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Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

256 points by kolbe 11y ago

Most notable is /r/fatpeoplehate, which had become an extremely popular "fat-shaming" community.

Navarr 11y ago
Clarification from the Reddit Admins on their announcement post indicate that they're banning subs where moderators either took no action or encouraged organized harassment (as in going to other subs or websites and actively harassing the person in question) as opposed to subs that just post awful things about people.
- almaIV 11y ago
  I'm not sure how much I believe that. I've dealt with reddit's administrators from a moderator side before, and they can just shadowban moderators they don't like. It makes no sense to ban a subreddit for the actions of that subreddit's moderators when they can just remove the moderators that are the issue. I suspect they wanted to ban certain subreddits, and "the subreddit has toxic moderators" is a good reason to give publicly. Nonetheless, they've always had policies for dealing with toxic moderators that don't involve removal of subreddits.
  - Navarr 11y ago
    More "the entire subreddit is involved in the harassment of users by taking action outside of their subreddit"
- fleitz 11y ago
  Why not ban the people organizing these activities rather than the sub? It's a smoke screen for banning ideas.
  - lukeschlather 11y ago
    If the people organizing the activities are the moderators, how do you ban them without banning the sub?
    - fleitz 11y ago
      Ban the moderators but not the subs? Is this some sort of trick physics question? It seems to me to be possible to have this sort of feature in software... it's like a channel in IRC with out an op. Also, how is what the mods were doing not a speech issue? If crimes were committed surely reddit was not negligent in reporting these to authorities?
- girvo 11y ago
  You'd think so, but they're banning any new sub that attempts to be a "new" /r/fatpeoplehate -- if it's not about "banning ideas", but "banning behaviour", then I find that somewhat at odds. I think there's a simpler answer: FPH ended up on the front-page of /r/all constantly, and the Imgur staff "doxxing" (I've heard right before they were banned there was something happening regarding harassing the imgur editors outside of Reddit, though I don't know how true it is) was enough to get the admins to pull the plug. If you're monetising a website, and the most active and fasting growing sub on your website (aside from the defaults) is a subreddit dedicated to mocking fat people, I think that may make it a difficult sell.
  - toufka 11y ago
    Or, if you're monetizing a website and one of the largest hosts of your content (imgur) is being actively harassed by a minority of your users, you find a way to mend the insult. It's becoming more clear that Reddit took action specifically because of the Imgur insult, and that makes a lot of sense from a business perspective. But from a wider perspective it looks very focused and targeted - not in a good way.
    - girvo 11y ago
      > Or, if you're monetizing a website and one of the largest hosts of your content (imgur) is being actively harassed by a minority of your users, you find a way to mend the insult. I said exactly as much in my comment?
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    > You'd think so, but they're banning any new sub that attempts to be a "new" /r/fatpeoplehate Is there any reason at all to think that /r/fatpeoplehate5 is not going to be administrated in exactly the same way that /r/fatpeoplehate was?
- EC1 11y ago
  There's over 50 subs currently banned.
a89anqm2ovn 11y ago
> We’re banning behavior, not ideas. SRS has always had atrocious behavior that's been forgiven because of their ideas....
- mintplant 11y ago
  Can we please not bring this to HN as well?
  - a89anqm2ovn 11y ago
    Can we not bring this to HN as well? When you declare certain points of view to be out-of-bounds you deprive yourself of the opportunity to have your own views challenged. edit: I admit my comment above was a knee-jerk reaction and that in itself is a problem. One of the best parts of HN is the higher quality of comments and I would be sad if all the comments here had as little effort put into them.
  - AwkwardTurtle 11y ago
    Seriously, I started using HN specifically to avoid this sort of crap on reddit. I would strongly prefer it stay over there.
  - shard972 11y ago
    Is someone suggesting making a SHNS site? What do you mean?
    - gormo2 11y ago
      Actually "Shit HN Says" has been around for a long time.
  - mayneack 11y ago
    seems like this thread is inevitable on HN. I see no harm in discussing it within this thread. It hasn't been "brought to HN" until it's getting in the way of other things.
  - woah 11y ago
fleitz 11y ago
They aren't banning behavior, they're banning the expression of certain ideas. It would be one thing if the group was about beating up fat people, but posting comments online about them is clearly under the ideals of expression. If they want to ensure it's behavior and not ideas they should get a judge to rule on whether the expression would be constitutionally protected. And yes, as a private entity it is their prerogative to ban certain ideas on their site, however, they should just be honest about it, they are limiting speech in a manner that would likely be unconstitutional if they were a government entity, aka. they are abridging freedom of expression.
noahbradley 11y ago
For an... interesting take on all of this, there's always /r/conspiracy: https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/39ddf1/rfatpeoplehate2_has_been_banned/ https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/39ddf1/rfatpeop...
- PopeOfNope 11y ago
  Meh. IMHO, the real conspiracy here is Reddit's attempting to make it more palatable for advertisers so they can at least make an attempt at making money.
  - ljk 11y ago
    is /r/fph and relevant subreddit affecting reddit's advertising income that much that they needed to be shut down? if the subreddits were such a huge issue it's kind of interesting that I've never realized it till this thing broke today
  - Hytosys 11y ago
    I would never want my business to boil down to a collective of people who will undoubtedly be on the wrong side of history. It's bad mojo all around, not just bad money.
    - smsm42 11y ago
      I can't imagine how this could happen to Reddit - if some category of people is "on the wrong side of history", they are either a minority (however vocal) or are about to become a minority very soon - otherwise we couldn't really say the history is going against them, right? If the site is not a niche site but a broad host-all ad-supported site like Reddit, their income can't depend exclusively on a minority of users, statistically speaking. They may suffer a hit for alienating part of the audience, but they should still keep most of it, so it can't "boil down to" just "wrong side" people.
      - Hytosys 11y ago
        The wrong side of history being people who practice or support hate speech.
zxcvcxz 11y ago
I don't know how to feel about this. On one hand I'm against censorship, on the other I'm against internet bullying. /r/FatPeopleHate was engaging in both. In the end reddit is a private site that can do what it wants. Wikipedia removes things all the time and sites like 4chan remove all sorts of extremely offensive material. I'm glad the mods of the hate oriented subreddits have been shadow banned, I actually think this shit storm is wonderful and I hope the reddit admins literally pull the plug and shut down. The FPH spammers are complete idiots, buying thousands of guilds and donating money directly to reddit and hurting their cause by vote brigading at the same time. They're sealing their fate. This whole fiasco has shown the true face of reddit, just a whole bunch of (slightly below) average kids who don't deserve my attention. I can't wait until reddit dies, but I have no idea where I'll go. I want something like reddit, but more open and transparent, and with a way for users to somehow remove mods.
- deleted 11y ago
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- deleted 11y ago
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- GauntletWizard 11y ago
  Wikipedia has a stated goal, a public management team engaged in discussion and debate with their users, and something resembling accountability. Reddit has the Silicon Valley's most notorious gender-baiting troll as it's head, virtually zero interactions between the corporate side and the unpaid community managers, and no clear rules on what it does and doesn't allow. Honestly, the writing should have been obviously on the wall when r/jailbait was banned. I think they could have made up reasonings that would have placated the userbase, but they failed to, and they handled the resulting outrage very poorly. I was sorta surprised that wasn't reddit's 'digg moment', but I thought that the HDCP controversy was Digg's, so maybe I'm just ahead of the wave.
elinchrome 11y ago
Reddit has become a real cesspool over the past few years. You'll always find misogyny front and center and you don't have to dig to find racism.
- smegel 11y ago
  Feminism too.
  - brobdingnagian 11y ago
    +1
  - _kst_ 11y ago
    What? Are you comparing feminism to misogyny and racism?
    - 001sky 11y ago
      every 'ism has its bullies...
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - shard972 11y ago
      I don't find mind difference between the conduct of 3rd wave feminists and a lot of the misogyny and racism I see online.
      - honestcoyote 11y ago
