7 ms·

Reddit is very enthusiastic about handing out site wide bans these days. If you say the wrong thing on the wrong topic you can be permanent banned, whereas befo

by fffffg 5y ago

Reddit is very enthusiastic about handing out site wide bans these days. If you say the wrong thing on the wrong topic you can be permanent banned, whereas before you would just be downvoted or argued with. Same for subreddits being banned. But only when it comes to speech it seems, not picture or video. So, for example, we have the odd case of "truelesbians" subreddit being banned for being trans-exclusive, but "lesbians" subreddit which is also trans-exclusive, but dedicated to pornographic imagery, is allowed to stay.

kwinten 5y ago
You're aware there is a difference between discrimination and categorization, right?
- retox 5y ago
  I don't understand the distinction or how it applies to the example above, can you please explain it to me.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    The distinction is that, for example, a 'world foods' (aka 'ethnic'!) aisle in a supermarket categorises stuff efficiently that the local ethnic minority group (predominantly) may be interested in, while more widely consumed (or consumed by local ethnic majority group) foods are distributed elsewhere categorised more according to food type; compared to saying 'you are {local ethnic minority}ian so you are not allowed to purchase {local ethnic majority} foods', which would be discrimination. Whether it applies to the example above though is I think more debatable.
  - jacoblambda 5y ago
    With respect to how it applies to the above: r/lesbians is a porn subreddit with content restricted to female same sex porn content. This is just categorisation. r/truelesbians was supposed to a subreddit for lesbians to aggregate and discuss stuff. What ended up happening was while it was still a lesbian focused subreddit, it became a breeding ground for anti-trans/TERF content/discussions/rhetoric and the moderation of the sub enforced those beliefs. This is what makes r/truelesbians discriminatory instead of just being categorisation. It takes a step from "don't post content that doesn't belong here" to "don't post content that doesn't belong here AND don't post at all here if you match some arbitrary biological definition we don't like or if you support those people". You also have r/actuallesbians which branched off from r/truelesbians when they got TERFy. r/actuallesbians is inclusive of all people who identify as female but have the same original focus of providing a platform to discuss and aggregate female same sex/lesbian content/discussions. This once again is categorisation and not discrimination because anyone can post there as long as the posts are on topic. Additionally the content of the sub isn't discriminatory in this case because it's focused on a topic (about same sex female relationships) rather than focused against another (against trans individuals). So r/lesbians and r/actuallesbians both are categorical while r/truelesbians was discriminatory on top of being categorical because of the exclusionary nature of the subreddit.
- ffffffg 5y ago
  How does it apply in this case? The "truelesbians" subreddit wanted a place where biological females could discuss lesbian issues with biological females. This was not allowed by Reddit. The "lesbians" subreddit is a place where exclusively biological females are portrayed in sexually stimulating activity with each other (mostly for male subscribers to ejaculate to). This is allowed by Reddit. Both of these involve discrimination against so-called 'male lesbians'. The difference seems to be that the male gaze is of more importance to Reddit than female speech.
  - rozab 5y ago
    How many throways do you get through each day? Can you go attempt to fan the flames of culture war somewhere else?
    - fffffffg 5y ago
      Will do, bye.
  - orra 5y ago
    Please. /r/truelesbians was banned for being transphobic. Meanwhile, /r/actuallesbians continues unhindered, cause it's not transphobic. > 'male lesbians'. Nice dog whistle.
    - ffffffg 5y ago
      Homosexuality is, by its very definition, same-sex attraction, not same-gender attraction. Aside from Reddit's double standard when it comes to subreddit bans, the fact that some people wanting to discuss their attraction to a particular sex is considered 'transphobic', is the wider problem here. It's not right that actual lesbians are getting harangued and then banned for not being interested in 'girldick' or whatever nonsense. > Nice dog whistle. Not really, just biological reality. People can't actually change their sex (only their gender expression), so 'male lesbian' is a statement of self-contradiction.
      - 5y ago
BoxOfRain 5y ago
