8 ms·

No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on. The shutdowns

by amyjess 11y ago

No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on. The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong. And your claims of censorship are, quite frankly, disturbing. The subreddits shut down last month were all hate groups that were targeting individuals for harassment and posting their photographs without permission in order to attack them. I've personally seen my pictures posted by one of these groups twice, and the day before those subs got banned, there was a very upset mother asking what recourse she had because these hate groups were posting pictures of her underage child and refused to take them down (and I distinctly remember this because I was one of a handful of people who helped teach her how to message the admins).

embik 11y ago
> The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong. That's not how I observed the situation honestly. A lot of subreddit mods got flooded with "shut down"-requests and some decided against it, some followed the mass. It wasn't really a hostage-taking, the shutdown has / had widespread support among the user base.
- slg 11y ago
  >The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power users to treat the majority of users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing the majority of users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong. Does that fix the problems with the above sentences? Regardless of who was ultimately behind it, the shutdowns were a "I'm taking my ball and going home" move at the expense of the entire Reddit community.
  - zxcvcxz 11y ago
    So it's okay when reddit does it because they're a private corporation and can censor whatever they want, but when the mods of a subreddit censor themselves there's a problem? Hypocrisy and double standards.
    - uxp 11y ago
      I don't think you're correctly characterizing the subreddit shutdowns. When someone in power silences someone else's speech or expression, then it's correctly a form of censorship, like what management did with r/fatpeoplehate. When the owners, creators or moderators of their own speech or expressions stop producing that content as what many subreddits did in response to r/iama suspending operations, purportedly not out of protest but out of a lack of understanding of a current situation, then it's protest. Censorship is a top-down use of power to silence a majority. Protest is a middle-up form of power to inconvenience a majority to apply pressure to the power holders. They aren't the same.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    Actually it was a reaction by the Reddit community to management idiocy. As such, it was entirely justified. You don't seem to understand how this works. Reddit does not own the community. Reddit hosts the community, and in return the community provides content for Reddit. The community has already moved from another provider, and if Reddit carries on with more management idiocy, it will move again. Social is littered with the crumbling ruins of corps that believed they were too big to fail, but which fell off the world after Doing Stupid Shit for too long.
    - slg 11y ago
      You are defining the community as people who interact with the site (or maybe content creators). I am defining it as people who visit the site. The old 90-10-1 rule suggests the community how you define it is only a small subset of the community how I defined it. If someone doesn't care enough to even create an account on Reddit, what makes you think they have strong feeling about the personnel decisions of the company?
- heyheyhey 11y ago
  > It wasn't really a hostage-taking, the shutdown has / had widespread support among the user base. Don't believe this for one second. Like many others have said, it was mostly a vocal minority. /r/pics has 8+ million subscribers and you think a majority of those subscribers wanted it to be shut down? I'm honestly surprised the mods have the power to shut down a default subreddit.
  - worklogin 11y ago
    Subscription numbers on a default sub are useless.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    > and you think a majority of those subscribers wanted it to be shut down? And you think it didn't? I don't see you offering up any evidence for your position other than assuming they can't have because of the sheer number. Meanwhile we have at least some indication that there were support well beyond the moderators, in the form of heavily upvoted threads with large number of comments in support of shutdowns for many subreddits. It's very possible that the majority didn't support the shutdowns, but that support went far beyond the moderators is a fact easily ascertained by looking at the threads.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      Voting on Pao's comments visualised: https://i.imgur.com/nrYiK5M.png https://i.imgur.com/nrYiK5M.png From https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3cjsm7/ellen_paos_comment_karma_visualized_oc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3cjsm7/ell...
    - heyheyhey 11y ago
      > Meanwhile we have at least some indication that there were support well beyond the moderators, in the form of heavily upvoted threads with large number of comments in support of shutdowns for many subreddits. To be honest, it's hard to argue either way. Going by your indication, if we look at /r/all the past week and all the submissions comparing Ellen Pao to Kim Jong-Il or Mao Zedong, would you say reddit widely supports this comparison?
flatline 11y ago