        Every time I see this accusation against 3rd wave feminism, I realize the poster has no idea what 3rd wave feminism is. 2nd wave is the one which frightened insecure men, and had some strong anti porn and anti sex messages from a few proponents. 3rd wave, in short, is why don't we all get along, sex is awesome, and if we help men with some of their problems with toxic masculinity, then everyone is better off. edit: Here's a good & brief overview of feminism's waves - http://www.pacificu.edu/about-us/news-events/three-waves-feminism http://www.pacificu.edu/about-us/news-events/three-waves-fem...
drhodes 11y ago
AAAAAnd reddit just jumped the shark.
a2tech 11y ago
And yet subreddits like 'coonville' and 'GreatApes' still exist and continue shitting all over reddit. I know it makes my (black) wife feel welcomed when subreddits she frequents are slammed with the most virulent hate speech you can imagine.
- UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
  People keep bringing up racist subs, but it is unclear what exactly they're trying to argue. Should Reddit not ban anything because they haven't banned everything? I'd love to see them squish some of the subs mentioned, but ultimately today is just one day, and I'd prefer to see them take SOME action than sit around waiting for the day that they can sweep Reddit clean in one single swoop (which won't ever happen). PS - The two subs you listed have under 5K readers combined. FPH had 150,000. I've never seen any racist sub on /r/all but FPH was bullying on the front page daily.
- fleitz 11y ago
  There's nothing wrong with them banning those ideas, they just shouldn't claim their not banning ideas. I don't see why banning racist ideas would be so out there. Sure people are going to complain and leave, but aren't those like EXACTLY the people you want to leave?
mahouse 11y ago
This is pretty interesting. The top posts on all of reddit as of now: https://www.reddit.com/r/all https://www.reddit.com/r/all
- deanstag 11y ago
  it is quite funny to see another innocuous post amidst all the vile and hateful posts. "How do people even do this shit? (X-Post from /r/gtagifs) " (https://i.imgur.com/po4V0QW.gifv https://i.imgur.com/po4V0QW.gifv ) Edit : added quotes for clarity
  - zobzu 11y ago
    this guy with the truck is damn lucky.
- batiudrami 11y ago
  Like the Digg HDDVD encryption drama. http://i.imgur.com/0QLFsPo.png http://i.imgur.com/0QLFsPo.png
  - shpx 11y ago
    I love the irony of (poorly, see #8) censoring the original image https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ae/HD_DVD_Night_Digg_Frontpage_before_rose_blog_post_screenshot.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ae/HD_DVD_Night_...
ejcx 11y ago
The idea is to make people who are being harassed on reddit feel safe[0]. This goal is something I think everyone agrees is a good goal. As a policy decision, I think it is pretty weird they started banning communities instead of people. There are a lot of people on reddit and policing individual users would be a challenge. Would something like a "flag harassment" button have the same desired affect? 0 - http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removing_harassing_subreddits/cs23fzr http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removi...
- girvo 11y ago
  > This goal is something I think everyone agrees is a good goal Depends. As it stands, making something a "safe space" is a super broad goal that has some very fuzzy edges. But then, I enjoy dissent and viewpoints at odds with my own, and it's a private company that needs to make money, so I can understand it.
  - ejcx 11y ago
    Yes I agree. Everyone attaches their own meaning to that. I only mean it to be, a website where using it isn't going to get you needlessly harassed, doxed, threatened, etc. and when that kind of stuff happens, people don't find it acceptable. This is clearly a growing pain for reddit. Something like "reddiquitte" only scales so much.
- eli 11y ago
  I'd imagine a "flag harassment" tool would be used at least as often by abusers as the abused.
- zobzu 11y ago
  Admirable goal, wrong execution, not that its easy to get right, but still a classic.
- redml 11y ago
  The question is safe for who? Who are they trying to appease/attract to the site by changing it? They're just driving away their current userbase who likes things as they are. The time to set boundaries was during the sites initial founding. It's a little late to have regrets.
kzhahou 11y ago
A few weeks ago, /r/fatpeoplehate started showing up at the top of /r/all, every day. This was pretty lame, since I prefer /r/all versus home page. Anyone know how /r/fph suddenly jumped so high?
- girvo 11y ago
  > Anyone know how /r/fph suddenly jumped so high? It was the fastest growing subreddit outside of the defaults, and by far the most active. Turns out there's a large contingent of people who seem to hate fat people, at least that's how it seems anyway
  - eli 11y ago
    I'm speculating but it seems like an easy outlet for that "being offensive for its own sake" mindset you see sometimes in kids and young adults. I think it's part of growing up... It just happens that the Internet allows people to focus and concentrate that negative energy.
    - girvo 11y ago
      > I'm speculating but it seems like an easy outlet for that "being offensive for its own sake" mindset you see sometimes in kids and young adults Possibly, though theres /r/imgoingtohellforthis that literally aims for that exact "use-case", so whether FPH is the outlet for it I'm not sure? It's definitely possible though.
    - donw 11y ago
      While that's likely part of it, that's not the entirety of things. To be fair, I would wager that fatpeoplehate had its share of trolls, but I would definitely believe that the vast majority of its denizens were former fat people, and very frustrated at the obesity epidemic in the United States. Frustration leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. You know the rest. I speak here from some experience. Several members of my family are morbidly obese, with BMIs well north of 45. For the average person, obesity starts at a BMI of 30. More than a third of the population of the United States qualifies as obese. Obesity-related diseases are the leading cause of death, and the problem is getting worse. There are growing social movements that promote obesity as a way of life. This is simply insane. Nobody would promote anorexia as positive, or smoking, or heroin. Now, this would all be completely fine if it only impacted those that choose this lifestyle, but the problem impacts all of us, in the form of higher medical costs, greater danger for service personnel, and in the cost of infrastructure changes required to support the obese. Every holiday, I got to watch as some of the people I grew up with eat themselves into an early grave. To listen to them complain about their latest weight-related medical problem. To hear them make excuses and blame other people as to why they are sick. And then these same people would insult my spouse and I, because we control our diets and exercise regularly. I do not want to live in a society where this is accepted or encouraged. While I don't think that mocking fat people will solve the problem, I can understand how that particular community could grow so fast.
teraflop 11y ago
This article dramatically understates the magnitude of the shitstorm that is currently unfolding. Check out http://www.reddit.com/r/all/ http://www.reddit.com/r/all/ if you feel like seeing all the ugliness. (And if anyone has any doubts that this is ultimately about harassment, count how many of the posts on the front page (and their comments) are made up of personal attacks and/or obscenities targeted at CEO Ellen Pao.) I don't fault the Reddit admins for trying to clean things up but I can't see any good that will come of this. To paraphrase a comment that I saw earlier today and now can't find, it's like trying to get rid of an anthill with a leaf-blower; you just end up with pissed-off ants everywhere. EDIT: Ah, found it. It was in the "can I sue Reddit for violating my freedom of speech" thread in /r/legaladvice. http://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/39c58h/could_someone_sue_reddit_for_banning_and/cs2ch7d?context=4 http://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/39c58h/could_so...
- fleitz 11y ago
  You've got to give Christopher Poole credit, he was never dumb enough to try to police 4chan. This is as laughable as trying to get rid of trolling on IRC.
  - gkoberger 11y ago
    Reddit is a venture-funded company with a large staff that needs to monetize. Nobody wants their ad next to a post fat-shaming someone. I don't agree with censorship, however the two sites aren't comparable.
    - fleitz 11y ago
      The sites are very comparable, which is why everyone is comparing them. 4chan being profitable, and reddit not being profitable don't make them not comparable. Lots of ads have fat shaming in them, so I'm not sure why you wouldn't want diet pill ads next to fat shaming posts. Have you read any fitness articles recently? It's pretty much fat shaming content, next to ads for things that might make you less fat.
fuckedapanda 11y ago
This is just how it starts, who knows what they will define as harassment next.
evanriley 11y ago
I'm hoping this thread gets deleted, because the shitstorm is just going to come here sooner or later.
ChikkaChiChi 11y ago
Notch has the right idea. Why not just block the subreddits you find offensive? https://twitter.com/notch/status/608706518972788736 https://twitter.com/notch/status/608706518972788736 Reddit just put the world on notice that they are willing to become user babysitters, and historically this has never ended well for the company involved.
