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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

• 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.
      • eli 11y ago
        4chan was profitable? I find that very surprising.
        • fleitz 11y ago
          I know me too, Poole described it as 'technically profitable' not sure if that is ramen profitable, etc.
        • jaggederest 11y ago
          He said in an interview that it was technically profitable, but that nobody was taking a paycheck. That was in 2010. It's been supposed that the 'passes' system in 2012 made the site actually-profitable, but I haven't seen any statement to that effect. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/one-on-one-christopher-poole-founder-of-4chan/?_r=0 http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/one-on-one-christop...
          • brobinson 11y ago
            He also offered refunds for the passes last year because Google's new Recaptcha system meant that a lot of users were no longer seeing captchas at all.
    • rtpg 11y ago
      Alternatively, Reddit is trying to build a community around a bit more positivity, and has no obligation to continue dealing with bullies and fascists. People can express their freedom of speech elsewhere, I am extremely pleased with reddit getting rid of the most egregious subreddits
    • my-bullshit-job 11y ago
      Luckily you can choose what subreddits your ads appear in then....
  • PopeOfNope 11y ago
    Yes, he was. When GamerGate happened, that's exactly what he attempted to do. He replaced most of the mods on the site within a very short amount of time and the heavy handed policing started. Most of 4chan left in response. Many alternative chan sites were started, including 8ch.net.
    • fleitz 11y ago
      Touche, I stand corrected.
      • astrange 11y ago
        I recommend you stand un-corrected.
    • nemo1618 11y ago
      You're stating that like it's a fact. I don't think there's any credible evidence of the 4chan staff makeup changing significantly during GamerGate, other than a "leaked" IRC chatlog which essentially portrayed moot & mods cackling gleefully while rubbing their hands together like James Bond villains.
      • bsder 11y ago
        > IRC chatlog which essentially portrayed moot & mods cackling gleefully while rubbing their hands together like James Bond villains. To be fair, I kind of always assumed that moot and mods did what they did solely for the shits and giggles they themselves got out of it. It's not like they were running a distinguished web portal that would bring them fame, riches, and glory; they run the sewage pit of the Internet.
    • bramgg 11y ago
      > Most of 4chan left in response. Many alternative chan sites were started, including 8ch.net. A very small fraction of the worst bored on a bad website left to join an even worse website. Don't kid yourself.
  • pendo324 11y ago
    I feel offended by your recent action(s). Please read http://stop-irc-bullying.eu/stop http://stop-irc-bullying.eu/stop
  • jewbacca 11y ago
    > he was never dumb enough to try to police 4chan This is not true, there was a massive controversy and subsequent schism less than a year ago. A "folk history" (if you're feeling generous enough to call it that) of the episode here: https://encyclopediadramatica.se/M00t%27s_GamerGate_Sellout https://encyclopediadramatica.se/M00t%27s_GamerGate_Sellout
• tmerr 11y ago
  Not to mention there's a game of whack-a-mole going on where similar subreddits have been banned including fatpeoplehate2, 3, 4, 5, 8, and 9.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • derefr 11y ago
    If they really want to go down this road, it feels like there's only one destination: real Know-Your-Customer-esque identity verification to prevent registration of duplicate accounts, like banks and X.509 CAs do. If-and-when they do that, they will finally have an actually-effective tool (in the form of being able to ban people "for good") to stop harassment. Until then, it will just go on forever.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • yebyen 11y ago
      Urbit comes with this kind of identity management baked-in. It hasn't been shown yet to scale to the proportions of reddit. I'm not sure that even reddit has enough staff now to do that.
      • derefr 11y ago
        It seems like this is something that should only have to be done once, though. Ideally: imagine that the government of each state/country—who already have to work out how to deduplicate people for purposes of taxation, Social Security, etc.—acts as an OAuth identity provider. Then doing KYC becomes as simple as having a signup process that requires an OAuth login, and having a whitelist of identity providers you'll accept for that login (presumably just government ones, but there might be interesting edge-cases.) In other words, imagine a site that detects the country you're coming from, and presents a single button saying "Sign Up with [name of country] Federal IDPass" or something similar. The first time you see one, you'll probably be forced to set up your Federal IDPass account, which will likely be a huge hassle (though I could see it being as easy as showing up at e.g. your local post office with your regular physical ID. A process similar to voter registration.) Every time after that, it's like logging in with Google or Facebook.
• ljk 11y ago
  not only on /r/all, now on /r/pics a lof of the links are about... body-sizes, opinions about the CEO, etc
• emehrkay 11y ago
  This makes me want to leave Reddit alone.
  • codingdave 11y ago
    Me, too. I just blocked it on all devices on my home network. I wouldn't want to touch that community with a 10 foot patch cable.