I laugh when people complain about removal of /r/fatpeoplehate being censorship. The only reason that subreddit was such a problem is because of aggressive moderation and banning of users - i.e. censorship at the moderator level rather than the admin level.
- adnzzzzZ 11y ago
  One of the point of subreddits is to let people create their own rules (whatever those rules might be) and enforce them at their own discretion. As long as people aren't breaking reddit's global rules then subreddits should have the right to implement whatever rules they see fit, including heavy moderation. What the parent post was complaining about was censorship performed at the admin level (reddit's management), not the moderator level. Stuff like shadowbans (which have been increasing a lot lately), removing posts from /r/all and so on.
- bduerst 11y ago
  It's a cognitive bias. The assertion from the admins was pretty clear regarding the harassment of individuals and threats of violence, but rather than acknowledge their prejudice, some have tried to make it into a first amendment issue. On a privately owned website.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    There is no public ground on the Internet. Everything is owned by someone or some corporation. Our ideas about free speech will have to adapt to that reality, or they will be lost entirely.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - makomk 11y ago
    Part of the problem was that there was no transparency and almost anything can count as "harassment" - for example, I've seen journalists accuse people of harassment because they've searched their name on Twitter and found people mocking some of their more ill thought-out articles. If you actually dug into the details it was obvious why the admins banned /r/fatpeoplehate, but few did and those details didn't make the news either.
Shivetya 11y ago
I don't know, quite a few users were in full support of the move. The likely ones who were not simply knew nothing of what is going on as a great many users are simply not interested or unable to understand. It was selective censorship. There are many subs,some quite well known, who are more flagrant than some of the subs shut down. FatPeopleHate was the most famous that was canned and it was likely at the request of IMGUR staff as they were having a pissing contest with content posters. There are quite a few very racists and sexist subs left so this was highly selective. As, a SJW dream hit which many labled the Reddit Wedding. Personal stories aside, individual posters are who should be banned for violating site rules, not entire subs and certainly not their mods as many of them were trying to enforce rules only to be shot down by reddit admin
joshie_woshie 11y ago
Your language is pretty strong and one-sided -- 'petulant moves...to treat their users as pawns'? Have you even been paying attention? A lot of those moderators actively sought the opinions of their subreddits before blacking out. It was often the communities, and not the moderators, instigating those decisions. The censorship claims do not just apply to the hateful subreddits that were shut down -- censorship happens in more insidious ways, too. A lot of posts involving the Reddit debacle have been swept away, comments deleted, users shadowbanned. I think this is the kind of censorship that's being highlighted.
- tptacek 11y ago
  Because the language on the other side is, what, carefully reasoned and neutral in tone?
zxcvcxz 11y ago
> No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on. Well the moderators say that was only part of it, but after reading your whole comment it seems you're just here to push your authoritarian political agenda under the guise of social justice by ignoring half the facts. >And your claims of censorship are, quite frankly, disturbing. Half your comment history is disturbing. I support the removal of /r/fatpeoplehate, but you're trying really hard to paint the parent comment in bad light to push your political agenda. They never said they support FPH, but you make it seem as if they must be a "disturbed" individual. They said that the censorship is heavy-handed censorship that appears to be applied inconsistently. It would be pretty hard to push your authoritarian political agenda without demonizing others though.
jperras 11y ago
> No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on. As stated in the article, this was one of the reasons. The other reason is as you would suspect: > The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that the pattern of removing tools and failing to improve available tools to the community at large, not merely the moderators, was an affront to the people who use the site.
mason240 11y ago
They shut downs of other subs was overwhelmingly supported by the users.
- amyjess 11y ago
  No, it was supported by a loud and vocal minority of witch-hunters. Most people just want to use reddit normally.
  - ChargingWookie 11y ago
    How do you know that?
    - johnward 11y ago
      I don't think poster knows for sure but you can assume based on traffic levels to comments and just general web stats. A majority of users don't comment on anything. Most people don't even create an account to vote. They probably don't even know what was going on.
      - npizzolato 11y ago
        That seems like a pretty silly argument. You can literally use it as an argument against any sort of change because "most people don't vote." In fact they do vote, not with upvotes and comments but with their views. Those views indicate the place is somewhere they like spending their time, which is primarily a function of the moderators and the people posting content to the subreddit in the first place (the "vocal minority"). Since they already show they appreciate the work of those people by regularly viewing the content, it's actually more likely they agree with that minority by default than disagree.