- sehr 11y ago
  AFAIK it is literally impossible to ban 150,000 users from your reddit viewing experience or whatever. The issue wasn't with the subreddit, it's with what it was doing outside the subreddit.
  - colept 11y ago
    The reddit admins failed to consider the Streisand effect: they made all of reddit an outlet by taking away the container that kept the hate isolated.
    - wetmore 11y ago
      It wasn't isolated. It showed up on the front page of /r/all frequently. This will die down/blow over in a week or so anyway.
      - colept 11y ago
        And now the hate is unconfined. The lesser nuclear solution to that problem would be to filter out undesirable content from /r/all to isolate it.
  - freebsdgirl 11y ago
    That's a request that was made recently to OAPI. Um. We might be working on that.
- dopamean 11y ago
  I think the problem is when people organize a trolling campaign in one subreddit and the conduct it in another.
sergiotapia 11y ago
This marks the beginning of the end of Reddit. It's been a long time coming and Reddit has become a huge promotional platform for pseudo user generated content submitted by shills and celebrities. A lot of people are migrating to Voat. http://voat.co http://voat.co
- sehr 11y ago
  I genuinely hope they do, it would be nice to browse reddit without them
  - feybay 11y ago
    You'll all be there in a few years if it sticks around.
  - UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
    That site has been down all day. But frankly if they get all of the racists/fat haters/misogynists/etc then Reddit will be significantly better for it. The site always had undertones of this stuff, but as the popularity grew these previously minority voices got louder and louder and harder to ignore until I myself don't spend a whole lot of time on Reddit now.
  - baby 11y ago
    If you look at parent's URL you will see mostly garbage. The migration of the shitty reddit to voat.com has begun :)
    - robot22 11y ago
      I wouldn't have agreed with you until today.
- infinitone 11y ago
  This. I was one from Digg to come to Reddit, but since then the quality of posts has gone to shit. Comments worse than Youtube sometimes.
spodek 11y ago
HN users consistently imply this place has better comments than Reddit. "Reddit is a cesspool." "Can we please not bring this to HN as well." etc. I've never had a problem avoiding content I didn't like there. Meanwhile I saw great discussions at various times. Here, on the other hand, I've nearly stopped reading. Besides the unjustified elitism, constantly I'd post on a thread here only to see it disappear with no explanation. I don't understand HN's weighting and it seems to change without notice, or it did a while ago. Arbitrary curating means someone is arbitrarily imposing their values on discussions. I prefer allowing legal speech. I generally preferred Reddit to HN and will probably end up going to Voat.co like everyone else talks about. EDIT: Case in point: When I posted the above, the story was number 1 and it was about fifty minutes old. When it hit one hour, it dropped to number 5. The stories that it dropped behind were 5 to 12 hours old so I doubt they suddenly got surges of activity. In the time I wrote the above edit this story dropped to number 11. Soon it will probably drop from the front page. Who knows? I don't understand HN's weighting. Maybe this story is getting downvoted and user behavior is driving its trajectory, but it seems arbitrary and tells me to leave the site. EDIT 2: corrected voat.co address thanks to ljk's comment.
- zxcvcxz 11y ago
  HN isn't very good, but it's a little better than the current state of reddit, which is like a middle school without adults. At least people try to be intellectual on HN.
  - batiudrami 11y ago
    It really depends where you look and what subreddits you subscribe to. Opening reddit this morning looked exactly the same to me as any other day, except for one thread because I'm subscribed to /r/subredditdrama.
    - Goronmon 11y ago
      Yeah, as bad as /r/all has been (though, I have to admit, I've been amused by the drama), my frontpage looks the same as any other day.
themeek 11y ago
I do not know about this specific case (looking at the subreddits I truly doubt it is an example) but there are examples of systems using anti-harrassment as a means to censor particular groups, links, and ideas. With a title like "'Troll hunting' algorithm could make web a better place" (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-04/14/google-algorithm-predicts-trolls-antisocial-behaviour http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-04/14/google-algori...) this algorithm seems like a true boon. It's only slightly suspicious (and can easily be explained away) that two of the three websites used in its study were political websites. You'd have to be pretty zany to leap to the conclusion that the paper had anything to do with censorship. It would look worse if one of its co-authors (Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil) received funding from the DoD to study the propagation of information through social media online (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.01383.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.01383.pdf) as part of DARPA SMISC - a strategic communications (DoD term for propaganda) research group that studies how information flows on social media and how to direct and disrupt it. Many researchers take grants from all over though, and anything in this area of study is likely to get investment from the DoD. So still it's more reasonable to think that, since he works in that area, of course he will receive DoD funding. Yet it was posted with 22 likes to NATO's Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (https://www.facebook.com/StratComCOE https://www.facebook.com/StratComCOE), a Facebook wall also contains a review of a book called "The Weaponization of Social Media" and announces its participation in a conference on “Cyberattacks and Propaganda: the Battlefield of Future”. As evidenced (again) as recently as this week by a group of people who run an anti-TPP website, there is an inter-website system for blocking posts to certain content (https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/38pmg8/hey_reddit_someone_is_trying_really_hard_to_erase/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/38pmg8/hey_redd...) - Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, etc all simultaneously blocked this website. Whether this was an error or not (it probably was), it points out there is a centralized system for blocking content. Both the Facebook emotion experiment and the Facebook vote experiment had ties to funding to the DoD (and Air Force though blurbs about funding from the Air Force, which handles cyber in the US, was erased from the academic's page when there was public attention; it was reported to be a clerical error). This is not to say that this is used inside the US to block US contibuted content. While the history of the United States Government in applying strategic communication and information support to US audiences has been slippery, and the Smith-Mundt Act (anti-propaganda law) was recently weakened under the justification that global interconnectedness of conversation, news and social media makes it difficult to prevent US propaganda intended for foreign audiences from making it back home. The new CEO of Reddit is on the board of a Washington Defense Thinktank. This anecdote doesn't imply anything. But it does mean that you should be asking Reddit and its CEO hard questions, you should be skeptical of intentions, and you should demand that Reddit - like all other companies that own your communications and socialization - keep themselves to the highest possible standards.
cousin_it 11y ago
Has any large website ever managed to stay censorship-free?
- baby 11y ago
  any website is "moderating" its content. Even 4chan.
fierycatnet 11y ago
This is like dream come true for voat dot co. I highly doubt there is going to be mass migration like it was with Digg but Voat is going to get quite a few users in the near future for what it's worth. In any case, Reddit has become a new mainstream site full of propaganda, censorship, shadowbanning, hand-picked news, etc. I've noticed a sharp decline in the last year or so. It's not even their new policy, it just feels like it Reddit got big enough to finally join any other mass media source of information, not in a good way.
- freebsdgirl 11y ago
  > This is like dream come true for voat dot co. A dream they weren't prepared for. The site has been in failboat mode all day. Should have designed to scale for all of those users that want to hate on fat people.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  Have fun with your mysoginistic, racist, hateful community.
pjscott 11y ago
In case anybody was wondering what the five communities are, here's the list of names: /r/FatPeopleHate /r/HamPlanetHatred /r/TransFags /r/NeoFAG /r/ShitNiggersSay
cft 11y ago
I truly hope that this will have one of two outcomes: 1. End of Chairman Pao's CEO term 2. End of Reddit. I find only these two outcomes desirable, because the third one is chilling free speech in the internet, the one that Ellen Pao is gunning for.
- wetmore 11y ago
  Lol, take it to /r/conspiracy bud.
im3w1l 11y ago