A better example would be what happened with /r/ukpolitics and Aimee Challenor I think, it was a truly shameless display of how incompetent Reddit has become in recent years. The whole episode was an omnishambles, and a perfect microcosm of everything that's wrong with Reddit at the moment. It featured awful hiring practices, awful moderation practices, awful crisis management, awful PR management, and highlighted the piss-poor relationship that paid Reddit staff have with both the platforms's users and the volunteer moderators running what are in many cases enormous online communities in their own right. Regardless of where they're at as a company, as a platform from the user's perspective Reddit been on a downhill trajectory for years. They manage to cock up moderation time after time, and every single UI change they make somehow manages to make the site even less usable. They'll double down on their crappy decisions in an enormously user-hostile way until literally the point users are in open revolt against the platform's staff which sometimes triggers a U-turn with all the grace and agility of an oil tanker. This bad relationship between owners, moderators, and users often seems to kill smaller platforms (anyone remember Yik Yak?) but Reddit has so much inertia it's been taking literal years for this disease to become terminal. It will happen one way or another though, one day they'll make a decision too user-hostile and Reddit will have its very own "Digg V4" moment.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Sebb767 5y ago
  > A better example would be what happened with /r/ukpolitics and Aimee Challenor I think, Would you mind expanding on this? I don't follow Reddit dramas any more. > It will happen one way or another though, one day they'll make a decision too user-hostile and Reddit will have its very own "Digg V4" moment. I highly doubt that. Reddit has far too much non-techie people, which tend to know less alternatives and don't punish bad design as directly as "we" would. More likely it will be a slow fade to unimportance, like MySpace or Facebook (the platform, not the company).
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    >Would you mind expanding on this? I don't follow Reddit dramas any more. No worries! Aimee Challenor is a very minor political figure in the UK who's mostly known for the fact she hired her father to act as her election agent after he was charged with (and was later convicted of) truly horrendous crimes against a ten year old child. Later on she left politics entirely and began working for the Reddit Public Access Network, after which she was eventually hired as a site-wide administrator. On /r/ukpolitics (a fairly large subreddit) a moderator posted an article from the Spectator that mentioned her indirectly, I believe simply naming her as a candidate at the time and not mentioning her background at all. This moderator was banned without warning from Reddit and it became known that Reddit had been systematically censoring any mention of Challenor whatsoever and worse, banning the commenter. It was claimed by Reddit this was through an automated system but it's been alleged that Challenor herself was carrying out the censorship personally*. /r/ukpolitics temporarily closed itself in protest of this behaviour as they (correctly, in my opinion) felt that it was absurd to ban legitimate discussion of a British political figure on a forum dedicated to British politics simply because they're also a Reddit administrator and at any rate they wanted to support their banned fellow moderator. This started a chain reaction across the site in protest of Reddit's administrator team in which many subreddits with millions of subscribers set themselves to private in solidarity with /r/ukpolitics. I don't have any figures to hand but participation was very wide and I can't imagine it did that day's advertising revenue any favours at all! Eventually the administrators relented after intense criticism from almost all angles, fired Challenor and re-instated the banned /r/ukpolitics mod. The moderators of /r/ukpolitics handled the situation excellently in my opinion, their competence was in stark contrast to the incompetence of the administrators. It's worth pointing out that it was the censorship on Reddit's part and Challenor's questionable conduct as a political figure that triggered such a strong reaction, not Challenor's political stances. From what I understand her political activism was mostly centred around environmentalism and LGBT rights, both very laudable causes in my opinion! I think the issue everyone had was that while harassment is never okay (and I don't think it's controversial that people often do suffer atrocious harassment on platforms like Reddit, especially transgender people) the reaction to it was extremely disproportionate and further complicated by the fact Challenor is a public figure - even if a very minor one. There were also apparently a lot of complaints around the issue of safeguarding minors on Reddit which followed on from their obviously inept hiring practices, although I don't know enough to comment further on that. >More likely it will be a slow fade to unimportance, like MySpace or Facebook (the platform, not the company). This could be a more likely outcome than what I suggested, although given how volatile politics on social media are these days I could definitely see Reddit tearing itself apart over moderation drama. Having said that this isn't always terminal, a good case study would be 4chan which has had several incidences over the years of parts of its userbase starting their own platforms with the same format. *I'm still not sure about this, as a web developer I can't imagine Reddit with their enormous volume of traffic would seriously follow every outgoing link and scrape the page for mentions of Challenor. I think it could be done, but I don't think it could be done with good value for money! I'd appreciate someone with more experience than me weighing in on this.

