Admins ban harassment subs and Reddit goes crazy

Also, if they're on Voat or the deep web, they can't find people to harass without leaving there and logging in to a different site.

The more I think about it, the more I think the great purge is indeed coming. Reddit management really hates it when Reddit is in the mainstream public eye for negative stuff. And now with what Yishan is saying, news site reporting on the Pao situation, and the growing public awareness of stuff like the vile raping women sub, Reddit is going to start cleaning house.

Robear wrote:

Isn't Voat going to face the same problems in short order?

Voat was briefly shut down by its German hosting service because of this kind of stuff. But while Reddit is run as a business, Voat is run as a ideological free-speech platform. Its founded has said he'll host pretty much anything. The problem is finding the money and a hosting service willing to accommodate him.

http://venturebeat.com/2015/06/19/sw...

There's always 4chan!

Michael wrote:

There's always 4chan!

On 4chan I learned there is a fetish where two people will wear the same clothes at the same time. 4Chan is freedom. Nah just kidding 4chan is the devil but that fetish thing was real though.

Baron Of Hell wrote:

On 4chan I learned there is a fetish where two people will wear the same clothes at the same time. 4Chan is freedom. Nah just kidding 4chan is the devil but that fetish thing was real though.

How big of clothes do they have to buy? To fit two adults into one pair of underwear it would have to be like what 50-60 inches at the waist? And how do they move? And fit their arms into the shirt sleeves...

People are weird.

At first I thought he was just talking about two people wearing the same outfit and I was wondering if maybe all those old couples who dress alike are a lot kinkier than I thought.

muttonchop wrote:

At first I thought he was just talking about two people wearing the same outfit and I was wondering if maybe all those old couples who dress alike are a lot kinkier than I thought.

Everyone is more kinky than you thought. It's just that a lot of their kinks are really boring and commonplace.

"Naked ladies having sex with a man" is a kink
"Channing Tatum in his underoos" is a kink.
"Dragons making sweet sweet love to a fine German automobile" is a kink.

Ellen Pao wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post:

The Internet started as a bastion for free expression. It encouraged broad engagement and a diversity of ideas. Over time, however, that openness has enabled the harassment of people for their views, experiences, appearances or demographic backgrounds. Balancing free expression with privacy and the protection of participants has always been a challenge for open-content platforms on the Internet. But that balancing act is getting harder. The trolls are winning.
Sure. /r/rapingwomen will be banned. They are encouraging people to rape.

/r/coontown will be reclassified. The content there is offensive to many, but does not violate our current rules for banning.

For those who haven't read the AMA, the "reclassified" line in Quintin's quote refers to this:

Similar to NSFW, another type of content that is difficult to define, but you know it when you see it, is the content that violates a common sense of decency. This classification will require a login, must be opted into, will not appear in search results or public listings, and will generate no revenue for Reddit.

I'm kind of torn on this. I mean, it's good that they're making sh*t like coontown harder to access, and it's good that they won't be generating revenue off it.
On the other hand, it's still there. They're just kind of sweeping it under the rug and pretending it doesn't exist.

Quintin_Stone wrote:
Sure. /r/rapingwomen will be banned. They are encouraging people to rape.

/r/coontown will be reclassified. The content there is offensive to many, but does not violate our current rules for banning.

So... a subreddit about the assault of a group of people (women in this case) is not acceptable... but a subreddit of discrimination against a group of people (in the other case, black people), which is the source of violence against them, is... not ok... wait... what...

I'm actually not OK with them not making money on it though, weirdly. Take all the money you make off that subreddit and make irony-fueled donations to groups that stand up for racial diversity and fighting racism!

Spez has not answered very many questions in his AMA.

