14 ms·

Reddit takes a new direction

392 points by tswicegood 15y ago

throwawaymar2 15y ago
I confused about why he thinks it ironic that Nabakov is banned... I mean, it got grandfathered in when child porn laws were written, somehow, but it is certainly fiction about a paedophile, right? Anything that bans other kiddie-fiddler fiction while allowing _Lolita_ is quite obviously inconsistent, and those in favor of this inconsistency probably ought to examine why they like _Lolita_.
- _delirium 15y ago
  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 interpret it.)
  - kanamekun 15y ago
    The First Amendment is pretty clear that freedom of speech/press is protected only from Congress and legislation: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Companies and/or websites can ban almost any speech or writing they would like. It's not unconstitutional, because corporations aren't considered a governmental/Congressional body.
    - _delirium 15y ago
      That's true; I was objecting to the claim that it was "grandfathered in when child porn laws were written". The reason a law couldn't ban it is because of the First Amendment.
      - kanamekun 15y ago
        Definitely agree that Lolita is a written text and not a visual depiction of children engaged in sexual activity. So it's not covered by child porn laws, and is still protected by the First Amendment. But wanted to highlight that the law can ban speech, despite the First Amendment. For example, in 1982 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that child porn was not protected by the First Amendment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_v._Ferber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_v._Ferber Laws can also ban material deemed obscene. The Miller test is the standard there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_v._California http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_v._California
  - carbocation 15y ago
    Lolita, the novel, is an extended metaphor for the United States.
  - harshreality 15y ago
    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 those activities, even including women's international gymnastics competitions, be banned just because, viewed with an eye toward prurience, they might qualify? Certainly the activities have artistic value, but how much? What about purely fictional depictions of minors, either in manga (see the case of Christopher Handley's manga possession) or even in fictional stories that may not be deemed to have serious literary merit?
    - pjscott 15y ago
      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.
- comicjk 15y ago
  I don't defend Lolita in particular, but there is clearly a difference between child porn and fiction about the boring, sad life of a real pedophile. One is meant to arouse and the other to show a truth.
- mcantelon 15y ago
  >those in favor of this inconsistency probably ought to examine why they like _Lolita_. There is a lot of fiction from the perspective of non-sympathetic characters. If doesn't mean that those who appreciate the insight the fiction provides into the character, or the character's circumstance, are advocates of the character or the circumstance itself.
- kijin 15y ago
  Some people, myself included, object to banning "kiddie-fiddler fiction", no matter how disgusting it is. The law should not make judgments of literary quality, and literary quality is the only grounds for treating Lolita differently from some (but perhaps not all) of the amateur stuff. Besides, no actual child was abused in the production of these works, unlike with films and pictures with actual underage models; and potential harm to future children is a rather shaky basis to justify flushing the First Amendment down the drain. That's the argument that ACLU's Nadine Strossen used two decades ago against censorship of (non-child) pornography. I see no reason why the same argument won't apply to child pornographic literature. But private websites are a different matter, and there's nothing wrong with a moderator who chooses whether or not to discriminate on the basis of perceived literary quality on his or her own site. Many forums ban discussions about religion and politics altogether, but that doesn't infringe anybody's Constitutional rights.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- defrost 15y ago
  Yes. We should ban kiddie fiddler fiction like Romeo and Juliet. Did you read that disgusting line about busting their maiden heads? Yuck. Yuckity Yuckity Yuuuck.
- pyre 15y ago
  > I confused about why he thinks it ironic > that Nabakov is banned... It's not ironic that something that is considered 'classic' literature gets banned in a rush to ban all 'pedo' material? If you want to play it up, I'm sure you could conjure up images of Nazis burning books.
erickhill 15y ago
I think playing the 'endless game of whack-a-mole' really is their only option in the short term. Yes, it can get expensive. But if they want to continue on their current insane traffic trajectory and gain a wider audience, they need to be on top of the human moderation process. This traffic report isn't accurate, but the trend is right (from what I've heard): http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com/
josefresco 15y ago
What about utilizing the community to police this undesirable content? I'm sure that opens up other exploits but if the community wants to stay healthy, it has to take responsibility for itself and not just rely on the admins to come up with a magic algorithm that will solve the problem.
- InclinedPlane 15y ago
  Reddit isn't one community, it's sort of like usenet, there are lots of sub-communities that can easily be oblivious and invisible to one another.
  - Mrow 15y ago
    This is the reason I scoff when people try to describe an average "Redditor". With the sheer amount of traffic coming through their site it's impossible to come up with an accurate generalization of what the community as a whole feels, even with the small percentage of traffic actually commenting and voting. I would like to see a lot more emphasis be put on the decision between serving the will of the users, establishing a set of ideals that Reddit chooses to run things by, or a mixture of the two.
- showerst 15y ago
  The problem is that the 'community' is now so large that you have a subset that considers things appropriate that the wider group doesn't. So either the small group gets to do things that may damage the larger site (and be illegal), or the larger group squelches the smaller group's freedom by singling them out. It's a lose-lose situation from a purely community standpoint. Realistically, I support the message that they're sending - That child sexualization is blanket banned because it's too resource intensive to define and monitor shades of gray, and it's a unique issue. The very active marijuana, racism, or even black hat netsec communities may support illegal/gray-area things, but are far less likely to get the site branded as a kiddie-porn hive, which would basically be a death-penalty to the community, or attacked various governments. Sometimes admins just have to make some executive calls to protect their business, even if they're hypocritical from a strict standpoint. I'd say reddit's defacto bill of rights is still pretty strong for a web community.
starfox 15y ago
Doesn't every website that gets used by the unwashed masses eventually have to deal with this problem? How does facebook or youtube deal with it? How did AOL deal with it? Is the issue just that Reddit is run by a smaller team than these larger companies?
- raganwald 15y ago
  Facebook is obviously thriving as a business but arousing indignation and ire over their policies, which ban breastfeeding photos but allow hate speech. So I woud say they have decided to live woth a certain ongoing level of shitstorming as a cost of doing buiness.
  - nbm 15y ago
    Facebook does not ban breastfeeding photos in general - https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=340974655932193#Does-Facebook-allow-photos-of-mothers-breastfeeding https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=340974655932193#Does-Face...?
- barclay 15y ago
  Youtube handles it via whack-a-mole. A friend of mine used to work in their community dept, and would tell horror stories about the things she'd see people put up.
  - Apocryphon 15y ago
    My heart goes out to the censors who have to deal with user submissions (as opposed to network censors). I can only blanch at the job that people who manage Google Image Search have to deal with.
TheSOB88 15y ago
It's interesting, I think, how much sheer emotion there is behind these child protection issues. Is there anything more emotionally provocative than the thought of harm to your children? Your own flesh and blood, who you've raised from before they could crawl. The amount of emotional and physical pain you've gone through (and willingly continue to go through) for your children far surpasses any other possible source. Of course, people do overreact sometimes, but I think this is our instinct for a very good reason.
