Admins ban harassment subs and Reddit goes crazy

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Yesterday, Reddit banned 5 subs that it claimed were not just being assholes with terrible opinions, they were assholes spreading their toxic sh*t to people all over Reddit. These subs (at the start) were /r/fatpeoplehat, /r/hamplanethatred, /r/transf*gs, /r/neof*g, and /r/sh*tn*ggerssay.

The admins emphasized that these subs were banned for behavior, not ideas, which is why vile subs like "/r/coontown" were left untouched. The angry assholes refused to believe this, of course, and went collectively nuts.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/10/87...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/t...

http://internet.gawker.com/redditors...

A snapshot of /r/all, where the most popular threads show up: http://i.imgur.com/9q63Zlx.png

Needless to say, /r/KotakuInAction -- the Gamergate hub on Reddit -- is almost universally outraged over the banning of /r/FatPeopleHate and has been creating threads nonstop about the unacceptable censorship going on here.

Huh, my subreddits are curated enough that I haven't seen anything related to this but the original reddit blog post.

Yeah, same, NSMike. Just looking at the original post, it seems like reddit might become a better place is all the assholes posting there do leave. They won't, but one can dream.

Reddit scares the sh*t out of me.

mwdowns wrote:

Yeah, same, NSMike. Just looking at the original post, it seems like reddit might become a better place is all the assholes posting there do leave. They won't, but one can dream.

They're all talking about going to Voat (a Reddit clone that's said they won't censor anything that's not illegal), but Voat keeps going down under the load, and a lot of the assholes won't leave anyway.

I would like to thank Ms. Pao and her employees for acting as the administrators of Mos Eisley spaceport, thereby keeping everywhere else a little more sane.

What I love is that all these guys are going to reddit's "competitors". That's gotta be a fun moment if you're trying to compete with reddit. "Yeah guys, we're the up and coming site for the coveted Nazi, child-porn watching, up-skirt taking demographic that's all the rage these days. Microsoft will be knocking on our door with 9 zeros any day now!"

Sounds a lot what led to the creation of 8chan.

I took a look around and the general feeling is that this is a lot like when digg started moderating their front page more heavily... I honestly don't think reddit will suffer the same fate. The subreddits and independent nature of them make reddit much less vulnerable to this kind of exodus.

The thing with Reddit is you roll your own. There was little to no reference to this on my front page, if I clicked All it was wall to wall with it.

If Reddit's obnoxiousness goes down some, I might actually visit.

LarryC wrote:

If Reddit's obnoxiousness goes down some, I might actually visit.

Individual subreddits can be wonderful, reasonable communities. The aggregate, however, is a vapid wasteland that loses its sh*t more than an Alzheimer's patient with a colostomy bag.

Reddit is kind of like the Internet; lots of sh*tty places, a few oases.

kazooka wrote:

What I love is that all these guys are going to reddit's "competitors". That's gotta be a fun moment if you're trying to compete with reddit. "Yeah guys, we're the up and coming site for the coveted Nazi, child-porn watching, up-skirt taking demographic that's all the rage these days. Microsoft will be knocking on our door with 9 zeros any day now!"

Super fun, because the major one they were trying to move to, which I will not name here, got noticed by their hosting company as a result of the brouhaha. Their hosting company was based in Germany, which officially takes a rather dim view of some of those demographics.

Sadly, they shifted to some kind of cloud service before they lost their data, but the usual suspects had lots of opportunities to yell about censorship and free speech.

Maq wrote:

The thing with Reddit is you roll your own. There was little to no reference to this on my front page, if I clicked All it was wall to wall with it.

Never click "All."

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Reddit is kind of like the Internet; lots of sh*tty places, a few oases.

And, unfortunately, Q is there. That monster.

Which is probably only connected with the previous uproar by the common thread that moderation on Reddit has structural issues. Though this dispute seems to be more about the actual structural issues, so it might be a relatively good thing. Depending on which way the fallout goes, because I also see some of the usual suspects using this to try and claim the high ground in the last uproar.

