Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#81

Post by bradlys » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

pyronik19 wrote: post #75

kylebenzle wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users won't allow for (use) decentralized platforms until there is a good way to censor them. Once that happens, what would be the point of switching. Facebook and Reddit are successful BECAUSE they are censorship machines. Facebook spends far more man hours on "curating" content compared to engineering. Same with Reddit. Add up all the "moderation" time spent removing negative or controversial posts and I bet much m…

Reddit particularly used to be a free speech platform where anything could go and then used network effects to gain dominance. Now that they have dominance they now implement censorship of right wing views comments. This is true for Facebooks deboosting capabilities.

> Now that they have dominance they now implement censorship of right wing views comments.

They did the same with chapo - so, it's really not just right wing views...

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#82

Post by vanderZwan » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

MINIMAN10000 wrote: post #12

catsarebetter wrote: post #3

Never checked it out. Don't regret it

I did and I was left satisfied. I wanted to see their viewpoint on at the time "the hot topic" and confirm my suspicions that I truly don't consider their viewpoint rational or valid. It's like they start from a conclusion and work backwards to excuse it.

Honest question: how do you manage to work your way through that stuff without feeling incredibly shitty afterwards? Because whenever I have tried to make sense of them it was genuinely unpleasant for me to "reason along" with people that unreasonable (I'd almost call it painful, but perhaps that's a bit too strong).

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#83

Post by MintelIE » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

They figured out this would happen a while ago and already made a bolt-hole, thedonald.win.

You'd think a big tech operation would prefer to keep overlordship of a community they hate and despise. They can fuck with the users, edit articles, and generally cause a big hassle. Now with all the users moving, they lose that power and the ability to closely monitor and profile for their partnered organizations, like the Atlantic Group, the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation, and the rest.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#84

Post by untog » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

IMO this headline is too selective. They banned a whole group of subs, including /r/trapochaphouse, which is a left-wing subreddit. Only highlighting this one is needlessly simplistic and will mislead anyone reading it.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#85

Post by sschueller » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

electrotype wrote: post #58

I remember how was Reddit 10 years ago... It was a very open and permissive place. Only very bad things were prohibited at that time (pedophilia, rape, murder, etc.). It is now ran by people/corporations with a political agenda.

Yep, r/videos is so locked down you don't get anything relevant other than some old cat video repost.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#86

Post by duxup » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

ve55 wrote: post #7

Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use. There is constantly tremendous pressure on you to perform opposing actions, and even making no decision at all will cause you significant mental stress and harassment, regardles of what the issue is. You have to pick who you want to cave to, and to what extent, and no matt…

Would something decentralized help?

I don't think people want that. The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc.

Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content?

I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. The sheer volume of users at its height seemed to involve a huge amount of brand new accounts you never saw again / never posted again (except when they show up as a group again), and etc. Or those without brand new accounts show up and post strange dishonest lead in type posts that sort of try to lead folks down a bigoted path ... that you can blatantly see in their post history.

So you'd be in your other community and one day they all show up and down votes and the vitriol begins... it was no mystery that this happened, it was spoken of openly in The_Donald for a time.

Who wants to deal with that?

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#87

Post by john-shaffer » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

nullc wrote: post #20

I'm confused by the article. My understanding was that reddit replaced the moderators of /r/The_Donald months ago after initially making in quarantined. The Wikipedia article seems to agree with my understanding: > In February 26, 2020, Reddit administrators removed a number of r/The_Donald moderators "that were approving, stickying, and generally supporting content in this subreddit that breaks [Reddit's] content po…

> What's wrong with just saying that it's their platform and they have the right to set the rules?

1) They don't want to alienate people who care about free speech. 2) A lot of people liked reddit because it was user-driven, and don't like it when the content they see is selected by admins and mods. They want to keep the illusion of being user-driven as long as they can.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#88

Post by afiori » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

T-hawk wrote: post #61

nordsieck wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both sides have free speech rights and both have outcomes that support that speech... Free speech has 2 distinct meanings: 1. The legal right to be free from government interference to most speech. 2. The cultural norm to tolerate speech you disagree with in order to foster political inclusion. You're correct under meaning 1; you're not correct under meaning 2.

This is correct, those two ideas are often mistaken for each other. Reddit is not a governmental entity, and as a private platform, has every right to decide what speech it will or will not publish. But we can wish that Reddit as a speech platform would embrace the principles of the First Amendment rather than suppressing all the speech it doesn't like.

> Reddit [..] has every right to decide what speech it will or will not publish.

For legal reason that publish should be host.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#89

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

parliament32 wrote: post #9

Whether you agree with the move or not, it's funny how Reddit's stance has changed over time. Under the old ownership, 2012: "At reddit we care deeply about not imposing ours or anyone elses’ opinions on how people use the reddit platform. We are adamant about not limiting the ability to use the reddit platform even when we do not ourselves agree with or condone a specific use. We have very few rules here on reddit;…

That was effectively a challenge: how bad can you be without explicitly violating the rules?

(I call this "I'm not touching you Fascism", after the popular children's pastime. The goal is to enrage people without ever crossing anything that might be considered a clear line. Most systems evolve a meta-rule somewhere that "pushing the boundaries of the rules is itself against the rules". At the very least "ban evasion" is itself bannable.)

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#90

Post by 9HZZRfNlpR » Mon, Jun 29, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

psychometry wrote: post #38

jeremiahhs wrote: post #26

The article is incorrect. "racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, glorification of violence and conspiracy theories that flourished there." That can be seen in all political subreddits - even the favored /r/politics. Those forms of hate were not condoned in T_D. But if washpo wants to rewrite history, they can try. T_D was banned because reddit hates the policies Trump was elected to enact.

There's a difference between hate speech occasionally being found in a subreddit and a subreddit existing principally as a platform for hate speech. the_donald was unambiguously the latter.

By definition there's tons of hate speech against white males on reddit but Americans have invented these insane theories x can't be racist because you need power etc. It's just made up words to justify your own prejudice and feel yourself better about it.