- ThomPete 15y ago
  I have a son and I am not so sure. Don't get me wrong. If my son was a victim I would probably want nothing but hell for the person who did it. But I also sometimes can't help but feel that society and the media is actually making matters worse, than they already are.
- alex_c 15y ago
  I think the strength of the emotion is perfectly understandable. The unfortunate side effect is that it makes rational discussion very difficult - because it's such an emotional issue, it's easy to misunderstand what others are saying, or to see something as much more black and white than it actually is. The worst part is this emotional response is so easy to exploit. It can be "think of the children" laws with unintended (or intended) side effects. Or, like in this case, it can be used as a weapon to attack a person or community (even if I agree with the outcome, this particular instance feels like SA attacking Reddit either out of genuine outrage or, more likely, for shits and giggles).
kooshball 15y ago
My biggest concern over all this is that the policy change came so quickly after the SA thread (similar timeframe as the Anderson Cooper clip). Even though startups and usually praised for moving quickly, I agree complete with the OP that this can be a major directional change (positive or negative) for Reddit overall. This kind of stuff should be thought over long and hard, rather than come down from their parent company. Reactionary policies that sprouts from avoiding bad PR will be good for the short term, I just hope they thought it all out what they will do in the long term.
- ubershmekel 15y ago
  Not that I'd like to defend this move, but it probably has been on the table for a long time now. /r/jailbait was banned and reinstated enough times for the discussions to have gotten old in reddit HQ by now.
  - kooshball 15y ago
    So the result of the discussion was to keep all the other questionable content available until a PR shitstorm starts to brew? If they already made a decision why would they not act on it at the same time /r/jailbait was banned? This whole thing smells like they got their hands forced, which is what worries me.
    - evan_ 15y ago
      my interpretation- they were WAITING for an outside party to speak up about it, so they could say "well, x party forced our hand" to shift the blame. Reddit (the company) is terrified of upsetting its userbase, lest it go the way of Digg.
alecco 15y ago
Reddit is changing. It's currently in a renewed and stronger Eternal September. Bastion subreddits like /r/AskScience and /r/Truereddit are reduced to junk and fads. The hope for the group of moderated subreddits (Republic of Reddit) didn't really take off, it's just a handful of submitters. The top voted comments on threads about censorship are mostly 1 to 3 months old users. And now reddit (had to) surrender to a decadent SOPA-supporting forum and a bunch of trolls from /r/ShitRedditSays (wich starts to look like a *chan long troll instead of a bunch of ultra-feminists). Sure, a lot of questionable/creepy subreddits shouldn't be there. But where's the line? And who draws it? Also, isn't this an ongoing process? Those subreddits can reopen in minutes with more subtle names. The censorship whack-a-mole is pointless. It's weird how reddit was a bastion for resisting SOPA/ACTA but fear mongering in US can take over a site. It seems that's the real frontier and we are losing. Next up /r/trees and /r/atheism. Like so many times before it's time to move on. I wish the best to the owners/admins, they were cornered and probably had a tough choice. And I sincerely hope the new users enjoy this new reddit.
- neutronicus 15y ago
  /r/ShitRedditSays is entirely sincere. I've been reading it for a while, and they mean what they say.
  - Locke1689 15y ago
    This is 100% true. However, they are primarily concerned about the content for the content's sake (as you can see from their ban policy). Reddit is not concerned about the content, only the legal liability associated with the content (otherwise a whole bunch of other subreddits would be on the chopping block).
    - neutronicus 15y ago
      Yeah, I just wanted to dispel the idea that they're trolls faking a sense of outrage just for the opportunity to kick Reddit's sand castle.
  - bragh 15y ago
Mordor 15y ago
It's simple, shutdown anything criminal and keep the rest open.
- showerst 15y ago
  Sadly it's not that simple. Even if that were the only rule, illegal where? The rules aren't even uniform among the 50 US states, not to speak of city/county level, or other countries. I think that the (unique?) problem with child issues is that if you allow things that are clearly not illegal (just 'creepy'), you'll draw a community that 1) Looks illegal from the outside and 2) Will, with very high probability, be doing illegal things over the messaging system or private/side boards. To the greater world, 1 and 2 are enough for a high profile lawsuit or media blitz that would effectively be a death penalty for the community.
- harshreality 15y ago
  The problem is that criminality is decided by a jury if a case like this goes to trial. In New York or San Francisco or even D.C., getting an obscenity or child porn conviction based on images of minors that are not nude, whether they're fully clothed or wearing swimsuits or bras, would be difficult. Getting an obscenity conviction for fictional depictions would be nearly impossible in those locations. Then there are cases like the Christopher Handley manga case in Iowa, where he plead guilty to avoid the risk of a longer sentence for possession of purely fictional manga that a jury of his peers may well have deemed "obscene".
- pjscott 15y ago
  To be clear: that's what they were doing already. This whole hullabaloo was caused by their announcement that they were going beyond that.
evmar 15y ago
The comment about "everything that's happened, has also already happened on LiveJournal" really rings true for me. Recent instance: the breast-feeding protesters recently descended on Facebook, which is mostly amusing to me in that they had waited so long. It would be interesting to construct a "here are the trials any internet community is likely to go through" handbook distilling these experiences.
pilif 15y ago
While I agree that the world is better off without forums where people can post their child porn or similar ilk, this policy change in reddit shows that there's in inherent issue with centralized platforms. Back when there was usenet, everybody could post what ever they wanted (some news servers might not have carried the group, but there was no policing the source). Same with blogs: You wanted to post content the masses dislike? No problem. But you want to post that same content to a centralized platform like Twitter, Facebook or any of Google's properties, now the masses (and/or governments) dictate the content you are allowed to post. To really make use of the internet's capability of providing an incredible freedom of content you can create and publish, you cannot use a centralized platform. While sites like reddit or facebook might make it easier for other people to find your crap^Wcontent, they also make it infinitely easier to have it removed again.
- zotz 15y ago
  > Back when there was usenet NNTP is still alive. : )
  - tptacek 15y ago
    This shit killed Usenet. Not just child porn, but that and a lot of things like it. (I ran a Freenix-competitive server in the '90s and hacked on INN). (Disclosure: it's sad it took Reddit this long to apply this rule, and more than a little repulsive to see people up in arms about it.)
    - zotz 15y ago
      > more than a little repulsive to see people up in arms about it. Agreed. Equating free speech with the ability to trade in sexual images of children is about the low-water mark for political philosophy applied to communications tech. All that being said, I miss the pre-AOL usenet.
      - pyre 15y ago
        > sexual images of children The real question is how far can you stretch this definition. If you find someone jacking off to a picture of a mother holding her newborn baby, is that image now 'sexual' and fair game for censorship? What about a couch[1]? [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGU7MlDYgXA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGU7MlDYgXA
zotz 15y ago
I've been banned from posting articles on some larger subreddits some time ago. My political, economic and historical opinions aren't welcome for some reason. My point? Reddit began banning political opinion long before it banned kiddie porn. Reddit's admins don't give a damn about freedom of speech and opinion.
- blantonl 15y ago