by fffffg 5y ago

kwinten 5y ago

You're aware there is a difference between discrimination and categorization, right?

retox 5y ago
I don't understand the distinction or how it applies to the example above, can you please explain it to me.
- OJFord 5y ago
  The distinction is that, for example, a 'world foods' (aka 'ethnic'!) aisle in a supermarket categorises stuff efficiently that the local ethnic minority group (predominantly) may be interested in, while more widely consumed (or consumed by local ethnic majority group) foods are distributed elsewhere categorised more according to food type; compared to saying 'you are {local ethnic minority}ian so you are not allowed to purchase {local ethnic majority} foods', which would be discrimination. Whether it applies to the example above though is I think more debatable.
- jacoblambda 5y ago
  With respect to how it applies to the above: r/lesbians is a porn subreddit with content restricted to female same sex porn content. This is just categorisation. r/truelesbians was supposed to a subreddit for lesbians to aggregate and discuss stuff. What ended up happening was while it was still a lesbian focused subreddit, it became a breeding ground for anti-trans/TERF content/discussions/rhetoric and the moderation of the sub enforced those beliefs. This is what makes r/truelesbians discriminatory instead of just being categorisation. It takes a step from "don't post content that doesn't belong here" to "don't post content that doesn't belong here AND don't post at all here if you match some arbitrary biological definition we don't like or if you support those people". You also have r/actuallesbians which branched off from r/truelesbians when they got TERFy. r/actuallesbians is inclusive of all people who identify as female but have the same original focus of providing a platform to discuss and aggregate female same sex/lesbian content/discussions. This once again is categorisation and not discrimination because anyone can post there as long as the posts are on topic. Additionally the content of the sub isn't discriminatory in this case because it's focused on a topic (about same sex female relationships) rather than focused against another (against trans individuals). So r/lesbians and r/actuallesbians both are categorical while r/truelesbians was discriminatory on top of being categorical because of the exclusionary nature of the subreddit.
ffffffg 5y ago
How does it apply in this case? The "truelesbians" subreddit wanted a place where biological females could discuss lesbian issues with biological females. This was not allowed by Reddit. The "lesbians" subreddit is a place where exclusively biological females are portrayed in sexually stimulating activity with each other (mostly for male subscribers to ejaculate to). This is allowed by Reddit. Both of these involve discrimination against so-called 'male lesbians'. The difference seems to be that the male gaze is of more importance to Reddit than female speech.
- rozab 5y ago
  How many throways do you get through each day? Can you go attempt to fan the flames of culture war somewhere else?
  - fffffffg 5y ago
    Will do, bye.
- orra 5y ago
  Please. /r/truelesbians was banned for being transphobic. Meanwhile, /r/actuallesbians continues unhindered, cause it's not transphobic. > 'male lesbians'. Nice dog whistle.
  - ffffffg 5y ago
    Homosexuality is, by its very definition, same-sex attraction, not same-gender attraction. Aside from Reddit's double standard when it comes to subreddit bans, the fact that some people wanting to discuss their attraction to a particular sex is considered 'transphobic', is the wider problem here. It's not right that actual lesbians are getting harangued and then banned for not being interested in 'girldick' or whatever nonsense. > Nice dog whistle. Not really, just biological reality. People can't actually change their sex (only their gender expression), so 'male lesbian' is a statement of self-contradiction.
    - 5y ago