When something that was previously (more or less) politically neutral takes a stance people get upset. Especially when there is vendor lock-in. Some thought experiments: Imagine if Comcast blocked access to all liberal sites. Imagine if Microsoft word was changed so only pro-liberal documents could be created. For extra fun imagine if people could be "shadowbanned" so all their files were silently deleted. Imagine if Google could only be used to find websites that supported global warming. Imagine if Facebook messages could only send "patriotic" messages (as determined by their moderators). Imagine if Intel processors could only run non-violent games. These may seem weird comparisons because when we think of forums, we think of moderators having the power. But reddit isn't a forum. Reddit is basically a site that hosts forums. And now it wont host some of them anymore. Not only will it stop hosting some of them. It stopped hosting them unexpectedly, with a self-righteous "fuck-you".
- kayamon 11y ago
  That's not an especially useful comparsion. If Google didn't let people search for what they wanted, they'd just go use a different search engine. If reddit doesn't do what people want, there are other websites for them.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - namlem 11y ago
    The google example is bad, but I think it applies to reddit and facebook. There are no real alternatives to speak of. Now, if they really adopted policies that harsh, people would leave anyway and the competitors would experience a massive burst of growth. However, milder forms of biased content filtering could probably get through.
- tdmule 11y ago
  If we accept the premise of Reddit not as a forum, but as a host, perhaps a more apt analogy would be other hosts. For example, both AWS (http://aws.amazon.com/aup/ http://aws.amazon.com/aup/) and Google (https://cloud.google.com/terms/aup https://cloud.google.com/terms/aup) have very broad acceptable usage policies that allow for doing anything deemed legal by US law.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rak_112 11y ago
SJWs are cancer. Reddit staff ban opposing views while letting people who are blindly liberal off the hook for having the 'correct' views.
jacquesm 11y ago
This is probably the best illustration of the 'no broken windows' theory at work on the web. You can start a new community and keep it 'clean' from day one, but you can't let your community turn into a cesspool and then one day decide to clean it up, the inmates will be able to achieve critical mass and they'll happily burn down the asylum if they can't have their cesspool back. What I really don't get is that they choose these 5 subreddits to ban, reddit has at least 50 (and probably more) subreddits that are arguably a lot more offensive than the ones they just blocked.
- fleitz 11y ago
  Yup, it's like trying to clean up a crack neighborhood when the rent is already cheap everywhere else. You cant gentrify reddit because there's no incentive to be the first to go back to the cesspool.
- thaumaturgy 11y ago
  > What I really don't get is that they choose these 5 subreddits to ban, reddit has at least 50 (and probably more) subreddits that are arguably a lot more offensive than the ones they just blocked. I think this is the key thing that's really got everyone all in a tizzy. There are a pile of subreddits that the vast majority of Reddit users would like to see gone: topics that aren't just politically divisive, but are offensive for the sake of being offensive. Instead, the only thing that's consistent about Reddit's decisions to police subreddits is that it's inconsistent. Reddit's administration looks like they're generally OK with whatever's on the site up until it gets some kind of exposure elsewhere and only then does it get banned, and then the reasons given for it don't make any sense given the site as a whole. I think Reddit is actually in a unique position to start cleaning up their site. They don't have any real competition at the moment and they have a huge userbase. They could probably institute and enforce new consistent site-wide policies and actually get away with it. But this blindfolded "pin the ban on the subreddit" game is only succeeding in irritating their users and making the admins look ham-handed. On a side note, I was a little disappointed to see kn0thing's name prominently on the announcement. He's always seemed like a smart, level-headed guy. I'd genuinely love to hear from him how the subreddit banning policy makes any kind of sense. (Alexis, are you lurking here?)
mmalon6 11y ago
My two cents: 1) Reddit is a business and has certain interests at stake. If they want to seriously monetize their inventory (i.e., subreddits and pages), it needs to be with content that jives with advertisers. Odious content and sub-reddits are kryptonite to advertisers. Clorox doesn't want to see their advertising next to fat-shaming/racist/misogynistic horseshit. 2) Whether or not you think Reddit is suppressing "freedom of speech" is irrelevant (I personally don't think they are). What matters to Reddit is that those who contribute objectionable content according to advertisers leave the site, either because their subreddit has been shut down or because they find Reddit is suppressing their freedom of speech. All those pages were a cost to Reddit that had no chance of making money. When they're gone, they don't have to worry about them anymore. Reddit is probably rooting for other platforms, like Voat, to get traction so that people who want to post horseshit don't linger and leave immediately.
archagon 11y ago
People always say that Reddit is fine, you just have to unsub from the defaults. That's nonsense. The defaults are representative of the userbase of the site, and their values seep into every crevice. Furthermore, Reddit has never actually been about "free speech". The vast, vast majority of people who browse Reddit don't do it because they can say whatever they want; they do it because it's an esay way to aggregate and consume light content. I mean, this should be obvious to anyone who uses Reddit with any frequency. The people who trot out the free speech defense — at least from what I routinely see on the site itself — are often exactly the ones who enjoy reading vile subs like /r/fatpeoplehate. If Reddit can't survive this cleanup, then good fucking riddance.
jokoon 11y ago
I really wonder if there's not some money involved into those subreddits. It seems pretty easy for a PR company to just create fake accounts and build a popular subreddit and pretend that "the reddit community is angry". I'm really starting to doubt that plain users can put so much energy in hating fat people, and I'm really dubious that it would create such chaos. I wonder if the popularity of reddit has not brought some attention from PR groups.
themeekforgotpw 11y ago
The West is so inconsistent. It will cheer as Charlie Hebdo mocks the prophet of a quarter of the living people on Earth. "Free speech!" But then it will close down forums where some people say mean things about some other people. "Propriety!" "It's 'curated' or 'managed', not censored!"
- andrewflnr 11y ago
  It's almost as if The West isn't a monoculture, and contains people who disagree with each other.
  - themeekforgotpw 11y ago
    I don't think we can characterize it as that. Of course there are people who disagree with one another (everywhere). This comment above is about consensus - or its approximate form - that ends up dominating the conversation.
- _pmf_ 11y ago
  > It will cheer as Charlie Hebdo mocks the prophet of a quarter of the living people on Earth. I think the gentlemen shooting bullets at the Charlie Hebdo authors contributed quite a bit to this attitude of defiance.
  - themeekforgotpw 11y ago
    I think state sponsored messaging helped as much. But sure. I don't think that's at odds with the claim at the top.
digitalzombie 11y ago
Ugh... the majority of the ban was pretty reasonable. The fatpeoplehate was the one that got many redditors' panty in a bunch. Now I'm stuck with all these fatpeoplehate post on the front page.
_pmf_ 11y ago
Claiming that insulting obese people in an extremely offensive and aggressive manner for the sole purpose of personal entertainment has anything to do with free speech is something that even the average 14 year old Redditor should be able to recognize as a bit bold.
Eupolemos 11y ago
I'm all for moderation, be it votes weighed by algorithms or by taking a stance on communicative quality. I'm for it, because otherwise easy gratification comments is all I'm ever going to see. But I am very much against the "For Safety!" stance. That is not what Reddit is about. I don't think angry Redditors is for Hate, they are against Safety. IMHO, that is pretty simple.
thrillgore 11y ago
I think community oriented websites have stress moments, typically policy or technical in nature, that signal the period in which uniques begin a steady drop-off. Digg has its with the move to approved submitters in v4. I fear while banning FPH was the right thing to do, this is going to stunt the uniques that Reddit draws. And i'll leave it at that because it looks like, if the comments are telling, Hacker News is going full-on Eternal September right now.
chippy 11y ago
Digg users went to reddit, and reddit techies went to HackerNews. The classic early adopters, high technology users were the people going first. They went because there was a better alternative. Firstly it's the wrong sort of user that is thinking of leaving reddit - these are a lot of the latecomers and consumers rather than the early adopters. Secondly, these types of users will not be going to Voat because it is not a better alternative. If someone comes along and creates a better alternative, we will be pulled towards it, not pushed from something else.