  subreddits are moderated by folks who are like-minded individuals that participate in the subreddit. It seems more likely that you were moderated by those subreddit admins, not the Reddit administration. Furthermore, Reddit is a private organization, and they don't have to give a damn about freedom of speech.
  - zotz 15y ago
    I've been told, by a drunken reddit admin in a late night talk, that no one likes my opinions and I should just go away. True to form, callow youth are generally the most sure of their own views while also being sure that everyone else is wrong. > Reddit is a private organization, and they don't have to give a damn about freedom of speech. Agreed. They should stop acting like they care when they don't.
- buro9 15y ago
  You've touched upon an incredibly grey area. Most forums will ban trolls, but therein lies the problem: define "troll". I don't know what you said, where, and in what context... but I don't give benefit of doubt on this. Nor do I think you're guilty either... all I do know is that running a community is hard, and one of the things that the people of the community look to moderators to do is to keep the peace. A difference of opinion can be minor, or major. And depending on the topic it can be quite offensive to some. Have you considered that within a particular subreddit that the moderators were just trying to keep the peace? Has anything stopped you from starting your own subreddit to voice your opinion?
  - zotz 15y ago
    > I don't know what you said The below article was deleted from the queue in r/politics and I've been unable to post articles in politics and a few other subreddits ever since, using a particular handle from a particular IP. Ron Paul’s Challenge to the Left: http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/07/a-question-of-morality-ron-paul%E2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-left/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/07/a-question-of-morality-ron... My point stands: reddit has been complicit in silencing political opinion long before it began worrying about whether child porn should be allowed or not.
jballanc 15y ago
There is a problem with online communities. Let's call it the problem of "false association". Humans have been forming communities for millennia. Inevitably, in these communities, there are bad apples. However, if there is a child molester that lives in my town, that fact does not (on its own) reflect poorly on me. Even if that molester was my next door neighbor, there may be a bit more suspicion ("how could you not know that was going on next door?"), but I am confident that 9 times out of 10 I would come away with my reputation unblemished. Of course, before the internet, communities were a more-or-less involuntary phenomenon. They were defined by geography, history, a common resource, or a common industry. Contrast that to online communities that are largely viewed as self-directed, voluntary organizations. This is the view, I think, that will eventually have to change. This view is poisonous for two reasons. First, as we see here, if anyone, anywhere in an online community (no matter how large) does something offensive, objectionable, or illegal, the knee-jerk reaction of society today is to allow that bad apple to spoil the bunch. Second, this makes it very difficult to form heterogeneous communities online. If I associate with people randomly online, I am a Google search away from being associated with a potential thief/pervert/whatever. The end result is that online communities become insular, or they can only function well under a banner of anonymity, but anonymity has its own problems. Reddit, it seems to me, struck a useful middle ground: partial anonymity with history (I can create an identity that does not lead back to my real life identity, but can still build up a reputation). Unfortunately, Reddit is still a business. It seems to me that something like Reddit, but based on a distributed model, is what we need. Let's call it...usenet
jasonkester 15y ago
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 illegal, right? Not really. Not at all, in fact. Reddit is not the United States. It's Reddit. Online communities are not democracies any more than your back garden is a democracy. You pull weeds, plant seeds, and otherwise encourage the plants in your garden to comport themselves in a manner that ends up with a pleasing result. It's your garden, so you have the absolute right to pull weeds. The weeds get no say. Reddit seems to have forgotten this for a while, and as a result they started sliding until they became, well, Reddit. The community we're currently discussing this in, on the other hand, has been a lot more conscientious in cultivating the type of garden it would like to see. And I think we can all say the result is a lot more pleasant than a less tended place such as Reddit or 4chan.
- sophacles 15y ago
  * And I think we can all say the result is a lot more pleasant than a less tended place such as Reddit or 4chan.* I am honestly not sure we can say that at all. I thoroughly enjoy both hn and reddit, for completely different reasons. Sure, from a strictly legal standpoint, it isn't censorship or a constitutional issue, but at the same time, the "anything goes" attitude in places like 4chan and reddit allow for a lot of creative gems and interesting discussion. People instinctively recognize that while you may have to schlep thought he muck to find those gems, it is still important to have an "anything goes place". People will feel betrayed when they put time and effort into making the community what it is, and suddenly the rules are changed on them -- all their effort has been co-opted or may be co-opted, for something they don't want. It feels slimy. (yes we are all aware there is no contract or law or whatever, blah blah legalistic point missing, but the decency of it is still in question). All that being said, I also like the curated, well organized topical community of HN, because sometimes I just don't want to wade through the crap, but that occasional preference switch doesn't diminish either form of community building.
patio11 15y ago
Tech sometimes gets a bum rap for being a bunch of nerdy white men verging on undiagnosed autism who exude toxic body odor and equally toxic misogyny. That's an unfair overgeneralization, right? It becomes difficult to say that that is in any way unfair if our community routinely signals that its idea of a strong principled stance on an issue of major importance is to protect the rights of /r/niggerjailbait to masturbate to photos of a 6 year-old collected from someone's social networking site. OK, so maybe you don't believe that. Alright, let me try again: suppose you're in the business of building applications which let unsophisticated Internet users exchange totally innocent information like pictures of their children, and suppose further that your ability to remain in business is in large part dependent on the government treating Internet businesses as harmless geekery which generally falls beneath the notice of the bureaucratic state. Why are you standing in chest-deep water on top of the temple to Zeus while wearing full-plate armor in the middle of a roaring tempest shouting "SMITE ME"? Do you think the likely reaction of your political representatives is going to be excising problematic content with surgical precision while leaving the rest of our industry to continue writing software in peace? Do you think your fellow citizens are going to look with favor on arguments about there being actually a lot of shades of gray in masturbatory material involving children and carefully examine the technical differences between e.g. DNS, websites, servers, subreddits, and the like when calling their Congressman's office to draft a measured, proportionate response? Do you affirmatively enjoy the prospect of having to spend multiple weeks reading about nothing other than the Save Our Pre-Adolescents Act when it gets introduced later? And when it commands supermajority support among the American polity?
DannoHung 15y ago
Y'know, it's one thing to be against laws that are ostensibly made in favor of prosecuting child pornography because they can be abused to censor things that are politically unpopular... it's a whole other bucket of beans to be against removing stuff that's basically child pornography because you think something that's politically unpopular might be removed.
- jquery 15y ago
  > basically child pornography Nothing that got banned was "basically child pornography." That's why there is blood in the water.
  - DannoHung 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - ghani 15y ago
      The subreddits are as close as you can get to being illegal, but I think there's still a large (or at least significant) difference between the two. My only basis for that is my gut reaction, but I think it was what jquery was getting at. Not that they're truly unrelated.