Yeah I was reading about this yesterday. Today I discovered that Gamerghazi had gone dark in solidarity.

They're all back now. In a week no one will care or remember.

Much like how I think of reddit as a whole.

I know that a huge percentage of people just write reddit off out of hand, but I think some of their subreddits are the best place to discuss certain topics on the web.

I think r/games is one of the better places to discuss games on the net, and you constantly have interesting conversations on it that pull from its wide audience.

The current uproar is interesting if only in that it goes out of the traditional "cess pit" of subreddits that generally participate in it. Stuff like r/science and r/books are generally extremely good places to be if you are interested in such topics.

Gremlin is pretty correct in that this probably just points to structural limitations to the Reddit structure when you try to start doing a bit of moderating. The subreddit Admins feel like they should have complete autonomy over the content in their subs, as long as they aren't breaking any laws, if you start trying to restrain them you will certainly have some number that will be angry.

Also, yeah, never go to r/all.

The subreddit Admins feel like they should have complete autonomy over the content in their subs, as long as they aren't breaking any laws, if you start trying to restrain them you will certainly have some number that will be angry.

Hard to feel bad for some folks that have apparently never read the terms of use... or for folks who ramble on about the First Amendment as if it had some special hidden clause in an asterisk that says you also get a guarantee on what platform you use for your speech.

My understanding is that some of the subreddit moderators want better tools and support to fight against the times when the cesspool parts of Reddit spill over onto the more civilized areas. The relationship between the Reddit admins (who are paid staff) and the subreddit moderators (who are volunteers in the self-organizing Reddit space) has apparently been strained for a while. This was mostly sparked by losing the official contact point for AMAs abruptly and without warning.

Gremlin wrote:

My understanding is that some of the subreddit moderators want better tools and support to fight against the times when the cesspool parts of Reddit spill over onto the more civilized areas. The relationship between the Reddit admins (who are paid staff) and the subreddit moderators (who are volunteers in the self-organizing Reddit space) has apparently been strained for a while. This was mostly sparked by losing the official contact point for AMAs abruptly and without warning.

That sounds like a good summation.

Reddit would probably be a better place if some of the more....vocal....moderators/users went on to another platform and left the rest of us behind

Kamakazi010654 wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

My understanding is that some of the subreddit moderators want better tools and support to fight against the times when the cesspool parts of Reddit spill over onto the more civilized areas. The relationship between the Reddit admins (who are paid staff) and the subreddit moderators (who are volunteers in the self-organizing Reddit space) has apparently been strained for a while. This was mostly sparked by losing the official contact point for AMAs abruptly and without warning.

That sounds like a good summation.

Reddit would probably be a better place if some of the more....vocal....moderators/users went on to another platform and left the rest of us behind ;)

Voat keeps crashing under the load.

Holy crap.

Ellen Pao resigned from reddit today by mutual agreement. I'm delighted to announce that Steve Huffman, founder and the original reddit CEO, is returning as CEO.

Bad news, at least for the moment: the sexist factions will be claiming victory.

We'll see what things look like down the road.

Ellen stepped down, eh? I suppose the reddit admins won't be quite so heavy-handed with their mass-deletion of boards, anymore.

Gremlin wrote:

Bad news, at least for the moment: the sexist factions will be claiming victory.

We'll see what things look like down the road.

I hope that's not the case, since they had nothing to do with it. Firing Victoria is what triggered the anger that actually mattered.

The thing is, she was Interim CEO. Her position was always going to be temporary. For all the harassers claiming victory right now at best all they did was speed things up a bit.

Chairman_Mao wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

Bad news, at least for the moment: the sexist factions will be claiming victory.

We'll see what things look like down the road.

I hope that's not the case, since they had nothing to do with it. Firing Victoria is what triggered the anger that actually mattered.

I'm not going to link it, but there are more than a few posts to that effect already. Of course, everyone else (including the Reddit administration) is free to ignore them, so I hope that is what happens.

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