256 points by kolbe 11y ago

Most notable is /r/fatpeoplehate, which had become an extremely popular "fat-shaming" community.

Clarification from the Reddit Admins on their announcement post indicate that they're banning subs where moderators either took no action or encouraged organized harassment (as in going to other subs or websites and actively harassing the person in question) as opposed to subs that just post awful things about people.

almaIV 11y ago
I'm not sure how much I believe that. I've dealt with reddit's administrators from a moderator side before, and they can just shadowban moderators they don't like. It makes no sense to ban a subreddit for the actions of that subreddit's moderators when they can just remove the moderators that are the issue. I suspect they wanted to ban certain subreddits, and "the subreddit has toxic moderators" is a good reason to give publicly. Nonetheless, they've always had policies for dealing with toxic moderators that don't involve removal of subreddits.
- Navarr 11y ago
  More "the entire subreddit is involved in the harassment of users by taking action outside of their subreddit"
fleitz 11y ago
Why not ban the people organizing these activities rather than the sub? It's a smoke screen for banning ideas.
- lukeschlather 11y ago
  If the people organizing the activities are the moderators, how do you ban them without banning the sub?
  - fleitz 11y ago
    Ban the moderators but not the subs? Is this some sort of trick physics question? It seems to me to be possible to have this sort of feature in software... it's like a channel in IRC with out an op. Also, how is what the mods were doing not a speech issue? If crimes were committed surely reddit was not negligent in reporting these to authorities?
girvo 11y ago
You'd think so, but they're banning any new sub that attempts to be a "new" /r/fatpeoplehate -- if it's not about "banning ideas", but "banning behaviour", then I find that somewhat at odds. I think there's a simpler answer: FPH ended up on the front-page of /r/all constantly, and the Imgur staff "doxxing" (I've heard right before they were banned there was something happening regarding harassing the imgur editors outside of Reddit, though I don't know how true it is) was enough to get the admins to pull the plug. If you're monetising a website, and the most active and fasting growing sub on your website (aside from the defaults) is a subreddit dedicated to mocking fat people, I think that may make it a difficult sell.
- toufka 11y ago
  Or, if you're monetizing a website and one of the largest hosts of your content (imgur) is being actively harassed by a minority of your users, you find a way to mend the insult. It's becoming more clear that Reddit took action specifically because of the Imgur insult, and that makes a lot of sense from a business perspective. But from a wider perspective it looks very focused and targeted - not in a good way.
  - girvo 11y ago
    > Or, if you're monetizing a website and one of the largest hosts of your content (imgur) is being actively harassed by a minority of your users, you find a way to mend the insult. I said exactly as much in my comment?
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  > You'd think so, but they're banning any new sub that attempts to be a "new" /r/fatpeoplehate Is there any reason at all to think that /r/fatpeoplehate5 is not going to be administrated in exactly the same way that /r/fatpeoplehate was?
EC1 11y ago
There's over 50 subs currently banned.

a89anqm2ovn 11y ago

> We’re banning behavior, not ideas. SRS has always had atrocious behavior that's been forgiven because of their ideas....

mintplant 11y ago
Can we please not bring this to HN as well?
- a89anqm2ovn 11y ago
  Can we not bring this to HN as well? When you declare certain points of view to be out-of-bounds you deprive yourself of the opportunity to have your own views challenged. edit: I admit my comment above was a knee-jerk reaction and that in itself is a problem. One of the best parts of HN is the higher quality of comments and I would be sad if all the comments here had as little effort put into them.
- AwkwardTurtle 11y ago
  Seriously, I started using HN specifically to avoid this sort of crap on reddit. I would strongly prefer it stay over there.
- shard972 11y ago
  Is someone suggesting making a SHNS site? What do you mean?
  - gormo2 11y ago
    Actually "Shit HN Says" has been around for a long time.
- mayneack 11y ago
  seems like this thread is inevitable on HN. I see no harm in discussing it within this thread. It hasn't been "brought to HN" until it's getting in the way of other things.
- woah 11y ago

fleitz 11y ago

They aren't banning behavior, they're banning the expression of certain ideas. It would be one thing if the group was about beating up fat people, but posting comments online about them is clearly under the ideals of expression. If they want to ensure it's behavior and not ideas they should get a judge to rule on whether the expression would be constitutionally protected. And yes, as a private entity it is their prerogative to ban certain ideas on their site, however, they should just be honest about it, they are limiting speech in a manner that would likely be unconstitutional if they were a government entity, aka. they are abridging freedom of expression.

noahbradley 11y ago

For an... interesting take on all of this, there's always /r/conspiracy: https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/39ddf1/rfatpeoplehate2_has_been_banned/ https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/39ddf1/rfatpeop...

PopeOfNope 11y ago
Meh. IMHO, the real conspiracy here is Reddit's attempting to make it more palatable for advertisers so they can at least make an attempt at making money.
- ljk 11y ago
  is /r/fph and relevant subreddit affecting reddit's advertising income that much that they needed to be shut down? if the subreddits were such a huge issue it's kind of interesting that I've never realized it till this thing broke today
- Hytosys 11y ago
  I would never want my business to boil down to a collective of people who will undoubtedly be on the wrong side of history. It's bad mojo all around, not just bad money.
  - smsm42 11y ago
    I can't imagine how this could happen to Reddit - if some category of people is "on the wrong side of history", they are either a minority (however vocal) or are about to become a minority very soon - otherwise we couldn't really say the history is going against them, right? If the site is not a niche site but a broad host-all ad-supported site like Reddit, their income can't depend exclusively on a minority of users, statistically speaking. They may suffer a hit for alienating part of the audience, but they should still keep most of it, so it can't "boil down to" just "wrong side" people.
    - Hytosys 11y ago
      The wrong side of history being people who practice or support hate speech.

zxcvcxz 11y ago

I don't know how to feel about this. On one hand I'm against censorship, on the other I'm against internet bullying. /r/FatPeopleHate was engaging in both. In the end reddit is a private site that can do what it wants. Wikipedia removes things all the time and sites like 4chan remove all sorts of extremely offensive material. I'm glad the mods of the hate oriented subreddits have been shadow banned, I actually think this shit storm is wonderful and I hope the reddit admins literally pull the plug and shut down. The FPH spammers are complete idiots, buying thousands of guilds and donating money directly to reddit and hurting their cause by vote brigading at the same time. They're sealing their fate. This whole fiasco has shown the true face of reddit, just a whole bunch of (slightly below) average kids who don't deserve my attention. I can't wait until reddit dies, but I have no idea where I'll go. I want something like reddit, but more open and transparent, and with a way for users to somehow remove mods.

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GauntletWizard 11y ago
Wikipedia has a stated goal, a public management team engaged in discussion and debate with their users, and something resembling accountability. Reddit has the Silicon Valley's most notorious gender-baiting troll as it's head, virtually zero interactions between the corporate side and the unpaid community managers, and no clear rules on what it does and doesn't allow. Honestly, the writing should have been obviously on the wall when r/jailbait was banned. I think they could have made up reasonings that would have placated the userbase, but they failed to, and they handled the resulting outrage very poorly. I was sorta surprised that wasn't reddit's 'digg moment', but I thought that the HDCP controversy was Digg's, so maybe I'm just ahead of the wave.

elinchrome 11y ago

Reddit has become a real cesspool over the past few years. You'll always find misogyny front and center and you don't have to dig to find racism.

smegel 11y ago
Feminism too.
- brobdingnagian 11y ago
  +1
- _kst_ 11y ago
  What? Are you comparing feminism to misogyny and racism?
  - 001sky 11y ago
    every 'ism has its bullies...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - shard972 11y ago
    I don't find mind difference between the conduct of 3rd wave feminists and a lot of the misogyny and racism I see online.
    - honestcoyote 11y ago
      Every time I see this accusation against 3rd wave feminism, I realize the poster has no idea what 3rd wave feminism is. 2nd wave is the one which frightened insecure men, and had some strong anti porn and anti sex messages from a few proponents. 3rd wave, in short, is why don't we all get along, sex is awesome, and if we help men with some of their problems with toxic masculinity, then everyone is better off. edit: Here's a good & brief overview of feminism's waves - http://www.pacificu.edu/about-us/news-events/three-waves-feminism http://www.pacificu.edu/about-us/news-events/three-waves-fem...

drhodes 11y ago

AAAAAnd reddit just jumped the shark.

a2tech 11y ago

And yet subreddits like 'coonville' and 'GreatApes' still exist and continue shitting all over reddit. I know it makes my (black) wife feel welcomed when subreddits she frequents are slammed with the most virulent hate speech you can imagine.

UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
People keep bringing up racist subs, but it is unclear what exactly they're trying to argue. Should Reddit not ban anything because they haven't banned everything? I'd love to see them squish some of the subs mentioned, but ultimately today is just one day, and I'd prefer to see them take SOME action than sit around waiting for the day that they can sweep Reddit clean in one single swoop (which won't ever happen). PS - The two subs you listed have under 5K readers combined. FPH had 150,000. I've never seen any racist sub on /r/all but FPH was bullying on the front page daily.
fleitz 11y ago
There's nothing wrong with them banning those ideas, they just shouldn't claim their not banning ideas. I don't see why banning racist ideas would be so out there. Sure people are going to complain and leave, but aren't those like EXACTLY the people you want to leave?

mahouse 11y ago

This is pretty interesting. The top posts on all of reddit as of now: https://www.reddit.com/r/all https://www.reddit.com/r/all

deanstag 11y ago
it is quite funny to see another innocuous post amidst all the vile and hateful posts. "How do people even do this shit? (X-Post from /r/gtagifs) " (https://i.imgur.com/po4V0QW.gifv https://i.imgur.com/po4V0QW.gifv ) Edit : added quotes for clarity
- zobzu 11y ago
  this guy with the truck is damn lucky.
batiudrami 11y ago
Like the Digg HDDVD encryption drama. http://i.imgur.com/0QLFsPo.png http://i.imgur.com/0QLFsPo.png
- shpx 11y ago
  I love the irony of (poorly, see #8) censoring the original image https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ae/HD_DVD_Night_Digg_Frontpage_before_rose_blog_post_screenshot.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ae/HD_DVD_Night_...

ejcx 11y ago

The idea is to make people who are being harassed on reddit feel safe[0]. This goal is something I think everyone agrees is a good goal. As a policy decision, I think it is pretty weird they started banning communities instead of people. There are a lot of people on reddit and policing individual users would be a challenge. Would something like a "flag harassment" button have the same desired affect? 0 - http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removing_harassing_subreddits/cs23fzr http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removi...

girvo 11y ago
> This goal is something I think everyone agrees is a good goal Depends. As it stands, making something a "safe space" is a super broad goal that has some very fuzzy edges. But then, I enjoy dissent and viewpoints at odds with my own, and it's a private company that needs to make money, so I can understand it.
- ejcx 11y ago
  Yes I agree. Everyone attaches their own meaning to that. I only mean it to be, a website where using it isn't going to get you needlessly harassed, doxed, threatened, etc. and when that kind of stuff happens, people don't find it acceptable. This is clearly a growing pain for reddit. Something like "reddiquitte" only scales so much.
eli 11y ago
I'd imagine a "flag harassment" tool would be used at least as often by abusers as the abused.
zobzu 11y ago
Admirable goal, wrong execution, not that its easy to get right, but still a classic.
redml 11y ago
The question is safe for who? Who are they trying to appease/attract to the site by changing it? They're just driving away their current userbase who likes things as they are. The time to set boundaries was during the sites initial founding. It's a little late to have regrets.

kzhahou 11y ago

A few weeks ago, /r/fatpeoplehate started showing up at the top of /r/all, every day. This was pretty lame, since I prefer /r/all versus home page. Anyone know how /r/fph suddenly jumped so high?

girvo 11y ago
> Anyone know how /r/fph suddenly jumped so high? It was the fastest growing subreddit outside of the defaults, and by far the most active. Turns out there's a large contingent of people who seem to hate fat people, at least that's how it seems anyway
- eli 11y ago
  I'm speculating but it seems like an easy outlet for that "being offensive for its own sake" mindset you see sometimes in kids and young adults. I think it's part of growing up... It just happens that the Internet allows people to focus and concentrate that negative energy.
  - girvo 11y ago
    > I'm speculating but it seems like an easy outlet for that "being offensive for its own sake" mindset you see sometimes in kids and young adults Possibly, though theres /r/imgoingtohellforthis that literally aims for that exact "use-case", so whether FPH is the outlet for it I'm not sure? It's definitely possible though.
  - donw 11y ago
    While that's likely part of it, that's not the entirety of things. To be fair, I would wager that fatpeoplehate had its share of trolls, but I would definitely believe that the vast majority of its denizens were former fat people, and very frustrated at the obesity epidemic in the United States. Frustration leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. You know the rest. I speak here from some experience. Several members of my family are morbidly obese, with BMIs well north of 45. For the average person, obesity starts at a BMI of 30. More than a third of the population of the United States qualifies as obese. Obesity-related diseases are the leading cause of death, and the problem is getting worse. There are growing social movements that promote obesity as a way of life. This is simply insane. Nobody would promote anorexia as positive, or smoking, or heroin. Now, this would all be completely fine if it only impacted those that choose this lifestyle, but the problem impacts all of us, in the form of higher medical costs, greater danger for service personnel, and in the cost of infrastructure changes required to support the obese. Every holiday, I got to watch as some of the people I grew up with eat themselves into an early grave. To listen to them complain about their latest weight-related medical problem. To hear them make excuses and blame other people as to why they are sick. And then these same people would insult my spouse and I, because we control our diets and exercise regularly. I do not want to live in a society where this is accepted or encouraged. While I don't think that mocking fat people will solve the problem, I can understand how that particular community could grow so fast.

teraflop 11y ago

This article dramatically understates the magnitude of the shitstorm that is currently unfolding. Check out http://www.reddit.com/r/all/ http://www.reddit.com/r/all/ if you feel like seeing all the ugliness. (And if anyone has any doubts that this is ultimately about harassment, count how many of the posts on the front page (and their comments) are made up of personal attacks and/or obscenities targeted at CEO Ellen Pao.) I don't fault the Reddit admins for trying to clean things up but I can't see any good that will come of this. To paraphrase a comment that I saw earlier today and now can't find, it's like trying to get rid of an anthill with a leaf-blower; you just end up with pissed-off ants everywhere. EDIT: Ah, found it. It was in the "can I sue Reddit for violating my freedom of speech" thread in /r/legaladvice. http://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/39c58h/could_someone_sue_reddit_for_banning_and/cs2ch7d?context=4 http://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/39c58h/could_so...

fleitz 11y ago
You've got to give Christopher Poole credit, he was never dumb enough to try to police 4chan. This is as laughable as trying to get rid of trolling on IRC.
- gkoberger 11y ago
  Reddit is a venture-funded company with a large staff that needs to monetize. Nobody wants their ad next to a post fat-shaming someone. I don't agree with censorship, however the two sites aren't comparable.
  - fleitz 11y ago
    The sites are very comparable, which is why everyone is comparing them. 4chan being profitable, and reddit not being profitable don't make them not comparable. Lots of ads have fat shaming in them, so I'm not sure why you wouldn't want diet pill ads next to fat shaming posts. Have you read any fitness articles recently? It's pretty much fat shaming content, next to ads for things that might make you less fat.

fuckedapanda 11y ago

This is just how it starts, who knows what they will define as harassment next.

evanriley 11y ago

I'm hoping this thread gets deleted, because the shitstorm is just going to come here sooner or later.