dholowiski 15y ago
It's a business decision, plain and simple. Get over it.
Jun8 15y ago
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 thinks all who are on torrent sites are pirates and "hackers are baad and steal your CC numbers". This sort of blunt scare mongering demagogy is commonly used to create support from the masses, I am amazed that the HN crowd is also susceptible to it. Here are the facts as I believe them, please point out the ones you think are wrong: 1) Some of these subreddits may have contained CP, the illegal ones were being actively removed by admins. 2) Calling pictures of 16-year-olds in bikinis CP is not very useful and dilutes the term. 3) What is legal and morally right usually does not overlap 100%. Law may say one thing about CP and people may feel another thing. This is OK. Also different cultures, of course, have different attitudes. 4) In light of (3), to me there's "definitely bad CP" and "tolerable CP". The moral distinction is not clear cut and the law does not differentiate these. The situation is similar to the 55 mph speed limit, people break it everyday (avg speed on I-90 is more like 75mph) but if you do 85 the police will get you. So there's a tolerable zone and to me (2) falls in that category. 5) One has to be very careful with these outcries because they have the effect of ratcheting the law machine ever more tightly. Remember, no politician will put relaxation of sex offense laws on their ticket. But, please THINK A LITTLE AND RESEARCH before you pick up the pitchfork, e.g. read this (http://www.economist.com/node/14164614 http://www.economist.com/node/14164614). ADDENDUM: For (2), also consider the widespread use of young girls in advertising and movies, e.g. the Vanity Fair topless photoshoot of Miley Cyrus who was 15 at the time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miley_Cyrus#Controversies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miley_Cyrus#Controversies). This is just one that came to mind instantly, many more examples can easily be given.
- dkersten 15y ago
  ADDENDUM: For (2), also consider the widespread use of young girls in... Don't forget child beauty pageants. That stuff is IMHO often borderline pedophilia.
  - 15y ago
wavephorm 15y ago
Reddit had the biggest hissy fit of all about how child porn laws like SOPA were going to go too far and ruin the internet. And here they go banning anything involving a bathing suit. The hypocricy is strong in this one.
- pradocchia 15y ago
  Not at all. It's quite typical for an industry to choose to regulate itself, when the alternative is statutory regulation imposed by the government.
- nkohari 15y ago
  Uh, SOPA wasn't a child porn law. It was a copyright enforcement law. By definition it didn't cover anything regarding illegal pornography, because illegal things aren't subject to copyright.
trb 15y ago
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 was allowed or not. Instead we tried to recruit mods that knew the community, the direction it was heading and were able to keep a level head. Sure, someone went overboard once in a while and deleted o.k. stuff, but we'd just remove their mod privileges and reinstate what they deleted (thinks were removed from the database 14 days after they were marked as "deleted"). We were never accused of harboring pedophiles, or going overboard with removal. Those that complained about free-speech were always radical political groups well outside of "acceptable" for most communities. The key is to find moderators in line with the community, in a benevolent dictator way. No idea if reddit could find enough of those, but it worked well for us and should scale with community size, as reddit has a larger pool to recruit from.
- redslazer 15y ago
  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.
sjs382 15y ago
Every time I see k5 get mentioned, I get all nostalgic and think there will never be a community as eclectic as k5 ever again...
- nooneelse 15y ago
  I get similar pangs of nostalgia.
sien 15y ago
It's surprising how people have these discussions and don't discuss Metafilter - the discussion site that works. What has set Metafilter apart from slashdot, K5, Digg and Reddit was that after the initial burst of building a good community it became $5 to join. That keeps out the morons and pays for moderators to get rid of the asshats. If HN wants to keep up the quality before the hordes arrive it'd be a good move here too or it will be a matter of time before the idiots kill the place.
Locke1689 15y ago
I'm not against Reddit's move, but I do think they're being more than a little naive if they think it will stop here. hueypriest (Reddit admin) says: /r/trees isn't in remotely the same legal area as CP stuff. Not even close. They'll ban /r/trees when they pry it out of our cold dead hands. And yet, facilitating a drug transaction is almost definitely illegal. Posting torrent links is at least legally dangerous. Sure, these things haven't become problems yet, but neither were the other things a couple years ago. What the Reddit admins are saying right now is that anything goes, as long as it doesn't represent a plausible legal threat that can be waged against them. This is fine. The problem is that Reddit doesn't know that they're saying this. They think it's about CP, but it's not, it's about legal threat.
- diminoten 15y ago
  The slippery slope you describe simply does not exist. "First they took the CP, and I said nothing..." is not a valid concern, primarily because CP has always been an issue, and whenever it's come up it's always been removed from Reddit. This change in position is not nearly as large as it seems. Contrast, as you seem to want to, with /r/trees. How many posts in /r/trees get taken down due to their questionable legality? How many posts in /r/letstradetorrents (apocryphal) get taken down due to their questionable legality? None and none. The nature of CP on the Internet is unique, and not viewed similarly to anything else on the Internet. Reddit isn't saying "as long as it doesn't represent a plausible legal threat that can be waged against them", they're saying, "as long as it's not CP, and as long as it's manageable through an ad-hoc process." Due to the SomethingAwful attack, or due to some other, unknown reason, the volume of CP was too high to continue to deal with it on an ad-hoc basis. That is all.
  - Locke1689 15y ago
    First, I'm not saying that they shouldn't be taking the position they are. In fact, I believe that Reddit should always make the best effort to comport itself to US law in order to protect the site's existence for its users everywhere. However, I am saying that CP is not the only possible legal threat and it is naive to assume that it will continue to be the dominant legal threat going forward. Contrast, as you seem to want to, with /r/trees. How many posts in /r/trees get taken down due to their questionable legality? How many posts in /r/letstradetorrents (apocryphal) get taken down due to their questionable legality? None and none. The nature of CP on the Internet is unique, and not viewed similarly to anything else on the Internet. Reddit isn't saying "as long as it doesn't represent a plausible legal threat that can be waged against them", they're saying, "as long as it's not CP, and as long as it's manageable through an ad-hoc process." I agree that it is not yet a problem. Reddit has not yet been taken down by the FBI because of widespread drug trade on r/trees. Nor have they been sued because of torrent links. What I question is how long it will take before these things become issues? What I'm asking is: what is it about CP that makes it the only possible legal threat that Reddit can face? Reddit is still a maturing community that can evolve in many different ways. Reddit's policy is not about CP specifically, it's about credible legal threat. This is not what they say, but what they mean. If you think otherwise, I invite you to tell me what they will do if a non-CP related legal threat comes along.
rseymour 15y ago
"I originally cut my teeth on sites and services that, frankly, make 4chan and reddit (today’s all-too-frequent bogeymen) look like a knitting circle." WUT NET WUZ THIS GUY ON? K5/adequacy/early slashdot/b3ta/whatever... nothing like the internet of today. the volume of users alone leads to emergent (gross) behavior that before was drowned out in an invisible minority. USENET, IRC, same thing. You could find shady things if you looked for them, but no one (I knew of) actively did. Occasionally gross stuff would pop up in a listing of newsgroups, but you just didn't click. No one envies reddit, but they should've changed their policy earlier. Better late than never.
doki_pen 15y ago
Reddit is open source. If anyone thinks that this will ruin them then step up to the plate and compete on "freedom of speech"

