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Reddit CEO: Platform doesn't plan to ban pornography
- konjin 6y agoGiven their record I give it 6 months to 2 years until they ban porn. It's a shame that they sold out so thoroughly, especially since they gave up on the project and left, then came back when it had succeeded without them. C'est la vie. I am happy that the first decentralized forum is finally taking off and working well with a simple click and install interface: https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/
- p_l 6y agoBut it will, if certain new law passes.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoI think it would probably kill Reddit like it killed Tumblr, so that's probably a good idea.
- DSingularity 6y agoYou’re kidding right? Reddit is not being used exclusively for porn. Why would communities like r/politics or r/WSB leave because pornography was banned?
- echelon 6y agoHalf of the profiles I see posting in general subs are "restricted/18+". If I look at post histories of interesting comments, I more often than not find porn, sex+ communities, and even furry fandom. The Reddit community seethes with pornography. And there's nothing wrong with this. Killing it would put a huge damper on the userbase.
- DSingularity 6y agoI’ll start checking I guess but I’m honestly surprised to read that statistic. Sincere question: how do we determine that there is nothing wrong with facilitating access to pornography? Shouldn’t we study things of this nature before we sanction them?
- ta8645 6y agoWe should default to permissibility not to restriction. If you want something restricted it should be on you to prove that it's harmful enough to deprive your fellow man of the freedom necessary to choose for themselves.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dangwu 6y agoI don’t know of anyone that uses Reddit primarily for porn. I think it’d be totally fine.
- new_guy 6y agoSample size of one but I use it for porn.
- riffraff 6y agoForgive my question, but what does Reddit offer on this that popular porn-only platforms don't? I guess very specific/niche topics?
- afavour 6y agoI have zero doubt there any plenty of people that use Reddit primarily for porn. Consider that perhaps not everyone you know talks openly about their porn habits.
- banana_giraffe 6y agoEven after this change /r/all/new is mostly NSFW stuff. One of my jobs had me maintaining a real time feed of reddit. Making a SFW version to demo was half the job.
- dangwu 6y agoAnd /r/all/top has basically zero NSFW stuff. There seems to be a ton of NSFW spam that gets seen by much smaller audiences.
- spideymans 6y agoAny chance that Reddit is filtering /r/all/top/?
- dangwu 6y agoNope - definitely saw at least one in the first page.
- whateveracct 6y agoTumblr is plenty alive
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- flukus 6y agoTumblr still has plenty of porn, they've just crippled the UI and made it even less usable if you want the 18+ content. Given the starting point of how bad the interface already was this was quite an achievement.
- malwarebytess 6y agoI wonder if this is coming up now because of changes like removing porn from /r/all. They're introducing an age-rating system and filtering porn from /r/all, which was one of the intended purposes of /r/popular. [0] reddit is trying to make their platform even more palatable to investors and advertisers. I just wish they were honest about it. > But there's another aspect that's empowering. And these are people sharing stories of themselves, pictures of themselves. And we are perfectly supportive of that." This is such a horseshit take I know he doesn't believe it. Porn is a commodity, and he's hosting one of the largest (for him, free) repositories of pornography that he leverages to try to make money. "Empowerment." please. I really dislike the way reddit's leadership is trending. They're becoming less and less honest about why they're doing things. Take a look at this post full of corporate doublespeak nonsense. They're removing the option to disable their clickjacking and ad tracking and claiming it's intended to "reduce user confusion." [1] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_sexually_explicit_content_from_rall/ https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lqtecn/update_to_user_preferences/ https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lqtecn/update_to...
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoIn a highly contextual platform like Reddit, advertisements would always be frowned by its original users because getting contextual advertisement is hard. That's what makes Facebook successful for the advertisers, Majority of it's users don't mind seeing/clicking 'Earn $10,000 in 10 days' ad after 'Baby gender reveal party photos' post by a family member. Where as the same ad has no place in r/programming(But it is), naturally the advertiser wouldn't find much conversion. I think that's why Reddit is now making all the required changes to attract users & advertisers from Facebook type platform i.e. Bloated website, App, Changes to T&C, Privacy Policy etc. I bet API restrictions would be next. But then how can a platform like Reddit in its original form make money? I guess making it a fully paid platform is the only solution, which means foregoing the scale; Which is considered a bad word in today's startup ecosystem.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
- echelon 6y agoAdvertisers should get over themselves and advertise on 18+ content. We're adult animals. We know what's what. Millennials give zero fucks. We grew up on the Internet.