        johnward 11y ago
        Maybe they do agree? We don't really know because they are the "non-vocal majority". I'm willing to bet a large portion have no interest in reddit's internal politics or the mods struggle. They just want their cat pics. I do agree that they find value in the content or they wouldn't keep coming back and that the content comes from the minority. Reddit is really walking the edge. Things like this are why a bunch of users switched to reddit from digg in the first place. I don't think they will hesitate to do it again. They will follow the content submitters. Most social sites seem pretty similar as far as user interaction other than click through. I got 60k page views from one top HN post, a couple hundred upvotes, and probably less than 100 comments on the thread and my blog.
jonlucc 11y ago
The problem with shutting down the hateful subreddits is that they didn't communicate clearly. In that, they left a lot of room for rumors and speculation about why that sub was shut down for "harassment" when others that seem more harass-y were not targeted. Remember, most users never visited those subs, and weren't in the know about their modus operandi. Those rumors led to the takedowns looking like censorship of distasteful content to many users. If it was censorship of distasteful or rude content, then there are many other subs that should fall alongside those taken down. I think if they had said that the people in those subs were posting pictures of people and not responding in a timely manner to legitimate requests by aggrieved people portrayed on those subs, the users who don't really care about those subs would have brushed it off.
smudgy 11y ago
It's quite obvious that you have a greivence against part of the reddit user base since, as you mentioned, you have been the focus of their hate before. I appreciate your opinion on why the other subreddits were taken offline but I must remind you it's just that, an opinion - only that, it means nothing in the bigger scheme of things.
- FireBeyond 11y ago
  As opposed to everyone else here, who is offering unequivocal fact? No, wait, everyone else here is offering opinions, too.
worklogin 11y ago
>The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong. Reddit is a free chat site with a decentralized power structure (in theory). Reddit can be useful, and I know there are supportive subs there, but /r/gaming and /r/science going down for a day was not harmful. People probably got a bit more sun that day.
derptron 11y ago
So you're a fat SJW that advocates censorship of entire subs because of a few rule breakers. Gotcha. Hope you realize that there are many more "hate" subs that continue to operate unabated. I am picturing you frothing at the mouth while messaging admins begging any remaining subs that you disagree with to be banned. That's what you do, right? Picking and choosing what subs to censor is the disturbing part here. And no, just because you agree with a sub getting banned doesn't magically make it not censorship. Both unpopular and popular views can be censored.
- hoopd 11y ago
  This isn't how we behave here.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  >So you're a fat SJW that advocates censorship of entire subs because of a few rule breakers. Name calling isn't appreciated here. You'll find that HN is even more curated than reddit. Please keep these reddit attitudes at reddit.
  - derptron 11y ago
    What if I told you those "attitudes" exist outside of Reddit?
- saboot 11y ago
  | So you're a fat SJW Really? That's the level of thinking that those who claim censorship on reddit are operating on? It wasn't about views people disagree with (hence why the chimpire subreddits are still active). FPH actively engaged in harassment of individuals by both subscribers and moderators. And speaking of censorship the FPH mods would ban any "sympathetic views" of ridiculed individuals.
  - makomk 11y ago
    That's basically how /r/fatpeoplehate thought - anyone who disagreed with them was obviously just a fatty, and therefore subhuman. (The moderators literally banned anyone who showed any empathy to a fat person - it was even in the rules - and this seems to have resulted in about the culture you'd expect.)
kevdigital 11y ago
The other subs shutting down "in protest" I found laughable. I had a hard time understanding what exactly they were protesting and the vocal minority sounded like a lot of people just raging against the machine. Reddit the company is the power structure and people just want to tear them down. But why exactly? Not sure. This reminds me a lot of Occupy Wall Street. People see one protest breaking out then pile on with their own grievances. There was a lack of communication to the /r/iama mods about Victoria being let go...ok...now we're complaining about mod tools and censorship??
- Nadya 11y ago
  This has been building up for a long time. Recent events was just the catalyst.
zedpm 11y ago
I'm sorry that you were harassed by Reddit users; I certainly don't approve of that behavior. Like I said before, however, conflating those rotten actions by certain individuals with the larger ideological issues is not constructive. My complaint wasn't against censorship per se, but rather against what appears to be biased censorship. Certain harassment subreddits continue to exist, and it appears that they do so because their ideology is more closely aligned with Reddit management/admins than the ones that were banned. Rules need to be applied equally.