392 points by tswicegood 15y ago

I confused about why he thinks it ironic that Nabakov is banned... I mean, it got grandfathered in when child porn laws were written, somehow, but it is certainly fiction about a paedophile, right? Anything that bans other kiddie-fiddler fiction while allowing _Lolita_ is quite obviously inconsistent, and those in favor of this inconsistency probably ought to examine why they like _Lolita_.

_delirium 15y ago
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 interpret it.)
- kanamekun 15y ago
  The First Amendment is pretty clear that freedom of speech/press is protected only from Congress and legislation: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Companies and/or websites can ban almost any speech or writing they would like. It's not unconstitutional, because corporations aren't considered a governmental/Congressional body.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    That's true; I was objecting to the claim that it was "grandfathered in when child porn laws were written". The reason a law couldn't ban it is because of the First Amendment.
    - kanamekun 15y ago
      Definitely agree that Lolita is a written text and not a visual depiction of children engaged in sexual activity. So it's not covered by child porn laws, and is still protected by the First Amendment. But wanted to highlight that the law can ban speech, despite the First Amendment. For example, in 1982 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that child porn was not protected by the First Amendment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_v._Ferber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_v._Ferber Laws can also ban material deemed obscene. The Miller test is the standard there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_v._California http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_v._California
- carbocation 15y ago
  Lolita, the novel, is an extended metaphor for the United States.
- harshreality 15y ago
  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 those activities, even including women's international gymnastics competitions, be banned just because, viewed with an eye toward prurience, they might qualify? Certainly the activities have artistic value, but how much? What about purely fictional depictions of minors, either in manga (see the case of Christopher Handley's manga possession) or even in fictional stories that may not be deemed to have serious literary merit?
  - pjscott 15y ago
    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.
comicjk 15y ago
I don't defend Lolita in particular, but there is clearly a difference between child porn and fiction about the boring, sad life of a real pedophile. One is meant to arouse and the other to show a truth.
mcantelon 15y ago
>those in favor of this inconsistency probably ought to examine why they like _Lolita_. There is a lot of fiction from the perspective of non-sympathetic characters. If doesn't mean that those who appreciate the insight the fiction provides into the character, or the character's circumstance, are advocates of the character or the circumstance itself.
kijin 15y ago
Some people, myself included, object to banning "kiddie-fiddler fiction", no matter how disgusting it is. The law should not make judgments of literary quality, and literary quality is the only grounds for treating Lolita differently from some (but perhaps not all) of the amateur stuff. Besides, no actual child was abused in the production of these works, unlike with films and pictures with actual underage models; and potential harm to future children is a rather shaky basis to justify flushing the First Amendment down the drain. That's the argument that ACLU's Nadine Strossen used two decades ago against censorship of (non-child) pornography. I see no reason why the same argument won't apply to child pornographic literature. But private websites are a different matter, and there's nothing wrong with a moderator who chooses whether or not to discriminate on the basis of perceived literary quality on his or her own site. Many forums ban discussions about religion and politics altogether, but that doesn't infringe anybody's Constitutional rights.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
defrost 15y ago
Yes. We should ban kiddie fiddler fiction like Romeo and Juliet. Did you read that disgusting line about busting their maiden heads? Yuck. Yuckity Yuckity Yuuuck.
pyre 15y ago
> I confused about why he thinks it ironic > that Nabakov is banned... It's not ironic that something that is considered 'classic' literature gets banned in a rush to ban all 'pedo' material? If you want to play it up, I'm sure you could conjure up images of Nazis burning books.

erickhill 15y ago

I think playing the 'endless game of whack-a-mole' really is their only option in the short term. Yes, it can get expensive. But if they want to continue on their current insane traffic trajectory and gain a wider audience, they need to be on top of the human moderation process. This traffic report isn't accurate, but the trend is right (from what I've heard): http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com/

josefresco 15y ago

What about utilizing the community to police this undesirable content? I'm sure that opens up other exploits but if the community wants to stay healthy, it has to take responsibility for itself and not just rely on the admins to come up with a magic algorithm that will solve the problem.

InclinedPlane 15y ago
Reddit isn't one community, it's sort of like usenet, there are lots of sub-communities that can easily be oblivious and invisible to one another.
- Mrow 15y ago
  This is the reason I scoff when people try to describe an average "Redditor". With the sheer amount of traffic coming through their site it's impossible to come up with an accurate generalization of what the community as a whole feels, even with the small percentage of traffic actually commenting and voting. I would like to see a lot more emphasis be put on the decision between serving the will of the users, establishing a set of ideals that Reddit chooses to run things by, or a mixture of the two.
showerst 15y ago
The problem is that the 'community' is now so large that you have a subset that considers things appropriate that the wider group doesn't. So either the small group gets to do things that may damage the larger site (and be illegal), or the larger group squelches the smaller group's freedom by singling them out. It's a lose-lose situation from a purely community standpoint. Realistically, I support the message that they're sending - That child sexualization is blanket banned because it's too resource intensive to define and monitor shades of gray, and it's a unique issue. The very active marijuana, racism, or even black hat netsec communities may support illegal/gray-area things, but are far less likely to get the site branded as a kiddie-porn hive, which would basically be a death-penalty to the community, or attacked various governments. Sometimes admins just have to make some executive calls to protect their business, even if they're hypocritical from a strict standpoint. I'd say reddit's defacto bill of rights is still pretty strong for a web community.

starfox 15y ago

Doesn't every website that gets used by the unwashed masses eventually have to deal with this problem? How does facebook or youtube deal with it? How did AOL deal with it? Is the issue just that Reddit is run by a smaller team than these larger companies?

raganwald 15y ago
Facebook is obviously thriving as a business but arousing indignation and ire over their policies, which ban breastfeeding photos but allow hate speech. So I woud say they have decided to live woth a certain ongoing level of shitstorming as a cost of doing buiness.
- nbm 15y ago
  Facebook does not ban breastfeeding photos in general - https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=340974655932193#Does-Facebook-allow-photos-of-mothers-breastfeeding https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=340974655932193#Does-Face...?
barclay 15y ago
Youtube handles it via whack-a-mole. A friend of mine used to work in their community dept, and would tell horror stories about the things she'd see people put up.
- Apocryphon 15y ago
  My heart goes out to the censors who have to deal with user submissions (as opposed to network censors). I can only blanch at the job that people who manage Google Image Search have to deal with.

TheSOB88 15y ago

It's interesting, I think, how much sheer emotion there is behind these child protection issues. Is there anything more emotionally provocative than the thought of harm to your children? Your own flesh and blood, who you've raised from before they could crawl. The amount of emotional and physical pain you've gone through (and willingly continue to go through) for your children far surpasses any other possible source. Of course, people do overreact sometimes, but I think this is our instinct for a very good reason.