ChikkaChiChi 11y ago

Notch has the right idea. Why not just block the subreddits you find offensive? https://twitter.com/notch/status/608706518972788736 https://twitter.com/notch/status/608706518972788736 Reddit just put the world on notice that they are willing to become user babysitters, and historically this has never ended well for the company involved.

sehr 11y ago
AFAIK it is literally impossible to ban 150,000 users from your reddit viewing experience or whatever. The issue wasn't with the subreddit, it's with what it was doing outside the subreddit.
- colept 11y ago
  The reddit admins failed to consider the Streisand effect: they made all of reddit an outlet by taking away the container that kept the hate isolated.
  - wetmore 11y ago
    It wasn't isolated. It showed up on the front page of /r/all frequently. This will die down/blow over in a week or so anyway.
    - colept 11y ago
      And now the hate is unconfined. The lesser nuclear solution to that problem would be to filter out undesirable content from /r/all to isolate it.
- freebsdgirl 11y ago
  That's a request that was made recently to OAPI. Um. We might be working on that.
dopamean 11y ago
I think the problem is when people organize a trolling campaign in one subreddit and the conduct it in another.

sergiotapia 11y ago

This marks the beginning of the end of Reddit. It's been a long time coming and Reddit has become a huge promotional platform for pseudo user generated content submitted by shills and celebrities. A lot of people are migrating to Voat. http://voat.co http://voat.co

sehr 11y ago
I genuinely hope they do, it would be nice to browse reddit without them
- feybay 11y ago
  You'll all be there in a few years if it sticks around.
- UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
  That site has been down all day. But frankly if they get all of the racists/fat haters/misogynists/etc then Reddit will be significantly better for it. The site always had undertones of this stuff, but as the popularity grew these previously minority voices got louder and louder and harder to ignore until I myself don't spend a whole lot of time on Reddit now.
- baby 11y ago
  If you look at parent's URL you will see mostly garbage. The migration of the shitty reddit to voat.com has begun :)
  - robot22 11y ago
    I wouldn't have agreed with you until today.
infinitone 11y ago
This. I was one from Digg to come to Reddit, but since then the quality of posts has gone to shit. Comments worse than Youtube sometimes.

spodek 11y ago

HN users consistently imply this place has better comments than Reddit. "Reddit is a cesspool." "Can we please not bring this to HN as well." etc. I've never had a problem avoiding content I didn't like there. Meanwhile I saw great discussions at various times. Here, on the other hand, I've nearly stopped reading. Besides the unjustified elitism, constantly I'd post on a thread here only to see it disappear with no explanation. I don't understand HN's weighting and it seems to change without notice, or it did a while ago. Arbitrary curating means someone is arbitrarily imposing their values on discussions. I prefer allowing legal speech. I generally preferred Reddit to HN and will probably end up going to Voat.co like everyone else talks about. EDIT: Case in point: When I posted the above, the story was number 1 and it was about fifty minutes old. When it hit one hour, it dropped to number 5. The stories that it dropped behind were 5 to 12 hours old so I doubt they suddenly got surges of activity. In the time I wrote the above edit this story dropped to number 11. Soon it will probably drop from the front page. Who knows? I don't understand HN's weighting. Maybe this story is getting downvoted and user behavior is driving its trajectory, but it seems arbitrary and tells me to leave the site. EDIT 2: corrected voat.co address thanks to ljk's comment.

zxcvcxz 11y ago
HN isn't very good, but it's a little better than the current state of reddit, which is like a middle school without adults. At least people try to be intellectual on HN.
- batiudrami 11y ago
  It really depends where you look and what subreddits you subscribe to. Opening reddit this morning looked exactly the same to me as any other day, except for one thread because I'm subscribed to /r/subredditdrama.
  - Goronmon 11y ago
    Yeah, as bad as /r/all has been (though, I have to admit, I've been amused by the drama), my frontpage looks the same as any other day.

themeek 11y ago

I do not know about this specific case (looking at the subreddits I truly doubt it is an example) but there are examples of systems using anti-harrassment as a means to censor particular groups, links, and ideas. With a title like "'Troll hunting' algorithm could make web a better place" (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-04/14/google-algorithm-predicts-trolls-antisocial-behaviour http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-04/14/google-algori...) this algorithm seems like a true boon. It's only slightly suspicious (and can easily be explained away) that two of the three websites used in its study were political websites. You'd have to be pretty zany to leap to the conclusion that the paper had anything to do with censorship. It would look worse if one of its co-authors (Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil) received funding from the DoD to study the propagation of information through social media online (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.01383.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.01383.pdf) as part of DARPA SMISC - a strategic communications (DoD term for propaganda) research group that studies how information flows on social media and how to direct and disrupt it. Many researchers take grants from all over though, and anything in this area of study is likely to get investment from the DoD. So still it's more reasonable to think that, since he works in that area, of course he will receive DoD funding. Yet it was posted with 22 likes to NATO's Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (https://www.facebook.com/StratComCOE https://www.facebook.com/StratComCOE), a Facebook wall also contains a review of a book called "The Weaponization of Social Media" and announces its participation in a conference on “Cyberattacks and Propaganda: the Battlefield of Future”. As evidenced (again) as recently as this week by a group of people who run an anti-TPP website, there is an inter-website system for blocking posts to certain content (https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/38pmg8/hey_reddit_someone_is_trying_really_hard_to_erase/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/38pmg8/hey_redd...) - Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, etc all simultaneously blocked this website. Whether this was an error or not (it probably was), it points out there is a centralized system for blocking content. Both the Facebook emotion experiment and the Facebook vote experiment had ties to funding to the DoD (and Air Force though blurbs about funding from the Air Force, which handles cyber in the US, was erased from the academic's page when there was public attention; it was reported to be a clerical error). This is not to say that this is used inside the US to block US contibuted content. While the history of the United States Government in applying strategic communication and information support to US audiences has been slippery, and the Smith-Mundt Act (anti-propaganda law) was recently weakened under the justification that global interconnectedness of conversation, news and social media makes it difficult to prevent US propaganda intended for foreign audiences from making it back home. The new CEO of Reddit is on the board of a Washington Defense Thinktank. This anecdote doesn't imply anything. But it does mean that you should be asking Reddit and its CEO hard questions, you should be skeptical of intentions, and you should demand that Reddit - like all other companies that own your communications and socialization - keep themselves to the highest possible standards.

cousin_it 11y ago

Has any large website ever managed to stay censorship-free?

baby 11y ago
any website is "moderating" its content. Even 4chan.

fierycatnet 11y ago

This is like dream come true for voat dot co. I highly doubt there is going to be mass migration like it was with Digg but Voat is going to get quite a few users in the near future for what it's worth. In any case, Reddit has become a new mainstream site full of propaganda, censorship, shadowbanning, hand-picked news, etc. I've noticed a sharp decline in the last year or so. It's not even their new policy, it just feels like it Reddit got big enough to finally join any other mass media source of information, not in a good way.

freebsdgirl 11y ago
> This is like dream come true for voat dot co. A dream they weren't prepared for. The site has been in failboat mode all day. Should have designed to scale for all of those users that want to hate on fat people.
s73v3r 11y ago
Have fun with your mysoginistic, racist, hateful community.

pjscott 11y ago

In case anybody was wondering what the five communities are, here's the list of names: /r/FatPeopleHate /r/HamPlanetHatred /r/TransFags /r/NeoFAG /r/ShitNiggersSay

cft 11y ago

I truly hope that this will have one of two outcomes: 1. End of Chairman Pao's CEO term 2. End of Reddit. I find only these two outcomes desirable, because the third one is chilling free speech in the internet, the one that Ellen Pao is gunning for.

wetmore 11y ago
Lol, take it to /r/conspiracy bud.