by amyjess 11y ago

embik 11y ago

> The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong. That's not how I observed the situation honestly. A lot of subreddit mods got flooded with "shut down"-requests and some decided against it, some followed the mass. It wasn't really a hostage-taking, the shutdown has / had widespread support among the user base.

slg 11y ago
>The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power users to treat the majority of users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing the majority of users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong. Does that fix the problems with the above sentences? Regardless of who was ultimately behind it, the shutdowns were a "I'm taking my ball and going home" move at the expense of the entire Reddit community.
- zxcvcxz 11y ago
  So it's okay when reddit does it because they're a private corporation and can censor whatever they want, but when the mods of a subreddit censor themselves there's a problem? Hypocrisy and double standards.
  - uxp 11y ago
    I don't think you're correctly characterizing the subreddit shutdowns. When someone in power silences someone else's speech or expression, then it's correctly a form of censorship, like what management did with r/fatpeoplehate. When the owners, creators or moderators of their own speech or expressions stop producing that content as what many subreddits did in response to r/iama suspending operations, purportedly not out of protest but out of a lack of understanding of a current situation, then it's protest. Censorship is a top-down use of power to silence a majority. Protest is a middle-up form of power to inconvenience a majority to apply pressure to the power holders. They aren't the same.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  Actually it was a reaction by the Reddit community to management idiocy. As such, it was entirely justified. You don't seem to understand how this works. Reddit does not own the community. Reddit hosts the community, and in return the community provides content for Reddit. The community has already moved from another provider, and if Reddit carries on with more management idiocy, it will move again. Social is littered with the crumbling ruins of corps that believed they were too big to fail, but which fell off the world after Doing Stupid Shit for too long.
  - slg 11y ago
    You are defining the community as people who interact with the site (or maybe content creators). I am defining it as people who visit the site. The old 90-10-1 rule suggests the community how you define it is only a small subset of the community how I defined it. If someone doesn't care enough to even create an account on Reddit, what makes you think they have strong feeling about the personnel decisions of the company?
heyheyhey 11y ago
> It wasn't really a hostage-taking, the shutdown has / had widespread support among the user base. Don't believe this for one second. Like many others have said, it was mostly a vocal minority. /r/pics has 8+ million subscribers and you think a majority of those subscribers wanted it to be shut down? I'm honestly surprised the mods have the power to shut down a default subreddit.
- worklogin 11y ago
  Subscription numbers on a default sub are useless.
- vidarh 11y ago
  > and you think a majority of those subscribers wanted it to be shut down? And you think it didn't? I don't see you offering up any evidence for your position other than assuming they can't have because of the sheer number. Meanwhile we have at least some indication that there were support well beyond the moderators, in the form of heavily upvoted threads with large number of comments in support of shutdowns for many subreddits. It's very possible that the majority didn't support the shutdowns, but that support went far beyond the moderators is a fact easily ascertained by looking at the threads.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Voting on Pao's comments visualised: https://i.imgur.com/nrYiK5M.png https://i.imgur.com/nrYiK5M.png From https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3cjsm7/ellen_paos_comment_karma_visualized_oc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3cjsm7/ell...
  - heyheyhey 11y ago
    > Meanwhile we have at least some indication that there were support well beyond the moderators, in the form of heavily upvoted threads with large number of comments in support of shutdowns for many subreddits. To be honest, it's hard to argue either way. Going by your indication, if we look at /r/all the past week and all the submissions comparing Ellen Pao to Kim Jong-Il or Mao Zedong, would you say reddit widely supports this comparison?

flatline 11y ago

I laugh when people complain about removal of /r/fatpeoplehate being censorship. The only reason that subreddit was such a problem is because of aggressive moderation and banning of users - i.e. censorship at the moderator level rather than the admin level.