ThomPete 15y ago
I have a son and I am not so sure. Don't get me wrong. If my son was a victim I would probably want nothing but hell for the person who did it. But I also sometimes can't help but feel that society and the media is actually making matters worse, than they already are.
alex_c 15y ago
I think the strength of the emotion is perfectly understandable. The unfortunate side effect is that it makes rational discussion very difficult - because it's such an emotional issue, it's easy to misunderstand what others are saying, or to see something as much more black and white than it actually is. The worst part is this emotional response is so easy to exploit. It can be "think of the children" laws with unintended (or intended) side effects. Or, like in this case, it can be used as a weapon to attack a person or community (even if I agree with the outcome, this particular instance feels like SA attacking Reddit either out of genuine outrage or, more likely, for shits and giggles).

kooshball 15y ago

My biggest concern over all this is that the policy change came so quickly after the SA thread (similar timeframe as the Anderson Cooper clip). Even though startups and usually praised for moving quickly, I agree complete with the OP that this can be a major directional change (positive or negative) for Reddit overall. This kind of stuff should be thought over long and hard, rather than come down from their parent company. Reactionary policies that sprouts from avoiding bad PR will be good for the short term, I just hope they thought it all out what they will do in the long term.

ubershmekel 15y ago
Not that I'd like to defend this move, but it probably has been on the table for a long time now. /r/jailbait was banned and reinstated enough times for the discussions to have gotten old in reddit HQ by now.
- kooshball 15y ago
  So the result of the discussion was to keep all the other questionable content available until a PR shitstorm starts to brew? If they already made a decision why would they not act on it at the same time /r/jailbait was banned? This whole thing smells like they got their hands forced, which is what worries me.
  - evan_ 15y ago
    my interpretation- they were WAITING for an outside party to speak up about it, so they could say "well, x party forced our hand" to shift the blame. Reddit (the company) is terrified of upsetting its userbase, lest it go the way of Digg.

alecco 15y ago

Reddit is changing. It's currently in a renewed and stronger Eternal September. Bastion subreddits like /r/AskScience and /r/Truereddit are reduced to junk and fads. The hope for the group of moderated subreddits (Republic of Reddit) didn't really take off, it's just a handful of submitters. The top voted comments on threads about censorship are mostly 1 to 3 months old users. And now reddit (had to) surrender to a decadent SOPA-supporting forum and a bunch of trolls from /r/ShitRedditSays (wich starts to look like a *chan long troll instead of a bunch of ultra-feminists). Sure, a lot of questionable/creepy subreddits shouldn't be there. But where's the line? And who draws it? Also, isn't this an ongoing process? Those subreddits can reopen in minutes with more subtle names. The censorship whack-a-mole is pointless. It's weird how reddit was a bastion for resisting SOPA/ACTA but fear mongering in US can take over a site. It seems that's the real frontier and we are losing. Next up /r/trees and /r/atheism. Like so many times before it's time to move on. I wish the best to the owners/admins, they were cornered and probably had a tough choice. And I sincerely hope the new users enjoy this new reddit.

neutronicus 15y ago
/r/ShitRedditSays is entirely sincere. I've been reading it for a while, and they mean what they say.
- Locke1689 15y ago
  This is 100% true. However, they are primarily concerned about the content for the content's sake (as you can see from their ban policy). Reddit is not concerned about the content, only the legal liability associated with the content (otherwise a whole bunch of other subreddits would be on the chopping block).
  - neutronicus 15y ago
    Yeah, I just wanted to dispel the idea that they're trolls faking a sense of outrage just for the opportunity to kick Reddit's sand castle.
- bragh 15y ago

Mordor 15y ago

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

showerst 15y ago
Sadly it's not that simple. Even if that were the only rule, illegal where? The rules aren't even uniform among the 50 US states, not to speak of city/county level, or other countries. I think that the (unique?) problem with child issues is that if you allow things that are clearly not illegal (just 'creepy'), you'll draw a community that 1) Looks illegal from the outside and 2) Will, with very high probability, be doing illegal things over the messaging system or private/side boards. To the greater world, 1 and 2 are enough for a high profile lawsuit or media blitz that would effectively be a death penalty for the community.
harshreality 15y ago
The problem is that criminality is decided by a jury if a case like this goes to trial. In New York or San Francisco or even D.C., getting an obscenity or child porn conviction based on images of minors that are not nude, whether they're fully clothed or wearing swimsuits or bras, would be difficult. Getting an obscenity conviction for fictional depictions would be nearly impossible in those locations. Then there are cases like the Christopher Handley manga case in Iowa, where he plead guilty to avoid the risk of a longer sentence for possession of purely fictional manga that a jury of his peers may well have deemed "obscene".
pjscott 15y ago
To be clear: that's what they were doing already. This whole hullabaloo was caused by their announcement that they were going beyond that.

evmar 15y ago

The comment about "everything that's happened, has also already happened on LiveJournal" really rings true for me. Recent instance: the breast-feeding protesters recently descended on Facebook, which is mostly amusing to me in that they had waited so long. It would be interesting to construct a "here are the trials any internet community is likely to go through" handbook distilling these experiences.

pilif 15y ago

While I agree that the world is better off without forums where people can post their child porn or similar ilk, this policy change in reddit shows that there's in inherent issue with centralized platforms. Back when there was usenet, everybody could post what ever they wanted (some news servers might not have carried the group, but there was no policing the source). Same with blogs: You wanted to post content the masses dislike? No problem. But you want to post that same content to a centralized platform like Twitter, Facebook or any of Google's properties, now the masses (and/or governments) dictate the content you are allowed to post. To really make use of the internet's capability of providing an incredible freedom of content you can create and publish, you cannot use a centralized platform. While sites like reddit or facebook might make it easier for other people to find your crap^Wcontent, they also make it infinitely easier to have it removed again.

zotz 15y ago
> Back when there was usenet NNTP is still alive. : )
- tptacek 15y ago
  This shit killed Usenet. Not just child porn, but that and a lot of things like it. (I ran a Freenix-competitive server in the '90s and hacked on INN). (Disclosure: it's sad it took Reddit this long to apply this rule, and more than a little repulsive to see people up in arms about it.)
  - zotz 15y ago
    > more than a little repulsive to see people up in arms about it. Agreed. Equating free speech with the ability to trade in sexual images of children is about the low-water mark for political philosophy applied to communications tech. All that being said, I miss the pre-AOL usenet.
    - pyre 15y ago
      > sexual images of children The real question is how far can you stretch this definition. If you find someone jacking off to a picture of a mother holding her newborn baby, is that image now 'sexual' and fair game for censorship? What about a couch[1]? [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGU7MlDYgXA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGU7MlDYgXA

zotz 15y ago

I've been banned from posting articles on some larger subreddits some time ago. My political, economic and historical opinions aren't welcome for some reason. My point? Reddit began banning political opinion long before it banned kiddie porn. Reddit's admins don't give a damn about freedom of speech and opinion.