BoxOfRain 5y ago

A better example would be what happened with /r/ukpolitics and Aimee Challenor I think, it was a truly shameless display of how incompetent Reddit has become in recent years. The whole episode was an omnishambles, and a perfect microcosm of everything that's wrong with Reddit at the moment. It featured awful hiring practices, awful moderation practices, awful crisis management, awful PR management, and highlighted the piss-poor relationship that paid Reddit staff have with both the platforms's users and the volunteer moderators running what are in many cases enormous online communities in their own right. Regardless of where they're at as a company, as a platform from the user's perspective Reddit been on a downhill trajectory for years. They manage to cock up moderation time after time, and every single UI change they make somehow manages to make the site even less usable. They'll double down on their crappy decisions in an enormously user-hostile way until literally the point users are in open revolt against the platform's staff which sometimes triggers a U-turn with all the grace and agility of an oil tanker. This bad relationship between owners, moderators, and users often seems to kill smaller platforms (anyone remember Yik Yak?) but Reddit has so much inertia it's been taking literal years for this disease to become terminal. It will happen one way or another though, one day they'll make a decision too user-hostile and Reddit will have its very own "Digg V4" moment.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Sebb767 5y ago
> A better example would be what happened with /r/ukpolitics and Aimee Challenor I think, Would you mind expanding on this? I don't follow Reddit dramas any more. > It will happen one way or another though, one day they'll make a decision too user-hostile and Reddit will have its very own "Digg V4" moment. I highly doubt that. Reddit has far too much non-techie people, which tend to know less alternatives and don't punish bad design as directly as "we" would. More likely it will be a slow fade to unimportance, like MySpace or Facebook (the platform, not the company).
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  >Would you mind expanding on this? I don't follow Reddit dramas any more. No worries! Aimee Challenor is a very minor political figure in the UK who's mostly known for the fact she hired her father to act as her election agent after he was charged with (and was later convicted of) truly horrendous crimes against a ten year old child. Later on she left politics entirely and began working for the Reddit Public Access Network, after which she was eventually hired as a site-wide administrator. On /r/ukpolitics (a fairly large subreddit) a moderator posted an article from the Spectator that mentioned her indirectly, I believe simply naming her as a candidate at the time and not mentioning her background at all. This moderator was banned without warning from Reddit and it became known that Reddit had been systematically censoring any mention of Challenor whatsoever and worse, banning the commenter. It was claimed by Reddit this was through an automated system but it's been alleged that Challenor herself was carrying out the censorship personally*. /r/ukpolitics temporarily closed itself in protest of this behaviour as they (correctly, in my opinion) felt that it was absurd to ban legitimate discussion of a British political figure on a forum dedicated to British politics simply because they're also a Reddit administrator and at any rate they wanted to support their banned fellow moderator. This started a chain reaction across the site in protest of Reddit's administrator team in which many subreddits with millions of subscribers set themselves to private in solidarity with /r/ukpolitics. I don't have any figures to hand but participation was very wide and I can't imagine it did that day's advertising revenue any favours at all! Eventually the administrators relented after intense criticism from almost all angles, fired Challenor and re-instated the banned /r/ukpolitics mod. The moderators of /r/ukpolitics handled the situation excellently in my opinion, their competence was in stark contrast to the incompetence of the administrators. It's worth pointing out that it was the censorship on Reddit's part and Challenor's questionable conduct as a political figure that triggered such a strong reaction, not Challenor's political stances. From what I understand her political activism was mostly centred around environmentalism and LGBT rights, both very laudable causes in my opinion! I think the issue everyone had was that while harassment is never okay (and I don't think it's controversial that people often do suffer atrocious harassment on platforms like Reddit, especially transgender people) the reaction to it was extremely disproportionate and further complicated by the fact Challenor is a public figure - even if a very minor one. There were also apparently a lot of complaints around the issue of safeguarding minors on Reddit which followed on from their obviously inept hiring practices, although I don't know enough to comment further on that. >More likely it will be a slow fade to unimportance, like MySpace or Facebook (the platform, not the company). This could be a more likely outcome than what I suggested, although given how volatile politics on social media are these days I could definitely see Reddit tearing itself apart over moderation drama. Having said that this isn't always terminal, a good case study would be 4chan which has had several incidences over the years of parts of its userbase starting their own platforms with the same format. *I'm still not sure about this, as a web developer I can't imagine Reddit with their enormous volume of traffic would seriously follow every outgoing link and scrape the page for mentions of Challenor. I think it could be done, but I don't think it could be done with good value for money! I'd appreciate someone with more experience than me weighing in on this.