  • cma 11y ago
    Why? Hackernews is way more heavily moderated and would never tolerate anything like those subreddits for a minute.
    • debaserab2 11y ago
      It would be more accurate to compare Hacker News to a single subreddit than it would to compare it to reddit as a whole. Like reddit, hacker news has it's own rules and tolerances in place, but reddit as a whole attempts to leave censorship up to the subreddit moderators.
  • Veedrac 11y ago
    It's worth noting that reddit is a big place. The majority of subs are largely free of this nonsense - it's the accumulation of it all that makes it look so prevalent. I only noticed what was up when The Verge wrote an article on it, for example, since I tend to browse subreddits directly.
• lnanek2 11y ago
  I think banning the fatpeoplehate subreddit wouldn't have gone over so badly if it wasn't for the fact that Ellen Pao was already kind of hated on the site for constantly banning and deleting anything disagreeing with her viewpoint about her law suit. Even political cartoons with her driving the tank and the reddit alien with a down vote in front were getting deleted, which were quite funny and appropriate, since she was shadow banning and deleting people basically for down voting her law suit. It's tough to stand up and defend the fatpeoplehate group, but when someone abusing their power and deleting anything they don't agree with in a lawsuit does it, well, in this case maybe a villain ruining the site on her managed to do something not terrible, but because she is a villain it comes across a lot worse.
  • leereeves 11y ago
    They even censored https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/39ddnb/if_you_dont_believe_in_freedom_of_speech_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/39ddnb/if_you_dont_... "If you don't believe in freedom of speech for those you loathe, you don't believe in freedom of speech." (1600 points and gone from http://reddit.com/r/bestof http://reddit.com/r/bestof)
    • felixgallo 11y ago
      In what sense is it ironic? Reddit is a private corporation unaffiliated with the United States Government.
      • leereeves 11y ago
        I was wrong, it's not ironic at all. Censoring a post criticizing censorship is perfectly consistent. Though not entirely consistent with their statement that "we do protect the right of people to express their views".
        • felixgallo 11y ago
          You will doubtless learn, in your travels, that not every corporation will die on the hill staying true to the maximal interpretation of a throwaway sentence posted on their free service.
• baby 11y ago
  I never understood why reddit was so lenient with its community. There are so many racists and hateful subreddits, that attract more and more people like that, that makes the community as a whole worse. I'm really glad that moderation actions like that are taken, and I'm sad that people reply to that by "harassing" the CEO... Hopefully such people will get frustrated by such events and will eventually leave reddit. Note that it's mostly people posting to /r/punchablefaces that are reaching r/all right. Another hateful reddit for you... PS: FWIW, /r/all has always been pretty bad. If you want a good reddit experience do like me: unsubscribe from most subreddits and suscribe to smaller subreddits with active moderators.
  • PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    > I never understood why reddit was so lenient with its community. There are so many racists and hateful subreddits, that attract more and more people like that, that makes the community as a whole worse. There's a large segment of the online community in general that understands the ideal of free speech to mean that no one may ever be prevented from saying anything, in any location or context. These folks believe that the banning of /r/shitniggerssay deserves exactly as much righteous indignation as, say, secret police disappearing anyone who speaks against the government. Reddit was founded on this ideal, and has only recently started to move away from it. This understanding of "free speech" was obviously originated by petulant children on BBSes and Usenet groups casting about for a justification to (ironically) silence anyone who disagreed with them. I'm not really clear how it became something that otherwise-rational adults espouse in defense of people other than themselves.
    • cousin_it 11y ago
      When you claim that an extreme emphasis on free speech originates from people who secretly wish to silence others, you might be inadvertently revealing something about yourself :-) My idea of free speech is that large privately-owned communication networks shouldn't engage in censorship, just like the government. If you disagree with that, say goodbye to free speech on the internet, because most of it is privately owned. Large websites are already cooperating with each other in censorship, and it's only a matter of time before ISPs join as well.
• Goronmon 11y ago
  (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 think people are just upvoting anything that is critical of reddit at the moment. I doubt most people actually care who, if anyone, is being targeted.
• powrtoch 11y ago
  The front page is pretty worrying. The situation seems almost identical to when Reddit axed r/jailbait: one of their more embarrassing communities started to get too much attention, its users were increasingly behaving in a way that was damaging Reddit, and Reddit decided to kill it (ostensibly for the greater good of the site). But even though that pissed plenty of people off... I don't recall the front page being totally dominated by calls for anyone's head on a silver platter. Reddit's userbase seems to feel especially threatened by Ellen Pao, and it's hard for me to believe that the difference is anything rational.
  • Goronmon 11y ago
    Reddit's userbase seems to feel especially threatened by Ellen Pao, and it's hard for me to believe that the difference is anything rational. Well, she has basically said that she wants to start cleaning up the "objectionable" sides of reddit. Plus, there is a strong sentiment that content that's critical of her (even the less hateful stuff) has been removed often in the past.