blantonl 15y ago
subreddits are moderated by folks who are like-minded individuals that participate in the subreddit. It seems more likely that you were moderated by those subreddit admins, not the Reddit administration. Furthermore, Reddit is a private organization, and they don't have to give a damn about freedom of speech.
- zotz 15y ago
  I've been told, by a drunken reddit admin in a late night talk, that no one likes my opinions and I should just go away. True to form, callow youth are generally the most sure of their own views while also being sure that everyone else is wrong. > Reddit is a private organization, and they don't have to give a damn about freedom of speech. Agreed. They should stop acting like they care when they don't.
buro9 15y ago
You've touched upon an incredibly grey area. Most forums will ban trolls, but therein lies the problem: define "troll". I don't know what you said, where, and in what context... but I don't give benefit of doubt on this. Nor do I think you're guilty either... all I do know is that running a community is hard, and one of the things that the people of the community look to moderators to do is to keep the peace. A difference of opinion can be minor, or major. And depending on the topic it can be quite offensive to some. Have you considered that within a particular subreddit that the moderators were just trying to keep the peace? Has anything stopped you from starting your own subreddit to voice your opinion?
- zotz 15y ago
  > I don't know what you said The below article was deleted from the queue in r/politics and I've been unable to post articles in politics and a few other subreddits ever since, using a particular handle from a particular IP. Ron Paul’s Challenge to the Left: http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/07/a-question-of-morality-ron-paul%E2%80%99s-challenge-to-the-left/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/07/a-question-of-morality-ron... My point stands: reddit has been complicit in silencing political opinion long before it began worrying about whether child porn should be allowed or not.

jballanc 15y ago

There is a problem with online communities. Let's call it the problem of "false association". Humans have been forming communities for millennia. Inevitably, in these communities, there are bad apples. However, if there is a child molester that lives in my town, that fact does not (on its own) reflect poorly on me. Even if that molester was my next door neighbor, there may be a bit more suspicion ("how could you not know that was going on next door?"), but I am confident that 9 times out of 10 I would come away with my reputation unblemished. Of course, before the internet, communities were a more-or-less involuntary phenomenon. They were defined by geography, history, a common resource, or a common industry. Contrast that to online communities that are largely viewed as self-directed, voluntary organizations. This is the view, I think, that will eventually have to change. This view is poisonous for two reasons. First, as we see here, if anyone, anywhere in an online community (no matter how large) does something offensive, objectionable, or illegal, the knee-jerk reaction of society today is to allow that bad apple to spoil the bunch. Second, this makes it very difficult to form heterogeneous communities online. If I associate with people randomly online, I am a Google search away from being associated with a potential thief/pervert/whatever. The end result is that online communities become insular, or they can only function well under a banner of anonymity, but anonymity has its own problems. Reddit, it seems to me, struck a useful middle ground: partial anonymity with history (I can create an identity that does not lead back to my real life identity, but can still build up a reputation). Unfortunately, Reddit is still a business. It seems to me that something like Reddit, but based on a distributed model, is what we need. Let's call it...usenet

jasonkester 15y ago

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 illegal, right? Not really. Not at all, in fact. Reddit is not the United States. It's Reddit. Online communities are not democracies any more than your back garden is a democracy. You pull weeds, plant seeds, and otherwise encourage the plants in your garden to comport themselves in a manner that ends up with a pleasing result. It's your garden, so you have the absolute right to pull weeds. The weeds get no say. Reddit seems to have forgotten this for a while, and as a result they started sliding until they became, well, Reddit. The community we're currently discussing this in, on the other hand, has been a lot more conscientious in cultivating the type of garden it would like to see. And I think we can all say the result is a lot more pleasant than a less tended place such as Reddit or 4chan.

sophacles 15y ago
* And I think we can all say the result is a lot more pleasant than a less tended place such as Reddit or 4chan.* I am honestly not sure we can say that at all. I thoroughly enjoy both hn and reddit, for completely different reasons. Sure, from a strictly legal standpoint, it isn't censorship or a constitutional issue, but at the same time, the "anything goes" attitude in places like 4chan and reddit allow for a lot of creative gems and interesting discussion. People instinctively recognize that while you may have to schlep thought he muck to find those gems, it is still important to have an "anything goes place". People will feel betrayed when they put time and effort into making the community what it is, and suddenly the rules are changed on them -- all their effort has been co-opted or may be co-opted, for something they don't want. It feels slimy. (yes we are all aware there is no contract or law or whatever, blah blah legalistic point missing, but the decency of it is still in question). All that being said, I also like the curated, well organized topical community of HN, because sometimes I just don't want to wade through the crap, but that occasional preference switch doesn't diminish either form of community building.

patio11 15y ago

Tech sometimes gets a bum rap for being a bunch of nerdy white men verging on undiagnosed autism who exude toxic body odor and equally toxic misogyny. That's an unfair overgeneralization, right? It becomes difficult to say that that is in any way unfair if our community routinely signals that its idea of a strong principled stance on an issue of major importance is to protect the rights of /r/niggerjailbait to masturbate to photos of a 6 year-old collected from someone's social networking site. OK, so maybe you don't believe that. Alright, let me try again: suppose you're in the business of building applications which let unsophisticated Internet users exchange totally innocent information like pictures of their children, and suppose further that your ability to remain in business is in large part dependent on the government treating Internet businesses as harmless geekery which generally falls beneath the notice of the bureaucratic state. Why are you standing in chest-deep water on top of the temple to Zeus while wearing full-plate armor in the middle of a roaring tempest shouting "SMITE ME"? Do you think the likely reaction of your political representatives is going to be excising problematic content with surgical precision while leaving the rest of our industry to continue writing software in peace? Do you think your fellow citizens are going to look with favor on arguments about there being actually a lot of shades of gray in masturbatory material involving children and carefully examine the technical differences between e.g. DNS, websites, servers, subreddits, and the like when calling their Congressman's office to draft a measured, proportionate response? Do you affirmatively enjoy the prospect of having to spend multiple weeks reading about nothing other than the Save Our Pre-Adolescents Act when it gets introduced later? And when it commands supermajority support among the American polity?

DannoHung 15y ago

Y'know, it's one thing to be against laws that are ostensibly made in favor of prosecuting child pornography because they can be abused to censor things that are politically unpopular... it's a whole other bucket of beans to be against removing stuff that's basically child pornography because you think something that's politically unpopular might be removed.

jquery 15y ago
> basically child pornography Nothing that got banned was "basically child pornography." That's why there is blood in the water.
- DannoHung 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - ghani 15y ago
    The subreddits are as close as you can get to being illegal, but I think there's still a large (or at least significant) difference between the two. My only basis for that is my gut reaction, but I think it was what jquery was getting at. Not that they're truly unrelated.

dholowiski 15y ago

It's a business decision, plain and simple. Get over it.