im3w1l 11y ago

When something that was previously (more or less) politically neutral takes a stance people get upset. Especially when there is vendor lock-in. Some thought experiments: Imagine if Comcast blocked access to all liberal sites. Imagine if Microsoft word was changed so only pro-liberal documents could be created. For extra fun imagine if people could be "shadowbanned" so all their files were silently deleted. Imagine if Google could only be used to find websites that supported global warming. Imagine if Facebook messages could only send "patriotic" messages (as determined by their moderators). Imagine if Intel processors could only run non-violent games. These may seem weird comparisons because when we think of forums, we think of moderators having the power. But reddit isn't a forum. Reddit is basically a site that hosts forums. And now it wont host some of them anymore. Not only will it stop hosting some of them. It stopped hosting them unexpectedly, with a self-righteous "fuck-you".

kayamon 11y ago
That's not an especially useful comparsion. If Google didn't let people search for what they wanted, they'd just go use a different search engine. If reddit doesn't do what people want, there are other websites for them.
- deleted 11y ago
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- namlem 11y ago
  The google example is bad, but I think it applies to reddit and facebook. There are no real alternatives to speak of. Now, if they really adopted policies that harsh, people would leave anyway and the competitors would experience a massive burst of growth. However, milder forms of biased content filtering could probably get through.
tdmule 11y ago
If we accept the premise of Reddit not as a forum, but as a host, perhaps a more apt analogy would be other hosts. For example, both AWS (http://aws.amazon.com/aup/ http://aws.amazon.com/aup/) and Google (https://cloud.google.com/terms/aup https://cloud.google.com/terms/aup) have very broad acceptable usage policies that allow for doing anything deemed legal by US law.

deleted 11y ago

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rak_112 11y ago

SJWs are cancer. Reddit staff ban opposing views while letting people who are blindly liberal off the hook for having the 'correct' views.

jacquesm 11y ago

This is probably the best illustration of the 'no broken windows' theory at work on the web. You can start a new community and keep it 'clean' from day one, but you can't let your community turn into a cesspool and then one day decide to clean it up, the inmates will be able to achieve critical mass and they'll happily burn down the asylum if they can't have their cesspool back. What I really don't get is that they choose these 5 subreddits to ban, reddit has at least 50 (and probably more) subreddits that are arguably a lot more offensive than the ones they just blocked.

fleitz 11y ago
Yup, it's like trying to clean up a crack neighborhood when the rent is already cheap everywhere else. You cant gentrify reddit because there's no incentive to be the first to go back to the cesspool.
thaumaturgy 11y ago
> What I really don't get is that they choose these 5 subreddits to ban, reddit has at least 50 (and probably more) subreddits that are arguably a lot more offensive than the ones they just blocked. I think this is the key thing that's really got everyone all in a tizzy. There are a pile of subreddits that the vast majority of Reddit users would like to see gone: topics that aren't just politically divisive, but are offensive for the sake of being offensive. Instead, the only thing that's consistent about Reddit's decisions to police subreddits is that it's inconsistent. Reddit's administration looks like they're generally OK with whatever's on the site up until it gets some kind of exposure elsewhere and only then does it get banned, and then the reasons given for it don't make any sense given the site as a whole. I think Reddit is actually in a unique position to start cleaning up their site. They don't have any real competition at the moment and they have a huge userbase. They could probably institute and enforce new consistent site-wide policies and actually get away with it. But this blindfolded "pin the ban on the subreddit" game is only succeeding in irritating their users and making the admins look ham-handed. On a side note, I was a little disappointed to see kn0thing's name prominently on the announcement. He's always seemed like a smart, level-headed guy. I'd genuinely love to hear from him how the subreddit banning policy makes any kind of sense. (Alexis, are you lurking here?)

mmalon6 11y ago

My two cents: 1) Reddit is a business and has certain interests at stake. If they want to seriously monetize their inventory (i.e., subreddits and pages), it needs to be with content that jives with advertisers. Odious content and sub-reddits are kryptonite to advertisers. Clorox doesn't want to see their advertising next to fat-shaming/racist/misogynistic horseshit. 2) Whether or not you think Reddit is suppressing "freedom of speech" is irrelevant (I personally don't think they are). What matters to Reddit is that those who contribute objectionable content according to advertisers leave the site, either because their subreddit has been shut down or because they find Reddit is suppressing their freedom of speech. All those pages were a cost to Reddit that had no chance of making money. When they're gone, they don't have to worry about them anymore. Reddit is probably rooting for other platforms, like Voat, to get traction so that people who want to post horseshit don't linger and leave immediately.

archagon 11y ago

People always say that Reddit is fine, you just have to unsub from the defaults. That's nonsense. The defaults are representative of the userbase of the site, and their values seep into every crevice. Furthermore, Reddit has never actually been about "free speech". The vast, vast majority of people who browse Reddit don't do it because they can say whatever they want; they do it because it's an esay way to aggregate and consume light content. I mean, this should be obvious to anyone who uses Reddit with any frequency. The people who trot out the free speech defense — at least from what I routinely see on the site itself — are often exactly the ones who enjoy reading vile subs like /r/fatpeoplehate. If Reddit can't survive this cleanup, then good fucking riddance.

jokoon 11y ago

I really wonder if there's not some money involved into those subreddits. It seems pretty easy for a PR company to just create fake accounts and build a popular subreddit and pretend that "the reddit community is angry". I'm really starting to doubt that plain users can put so much energy in hating fat people, and I'm really dubious that it would create such chaos. I wonder if the popularity of reddit has not brought some attention from PR groups.

themeekforgotpw 11y ago

The West is so inconsistent. It will cheer as Charlie Hebdo mocks the prophet of a quarter of the living people on Earth. "Free speech!" But then it will close down forums where some people say mean things about some other people. "Propriety!" "It's 'curated' or 'managed', not censored!"

andrewflnr 11y ago
It's almost as if The West isn't a monoculture, and contains people who disagree with each other.
- themeekforgotpw 11y ago
  I don't think we can characterize it as that. Of course there are people who disagree with one another (everywhere). This comment above is about consensus - or its approximate form - that ends up dominating the conversation.
_pmf_ 11y ago
> It will cheer as Charlie Hebdo mocks the prophet of a quarter of the living people on Earth. I think the gentlemen shooting bullets at the Charlie Hebdo authors contributed quite a bit to this attitude of defiance.
- themeekforgotpw 11y ago
  I think state sponsored messaging helped as much. But sure. I don't think that's at odds with the claim at the top.

digitalzombie 11y ago

Ugh... the majority of the ban was pretty reasonable. The fatpeoplehate was the one that got many redditors' panty in a bunch. Now I'm stuck with all these fatpeoplehate post on the front page.

_pmf_ 11y ago

Claiming that insulting obese people in an extremely offensive and aggressive manner for the sole purpose of personal entertainment has anything to do with free speech is something that even the average 14 year old Redditor should be able to recognize as a bit bold.

Eupolemos 11y ago

I'm all for moderation, be it votes weighed by algorithms or by taking a stance on communicative quality. I'm for it, because otherwise easy gratification comments is all I'm ever going to see. But I am very much against the "For Safety!" stance. That is not what Reddit is about. I don't think angry Redditors is for Hate, they are against Safety. IMHO, that is pretty simple.

thrillgore 11y ago

I think community oriented websites have stress moments, typically policy or technical in nature, that signal the period in which uniques begin a steady drop-off. Digg has its with the move to approved submitters in v4. I fear while banning FPH was the right thing to do, this is going to stunt the uniques that Reddit draws. And i'll leave it at that because it looks like, if the comments are telling, Hacker News is going full-on Eternal September right now.

chippy 11y ago

Digg users went to reddit, and reddit techies went to HackerNews. The classic early adopters, high technology users were the people going first. They went because there was a better alternative. Firstly it's the wrong sort of user that is thinking of leaving reddit - these are a lot of the latecomers and consumers rather than the early adopters. Secondly, these types of users will not be going to Voat because it is not a better alternative. If someone comes along and creates a better alternative, we will be pulled towards it, not pushed from something else.