adnzzzzZ 11y ago
One of the point of subreddits is to let people create their own rules (whatever those rules might be) and enforce them at their own discretion. As long as people aren't breaking reddit's global rules then subreddits should have the right to implement whatever rules they see fit, including heavy moderation. What the parent post was complaining about was censorship performed at the admin level (reddit's management), not the moderator level. Stuff like shadowbans (which have been increasing a lot lately), removing posts from /r/all and so on.
bduerst 11y ago
It's a cognitive bias. The assertion from the admins was pretty clear regarding the harassment of individuals and threats of violence, but rather than acknowledge their prejudice, some have tried to make it into a first amendment issue. On a privately owned website.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  There is no public ground on the Internet. Everything is owned by someone or some corporation. Our ideas about free speech will have to adapt to that reality, or they will be lost entirely.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- makomk 11y ago
  Part of the problem was that there was no transparency and almost anything can count as "harassment" - for example, I've seen journalists accuse people of harassment because they've searched their name on Twitter and found people mocking some of their more ill thought-out articles. If you actually dug into the details it was obvious why the admins banned /r/fatpeoplehate, but few did and those details didn't make the news either.

Shivetya 11y ago

I don't know, quite a few users were in full support of the move. The likely ones who were not simply knew nothing of what is going on as a great many users are simply not interested or unable to understand. It was selective censorship. There are many subs,some quite well known, who are more flagrant than some of the subs shut down. FatPeopleHate was the most famous that was canned and it was likely at the request of IMGUR staff as they were having a pissing contest with content posters. There are quite a few very racists and sexist subs left so this was highly selective. As, a SJW dream hit which many labled the Reddit Wedding. Personal stories aside, individual posters are who should be banned for violating site rules, not entire subs and certainly not their mods as many of them were trying to enforce rules only to be shot down by reddit admin

joshie_woshie 11y ago

Your language is pretty strong and one-sided -- 'petulant moves...to treat their users as pawns'? Have you even been paying attention? A lot of those moderators actively sought the opinions of their subreddits before blacking out. It was often the communities, and not the moderators, instigating those decisions. The censorship claims do not just apply to the hateful subreddits that were shut down -- censorship happens in more insidious ways, too. A lot of posts involving the Reddit debacle have been swept away, comments deleted, users shadowbanned. I think this is the kind of censorship that's being highlighted.

tptacek 11y ago
Because the language on the other side is, what, carefully reasoned and neutral in tone?

zxcvcxz 11y ago

> No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on. Well the moderators say that was only part of it, but after reading your whole comment it seems you're just here to push your authoritarian political agenda under the guise of social justice by ignoring half the facts. >And your claims of censorship are, quite frankly, disturbing. Half your comment history is disturbing. I support the removal of /r/fatpeoplehate, but you're trying really hard to paint the parent comment in bad light to push your political agenda. They never said they support FPH, but you make it seem as if they must be a "disturbed" individual. They said that the censorship is heavy-handed censorship that appears to be applied inconsistently. It would be pretty hard to push your authoritarian political agenda without demonizing others though.

jperras 11y ago

> No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on. As stated in the article, this was one of the reasons. The other reason is as you would suspect: > The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that the pattern of removing tools and failing to improve available tools to the community at large, not merely the moderators, was an affront to the people who use the site.

mason240 11y ago

They shut downs of other subs was overwhelmingly supported by the users.

amyjess 11y ago
No, it was supported by a loud and vocal minority of witch-hunters. Most people just want to use reddit normally.
- ChargingWookie 11y ago
  How do you know that?
  - johnward 11y ago
    I don't think poster knows for sure but you can assume based on traffic levels to comments and just general web stats. A majority of users don't comment on anything. Most people don't even create an account to vote. They probably don't even know what was going on.
    - npizzolato 11y ago
      That seems like a pretty silly argument. You can literally use it as an argument against any sort of change because "most people don't vote." In fact they do vote, not with upvotes and comments but with their views. Those views indicate the place is somewhere they like spending their time, which is primarily a function of the moderators and the people posting content to the subreddit in the first place (the "vocal minority"). Since they already show they appreciate the work of those people by regularly viewing the content, it's actually more likely they agree with that minority by default than disagree.
      - johnward 11y ago
        Maybe they do agree? We don't really know because they are the "non-vocal majority". I'm willing to bet a large portion have no interest in reddit's internal politics or the mods struggle. They just want their cat pics. I do agree that they find value in the content or they wouldn't keep coming back and that the content comes from the minority. Reddit is really walking the edge. Things like this are why a bunch of users switched to reddit from digg in the first place. I don't think they will hesitate to do it again. They will follow the content submitters. Most social sites seem pretty similar as far as user interaction other than click through. I got 60k page views from one top HN post, a couple hundred upvotes, and probably less than 100 comments on the thread and my blog.