- judge2020 6y agoExecs and middle management will all have to change for this to happen. Even then, chances are regular advertisers just aren't relevant when placed next to porn. Someone going to relieve themselves isn't going to be interested in buying a new toothbrush or subscribing to some APM solution - a portion of viewers would rather purchase erectile dysfunction pills or view a different full-length adult video.
- astrange 6y agoMaybe seeing the ad while they're looking at porn will give them a subconscious fetish for your toothbrush brand.
- tomjen3 6y agoThat is a good point, but I am never going to be interested in ads for a toothbrush, watching naked women or not. It is one of the many things that have been solved and don't need to be "reinvented", I just buy the cheapest one when I need one. Show me an ad for a hoverboard (one that actually hovers) and I am interested, naked women or not.
- xmprt 6y agoThe same argument can be made for pretty much all advertising. If I'm watching a YouTube video about a film review or some video game, I'm not interested in whatever they're advertising these days (the fact that I can't even come up with an ad I've seen recently is telling). Why is porn any different?
- skohan 6y agoHow long until influencer marketing fuses with amateur porn and we have creators hocking diet pills and leggings on their OnlyFans page? For all I know this has already happened
- FireflyChild 6y agoThey have to protect the thots who post their porn so the loser simps can buy reddit gold to give to the posts. That's why they're not banning it. It makes them money. Edit: You're downvoting me, even though you know I'm right.
- vecplane 6y agoHow is it that Pornhub comes under scrutiny for under-age pornography by 'unverified' accounts, but Reddit and other sites don't have real counter-measures? Remember the Reddit 'Jailbait' and 'Creepshots' scandals? Those should have been big wake up calls for them to wise up and crack down on the rest of the site, as they're obvious avenues for under-age abuse.
- judge2020 6y agoThose are 2011 and 2012 events - all of the big IRL "teen" subs (which are mostly moderated by the reddit super mods[0] which are rumored to now be paid mods) screen posters for identity and age verification. The only problem they still have is fictional characters that appear under 18 - which is not universally illegal in the U.S.[1] so reddit admins have been mostly complacent on deciding if they're OK with them on the site. 0: https://redd.it/8g5ngn https://redd.it/8g5ngn (not nsfw) 1: https://redd.it/b5b9lz https://redd.it/b5b9lz (nsfw descriptions/vulgar)
- EE84M3i 6y agoWhat? Where on reddit do you need to meet anything like 2257 requirements to post pictures of yourself?
- judge2020 6y agoTry posting a random picture you got from Google Images on RealGirls and see how long it takes to get removed and a message from the moderators asking you to verify your identity.
- drdeca 6y agocouldn't they do a reverse image search, see that it is already online, and therefore suspect that it was not posted by the person it depicts, and therefore require the verification? I don't see how "posting a picture you got from google images results in them asking you to confirm that you are the one in the picture" indicates that they generally require verification before you can post a picture of yourself. I mean, based on the name, I assume that in my case that subreddit wouldn't be interested in a picture of me, because I'm male (and, I also wouldn't want them to have it either), but still.
- tachyonbeam 6y agoI feel like reddit used to be used to be an amazing social media platform where you could connect with strangers and learn so much, find tons of interesting discussions where people acted fairly civilized. It was basically the complete opposite of twitter. Many online/worldwide trends also seemed to be born there. If you went on reddit, you were ahead of the curve. You knew what was going to become trendy months before anybody else had even heard of it. However, the management has shown a ridiculous lack of transparency, and they've just kept making the user experience worse and worse. It makes me sad. Reddit is an amazing resource, and the people who run it are basically shitting on a goldmine. It's like they're hell bent on destroying their asset. Is it because they fundamentally misunderstand what they have? Because they don't care? Because they're greedy, or just plain incompetent?
- parasubvert 6y agoIt won’t matter unless there’s a better alternative. Reddit wasn’t the first popular forum online, and won’t be the last.
- tjr225 6y agoI think of Reddit the platform that tried to make hosting a forum as easy as possible. Within that scope it’s awesome but it’s also so easy that it is just another cesspool.
- parasubvert 6y agoDecentralized servers with mods are probably the best way to manage s/n ratio. But even then... scale eventually ruins everything.
- chii 6y agojust like how digg.com fell (to reddit), so will reddit fall to the next thing. But the central problem remains - how do people who currently use reddit migrate but not nose their communities built up over the years?
