix.

totally understandable, right?

/s

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

#56

Post by aniforprez »

unethical_ban wrote: post #16

reddit admins responded and specifically said their automod got aggressive, remediated it, and that talking about the admin is alright as long as it isn't a dox attempt or threatening behavior. Keep this in mind as you see other people claiming falsely that anything is still being censored.

The problem with the automated moderator excuse seems to be that it started with a post that was removed that was an article that merely mentioned her name in passing. It was not part of the title and the article was not about her. It was a single sentence in the article itself that triggered the admin action which no one seems to be buying as an automated action. It seems highly suspect that the fallout of an automated moderator is a human mod getting perma-banned for it just for sharing the article

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

#58

Post by andrewzah »

ryandrake wrote: post #26
BitwiseFool wrote: post #18

Reddit feels very Soviet lately. Everything is heavily manipulated and it seems like users are aware of that fact but are powerless to change anything.

They can always just stop using Reddit. Digg went this way, too, and it ended badly for them.

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.

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

#59

Post by wing-_-nuts »

Nacdor wrote: post #8

This is the Reddit "Out of the Loop" thread that sort of explains what's happening: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/mbeycw/whats_... It's still somewhat difficult to find a clear explanation because the admins were banning people who mentioned her by name (despite the fact that she is a public/political figure in the UK). That had an extremely chilling effect on the discussions, but now the Streisand E…

This all feels very witch hunt like to me. If there's any evidence that she's a danger to children, I feel like people should put up or shut up. All I've seen is people slandering her for the actions of her father (proven) and some comments that might have been made by her partner about his own interests (completely unprovable). It's kind of disgusting what conservatives are trying to turn this into without a shred of proof.

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

#60

Post by the_snooze »

diogenesjunior wrote: post #17
kyrieeschaton wrote: post #3

Do we need scare quotes around "censorship" when reddit is telling them particular names are unmentionable in any context?

The problem (from the very start) was censorship. Reddit has always had the ability to censor.

It seems like online companies go through all sorts of contortions to avoid saying what they need to say with respect to content moderation:

> We will try to moderate our platform fairly, but we reserve the absolute right to do so arbitrarily and capriciously. Users are not entitled to any explanation or recourse.

That should be the extent of any social media platform's content policy. I think we'd all be better off setting expectations properly and honestly.

Post reply on HN