Jun8 15y ago

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 thinks all who are on torrent sites are pirates and "hackers are baad and steal your CC numbers". This sort of blunt scare mongering demagogy is commonly used to create support from the masses, I am amazed that the HN crowd is also susceptible to it. Here are the facts as I believe them, please point out the ones you think are wrong: 1) Some of these subreddits may have contained CP, the illegal ones were being actively removed by admins. 2) Calling pictures of 16-year-olds in bikinis CP is not very useful and dilutes the term. 3) What is legal and morally right usually does not overlap 100%. Law may say one thing about CP and people may feel another thing. This is OK. Also different cultures, of course, have different attitudes. 4) In light of (3), to me there's "definitely bad CP" and "tolerable CP". The moral distinction is not clear cut and the law does not differentiate these. The situation is similar to the 55 mph speed limit, people break it everyday (avg speed on I-90 is more like 75mph) but if you do 85 the police will get you. So there's a tolerable zone and to me (2) falls in that category. 5) One has to be very careful with these outcries because they have the effect of ratcheting the law machine ever more tightly. Remember, no politician will put relaxation of sex offense laws on their ticket. But, please THINK A LITTLE AND RESEARCH before you pick up the pitchfork, e.g. read this (http://www.economist.com/node/14164614 http://www.economist.com/node/14164614). ADDENDUM: For (2), also consider the widespread use of young girls in advertising and movies, e.g. the Vanity Fair topless photoshoot of Miley Cyrus who was 15 at the time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miley_Cyrus#Controversies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miley_Cyrus#Controversies). This is just one that came to mind instantly, many more examples can easily be given.

dkersten 15y ago
ADDENDUM: For (2), also consider the widespread use of young girls in... Don't forget child beauty pageants. That stuff is IMHO often borderline pedophilia.
- 15y ago

wavephorm 15y ago

Reddit had the biggest hissy fit of all about how child porn laws like SOPA were going to go too far and ruin the internet. And here they go banning anything involving a bathing suit. The hypocricy is strong in this one.

pradocchia 15y ago
Not at all. It's quite typical for an industry to choose to regulate itself, when the alternative is statutory regulation imposed by the government.
nkohari 15y ago
Uh, SOPA wasn't a child porn law. It was a copyright enforcement law. By definition it didn't cover anything regarding illegal pornography, because illegal things aren't subject to copyright.

trb 15y ago

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 was allowed or not. Instead we tried to recruit mods that knew the community, the direction it was heading and were able to keep a level head. Sure, someone went overboard once in a while and deleted o.k. stuff, but we'd just remove their mod privileges and reinstate what they deleted (thinks were removed from the database 14 days after they were marked as "deleted"). We were never accused of harboring pedophiles, or going overboard with removal. Those that complained about free-speech were always radical political groups well outside of "acceptable" for most communities. The key is to find moderators in line with the community, in a benevolent dictator way. No idea if reddit could find enough of those, but it worked well for us and should scale with community size, as reddit has a larger pool to recruit from.

redslazer 15y ago
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.

sjs382 15y ago

Every time I see k5 get mentioned, I get all nostalgic and think there will never be a community as eclectic as k5 ever again...

nooneelse 15y ago
I get similar pangs of nostalgia.

sien 15y ago

It's surprising how people have these discussions and don't discuss Metafilter - the discussion site that works. What has set Metafilter apart from slashdot, K5, Digg and Reddit was that after the initial burst of building a good community it became $5 to join. That keeps out the morons and pays for moderators to get rid of the asshats. If HN wants to keep up the quality before the hordes arrive it'd be a good move here too or it will be a matter of time before the idiots kill the place.

Locke1689 15y ago

I'm not against Reddit's move, but I do think they're being more than a little naive if they think it will stop here. hueypriest (Reddit admin) says: /r/trees isn't in remotely the same legal area as CP stuff. Not even close. They'll ban /r/trees when they pry it out of our cold dead hands. And yet, facilitating a drug transaction is almost definitely illegal. Posting torrent links is at least legally dangerous. Sure, these things haven't become problems yet, but neither were the other things a couple years ago. What the Reddit admins are saying right now is that anything goes, as long as it doesn't represent a plausible legal threat that can be waged against them. This is fine. The problem is that Reddit doesn't know that they're saying this. They think it's about CP, but it's not, it's about legal threat.

diminoten 15y ago
The slippery slope you describe simply does not exist. "First they took the CP, and I said nothing..." is not a valid concern, primarily because CP has always been an issue, and whenever it's come up it's always been removed from Reddit. This change in position is not nearly as large as it seems. Contrast, as you seem to want to, with /r/trees. How many posts in /r/trees get taken down due to their questionable legality? How many posts in /r/letstradetorrents (apocryphal) get taken down due to their questionable legality? None and none. The nature of CP on the Internet is unique, and not viewed similarly to anything else on the Internet. Reddit isn't saying "as long as it doesn't represent a plausible legal threat that can be waged against them", they're saying, "as long as it's not CP, and as long as it's manageable through an ad-hoc process." Due to the SomethingAwful attack, or due to some other, unknown reason, the volume of CP was too high to continue to deal with it on an ad-hoc basis. That is all.
- Locke1689 15y ago
  First, I'm not saying that they shouldn't be taking the position they are. In fact, I believe that Reddit should always make the best effort to comport itself to US law in order to protect the site's existence for its users everywhere. However, I am saying that CP is not the only possible legal threat and it is naive to assume that it will continue to be the dominant legal threat going forward. Contrast, as you seem to want to, with /r/trees. How many posts in /r/trees get taken down due to their questionable legality? How many posts in /r/letstradetorrents (apocryphal) get taken down due to their questionable legality? None and none. The nature of CP on the Internet is unique, and not viewed similarly to anything else on the Internet. Reddit isn't saying "as long as it doesn't represent a plausible legal threat that can be waged against them", they're saying, "as long as it's not CP, and as long as it's manageable through an ad-hoc process." I agree that it is not yet a problem. Reddit has not yet been taken down by the FBI because of widespread drug trade on r/trees. Nor have they been sued because of torrent links. What I question is how long it will take before these things become issues? What I'm asking is: what is it about CP that makes it the only possible legal threat that Reddit can face? Reddit is still a maturing community that can evolve in many different ways. Reddit's policy is not about CP specifically, it's about credible legal threat. This is not what they say, but what they mean. If you think otherwise, I invite you to tell me what they will do if a non-CP related legal threat comes along.

rseymour 15y ago

"I originally cut my teeth on sites and services that, frankly, make 4chan and reddit (today’s all-too-frequent bogeymen) look like a knitting circle." WUT NET WUZ THIS GUY ON? K5/adequacy/early slashdot/b3ta/whatever... nothing like the internet of today. the volume of users alone leads to emergent (gross) behavior that before was drowned out in an invisible minority. USENET, IRC, same thing. You could find shady things if you looked for them, but no one (I knew of) actively did. Occasionally gross stuff would pop up in a listing of newsgroups, but you just didn't click. No one envies reddit, but they should've changed their policy earlier. Better late than never.

doki_pen 15y ago

Reddit is open source. If anyone thinks that this will ruin them then step up to the plate and compete on "freedom of speech"