jonlucc 11y ago

The problem with shutting down the hateful subreddits is that they didn't communicate clearly. In that, they left a lot of room for rumors and speculation about why that sub was shut down for "harassment" when others that seem more harass-y were not targeted. Remember, most users never visited those subs, and weren't in the know about their modus operandi. Those rumors led to the takedowns looking like censorship of distasteful content to many users. If it was censorship of distasteful or rude content, then there are many other subs that should fall alongside those taken down. I think if they had said that the people in those subs were posting pictures of people and not responding in a timely manner to legitimate requests by aggrieved people portrayed on those subs, the users who don't really care about those subs would have brushed it off.

smudgy 11y ago

It's quite obvious that you have a greivence against part of the reddit user base since, as you mentioned, you have been the focus of their hate before. I appreciate your opinion on why the other subreddits were taken offline but I must remind you it's just that, an opinion - only that, it means nothing in the bigger scheme of things.

FireBeyond 11y ago
As opposed to everyone else here, who is offering unequivocal fact? No, wait, everyone else here is offering opinions, too.

worklogin 11y ago

>The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong. Reddit is a free chat site with a decentralized power structure (in theory). Reddit can be useful, and I know there are supportive subs there, but /r/gaming and /r/science going down for a day was not harmful. People probably got a bit more sun that day.

derptron 11y ago

So you're a fat SJW that advocates censorship of entire subs because of a few rule breakers. Gotcha. Hope you realize that there are many more "hate" subs that continue to operate unabated. I am picturing you frothing at the mouth while messaging admins begging any remaining subs that you disagree with to be banned. That's what you do, right? Picking and choosing what subs to censor is the disturbing part here. And no, just because you agree with a sub getting banned doesn't magically make it not censorship. Both unpopular and popular views can be censored.

hoopd 11y ago
This isn't how we behave here.
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
>So you're a fat SJW that advocates censorship of entire subs because of a few rule breakers. Name calling isn't appreciated here. You'll find that HN is even more curated than reddit. Please keep these reddit attitudes at reddit.
- derptron 11y ago
  What if I told you those "attitudes" exist outside of Reddit?
saboot 11y ago
| So you're a fat SJW Really? That's the level of thinking that those who claim censorship on reddit are operating on? It wasn't about views people disagree with (hence why the chimpire subreddits are still active). FPH actively engaged in harassment of individuals by both subscribers and moderators. And speaking of censorship the FPH mods would ban any "sympathetic views" of ridiculed individuals.
- makomk 11y ago
  That's basically how /r/fatpeoplehate thought - anyone who disagreed with them was obviously just a fatty, and therefore subhuman. (The moderators literally banned anyone who showed any empathy to a fat person - it was even in the rules - and this seems to have resulted in about the culture you'd expect.)

kevdigital 11y ago

The other subs shutting down "in protest" I found laughable. I had a hard time understanding what exactly they were protesting and the vocal minority sounded like a lot of people just raging against the machine. Reddit the company is the power structure and people just want to tear them down. But why exactly? Not sure. This reminds me a lot of Occupy Wall Street. People see one protest breaking out then pile on with their own grievances. There was a lack of communication to the /r/iama mods about Victoria being let go...ok...now we're complaining about mod tools and censorship??

Nadya 11y ago
This has been building up for a long time. Recent events was just the catalyst.

zedpm 11y ago

I'm sorry that you were harassed by Reddit users; I certainly don't approve of that behavior. Like I said before, however, conflating those rotten actions by certain individuals with the larger ideological issues is not constructive. My complaint wasn't against censorship per se, but rather against what appears to be biased censorship. Certain harassment subreddits continue to exist, and it appears that they do so because their ideology is more closely aligned with Reddit management/admins than the ones that were banned. Rules need to be applied equally.