- lambda_obrien 6y agoFirst of all, I'm not against porn, but most of reddit porn isn't empowering people, it's selling onlyfans or posting women against their will. Google is complicit with so called revenge porn as well. If you disagree, explain why they have crawlers indexing and doing facial recognition on porn sites that have an absolute buttload of revenge porn shit, like xhamster, 4chan archives, and motherless. It's a fucking travesty, and pornhub was just the tip of the exploitative spear, later reddit will ban porn unless it's verified, because the ny times or wapo will post an article about a dozen women being victimized by revenge porn on there.
- core-questions 6y agoI am interested in hearing what you would do about this if you were in charge. Want to elaborate?
- lambda_obrien 6y agoIn charge of what? There's a lot of different problems I commented on there.
- vxNsr 6y agoIt’s an invitation to pose a slippery slope argument so that s/he can tear it down, I’d just ignore it.
- core-questions 6y agoIt honestly isn't. I just feel like I am losing touch with the range of opinions on this issue and want to get some elaboration into something that's outside of my normal filter bubble.
- lambda_obrien 6y agoPersonally, I think amateur posters need to be verified somehow, but there's really nothing you can do to prevent the sharing of photos, but you just need to squash it on the major platforms to slow it immensely. Also, if the governments of the world went after revenge porn like copyright laws, it could take do a lot to push it out of the mainstream, even if not eliminating completely. I think the porn industry needs to do a lot more as well and they made their bed then shit in it by allowing unverified posting, so they're going to get fucked in that case.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoReddit will warn you if a community allows NFSW content, then it will warn you again when you are about to see something NFSW. Many subreddits do not allow NFSW content and moderators will ban your contributions if they violate their community rules. NFSW stuff is pretty much an opt-in experience at this point, and that's fine.
- vxNsr 6y agoNot Safe For Work = NSFW
- 29athrowaway 6y agoNSFW, true. I mispelled it.
- hdcompany123 6y agoBanning is not a solution
- techaddict009 6y agoLittle offtopic question: How do apple & google app stores allow Reddit & Twitter, if you upload apps with pornographic content links in it they ban out instantly? Is there some other guidelines to be followed or I am missing something?
- moonchild 6y agoThey also allow web browsers, which can access arbitrary content. I would guess they only want to allow apps that don't explicitly condone porn, but that ‘platform’-type apps which happen to contain some pornographic material are ok.
- annexrichmond 6y agoYes but Apple removed Tumblr from the App Store for this -- why doesn't your argument apply there?
- tolbish 6y agoThey are not anti-porn. They just do not want to be seen as being pro-porn.
- ramblerman 6y agoReddit has a huge problem with exposing pictures of people that never gave permission. And I'm not talking about just nudes. Take the "Karen" meme where people just grab their phone and start filming any public outrage moment for the posse to jump on and ridicule. Or even stuff like "Saw this guy on the train, lol" where obviously said guy was not aware, and didn't want to end up on the internet. I still don't understand how this is legal, I would hope in the future there is some countermeasure against this.
- Nextgrid 6y agoIt isn't just Reddit though, this happens everywhere on the internet, and frankly I'm not sure this is that big of a deal. In the US, I believe it is legal to film and broadcast anything happening in public spaces. Whether this is good or not is another discussion, and has nothing to do with Reddit itself.
- insickness 6y agoIt's not illegal to photograph or film in public. You don't need permission to use an image taken of someone in public unless you're using it for something like an ad. You'll often see police try to tell you you can't film in public (usually them) but this is complete crap. Likewise if a business owner tells you that you can't film their business from the street, it is complete crap. Shaming culture is a problem but making public photography illegal is not the solution.
- Zak 6y agoStreet photography predates the internet. It often involves photographing someone who is unaware they're being photographed, and in many cases publishing the photograph without seeking permission. Its legality varies significantly by jurisdiction, which can be tricky where a jurisdiction recognizes both a right to privacy and a right to freedom of expression. In the US, courts have generally found that photographing someone where they do not have a "reasonable expectation of privacy", i.e. anywhere open to the public is protected under the first amendment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_photography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_photography
- yc-kraln 6y ago"Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten." I predict they will "ban" pornography within a few months after such a statement.
- ydnaclementine 6y agoI don't know what category is exactly falls under (favoritism, etc), but other apps on the app store are banned because user generated content can be pornographic (not pure porn apps either, similar to reddit with porn subreddits), but reddit viewing apps don't seem to have this issue. Maybe the apps don't allow you to access that type of content