    • mintplant 11y ago
      I've seen plenty of these claims but far less in the way of actual removed content. My sense is that this is largely a myth used to stir up outrage.
      • djf1 11y ago
        It's a bit harder to link to this type of stuff because by definition its been removed, but for example, this sub has been banned today: https://np.reddit.com/r/paoiskillingreddit https://np.reddit.com/r/paoiskillingreddit here's a thread regarding a joke removed about two weeks ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/378smw/a_joke_making_fun_of_reddit_ceo_ellen_pao_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/378smw/a_jo...
        • programmernews3 11y ago
          I wonder why people don't use archive.is and archive.org to archive things more.
• txru 11y ago
  Here's /r/all as of about a half hour ago. Not cool. http://imgur.com/a/5KMCS#0 http://imgur.com/a/5KMCS#0
  • baby 11y ago
    meh. Mostly from r/punchablefaces which is another hateful subreddit.
    • txru 11y ago
      Yep. It's just a nice reminder for me to quietly stay subscribed to r/scala, r/learnprogramming, and r/AskHistorians.
      • __david__ 11y ago
        Yes, it's actually a testament of how good subreddits generally work that I didn't even know about all this going on until I happened to read it on another site. After reading Reddit for a couple hours. None of this nonsense showed up on my homepage at all.
  • tomphoolery 11y ago
    This is what I'm doing about it: http://i.imgur.com/E5tIRGg.png http://i.imgur.com/E5tIRGg.png
    • eertami 11y ago
      So... basically nothing?
  • eertami 11y ago
    Why not? It's pretty funny.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• a89anqm2ovn 11y ago
  Wow. Even though I'm somebody who thinks reddit has crossed the line into thought-policing the frontpage of /r/all is surprisingly ugly. An nice juxtoposition is the top post of the default homepage is social justice outrage about a police officer shooting somebody.
• voltagex_ 11y ago
  I think that's the end of my Reddit use then, the toxicity in a few fringe subreddits has spread into full blown septicemia. That's really sad - I don't think there's many communities like /r/assistance and even /r/buildapc around.
  • yanks 11y ago
    Just cut your ties with all the main ones and keep around the few you like, I did that ages ago and while my front page is a lot slower it I still get good content and decent people, and I honestly had no idea this stuff was going on until I went on hacker news, so that's nice.
  • oliyoung 11y ago
    as another comment said "If you want a good reddit experience do like me: unsubscribe from most subreddits and suscribe to smaller subreddits with active moderators." r/hiphopheads, r/nba and r/comicbooks are great communities in their own right
• zxcvcxz 11y ago
  They should just shut down the site. Who knew the internet would devolve into middle school bullying of fat people? It was just ten years or so ago that the kids started to get on myspace. We've reached the point where even the dumbest people have internet access. They've ruined everything.
• beloch 11y ago
  An analogy I like is "using a leaf blower in a sealed room full of leaves". Sure, you'll kick users out of their former resting spots on the floor, but they have nowhere to go and will just settle back into new resting spots after being in everybody's face for a little while.
• olefoo 11y ago
  The magnitude of an online shitstorm is never as big as any of the people involved believe it to be. This is reddit in the act of growing up. And it's about time and a a good thing in my opinion. I like that I manage my filters well enough that I visited reddit several times today and was blissfully unaware of this particular bit of drama.
• chjohasbrouck 11y ago
  Wow, that /r/all. I really thought Reddit was better than that.
• eivarv 11y ago
  Can someone explain how and/or why so many people have come to believe that freedom of speech obligates others to provide an arena for them to spread their opinions? I see mentions of thought-policing etc., but that's really wholly different from censorship and moderation.
  • renata 11y ago
    Nobody does, but up until now the reddit admins have been very supportive of the idea that they are a home for any content that isn't illegal. Former CEO of reddit, Yishan Wong: "We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19975375 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19975375 This is an obvious departure from this ideal.
    • eivarv 11y ago
      Thanks! I've seen loads of people espouse this belief though, and the current top comment [0] here links to a thread [1] that runs with the premise. A quick search of the site reveals that there are many more. I understand that point of view and agree with the need for those kinds of arenas. But even the article you link to state that doxxing and harassment goes against the TOS, which seems to be precisely what started this whole mess, from what I've gathered. Or at least that's what the official announcement [2] and /r/OutOfTheLoop [3] threads state. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9697285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9697285 [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/39c58h/could_someone_sue_reddit_for_banning_and/ http://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/39c58h/could_so... [2]: http://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removing_harassing_subreddits/ http://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removin... [3]: http://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/39bzdf/why_was_rfatpeoplehate_along_with_several_other/ http://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/39bzdf/why_was...