BTW, one of the best messages I've read in response to the post QStone linked above:

/u/str1cken wrote:

I'm crestfallen.
It really seemed like you were going to do the right thing here.
White supremacy, as an ideology, has been one of the most destructive, ugly forces for evil in the history of the human race. Two of the worst atrocities in human history -- the holocaust and slavery -- are a direct result of ideologies of white supremacy, to say nothing of lynchings, disenfranchisement, and the exclusion of nonwhites in general and African-Americans specifically at every level of public and private life in America.
And atrocities abound globally and throughout history as a direct result of ideologies of racial superiority.
Reddit has become one of the #1 hubs for white supremacists on the internet. Continuing to host white supremacist communities in light of everything we know about white supremacy is not only a tacit endorsement of white supremacy but a violation of your own policies against inciting harm or violence.
You want to read subs like /r/coontown as somehow existing outside of the world, outside of the context of the very, very long history of white supremacy. To do so is irresponsible, willfully ignorant, and destructive and hurtful not just to redditors of color and white anti-racist redditors, but to every person of color who encounters members of your white supremacist community on the streets, in offices, at parties and concerts.
You have an opportunity here to fix something terrible inside reddit, to begin healing a very ugly wound that festers inside the heart of your site. And you're choosing not to for reasons I don't and cannot understand.
By standing by and allowing this community and their ideology to flourish on your site, you as a company and as individuals are culpable and stakeholders in white supremacist action, behavior, discrimination, and violence that takes place in the world.
You should be ashamed.

Demosthenes wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:
Sure. /r/rapingwomen will be banned. They are encouraging people to rape.

/r/coontown will be reclassified. The content there is offensive to many, but does not violate our current rules for banning.

So... a subreddit about the assault of a group of people (women in this case) is not acceptable... but a subreddit of discrimination against a group of people (in the other case, black people), which is the source of violence against them, is... not ok... wait... what...

I'm actually not OK with them not making money on it though, weirdly. Take all the money you make off that subreddit and make irony-fueled donations to groups that stand up for racial diversity and fighting racism! :D

It'd make more sense to force /r/coontown users to pay to keep using the site. Except then they're directly profiting from racism, which is pretty afwful.

Best to just ban the f*cking subs.

BadKen wrote:

Spez has not answered very many questions in his AMA.

I noticed that. Even the ones he has answered are not very specific.

BadKen wrote:

Spez has not answered very many questions in his AMA.

I think it's clear that he nor anyone else on Reddit's management team gave much thought to their proposed new rules or the questions that would follow.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Best to just ban the f*cking subs.

Yup. He should just say this is the future of Reddit and those that don't like it are more than welcome to piss off (or start a competing service for the eyeballs and clicks of racists, kiddie porn connoisseurs, and associated social misanthropes).

Quintin_Stone wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:
Sure. /r/rapingwomen will be banned. They are encouraging people to rape.

/r/coontown will be reclassified. The content there is offensive to many, but does not violate our current rules for banning.

So... a subreddit about the assault of a group of people (women in this case) is not acceptable... but a subreddit of discrimination against a group of people (in the other case, black people), which is the source of violence against them, is... not ok... wait... what...

I'm actually not OK with them not making money on it though, weirdly. Take all the money you make off that subreddit and make irony-fueled donations to groups that stand up for racial diversity and fighting racism! :D

It'd make more sense to force /r/coontown users to pay to keep using the site. Except then they're directly profiting from racism, which is pretty afwful.

Best to just ban the f*cking subs.

Take the money and donate it to charities specifically fighting against what these dillweeds are for. White supremacy subreddit? Take all that money and donate it to organizations like the NAACP or the National Diversity Council.

Either way, by even continuing to host it, they're profiting from it and nuking those subreddits from orbit (and their users) would totally be the best option.

The existence of the hate groups is only half the problem. The other half is that they can use it as a staging ground to spill out onto the rest of the site. Making it super-private only covers the first half...and it makes it harder for people to figure out where an attack is coming from when they brigade random victims.

I think this is the worst possible decision they could've made.

1. "This classification will require a login" - Logins are trivial to get on reddit and don't truly gate anything. This isn't really solving anything.

2. "Must be opted into" - In other words, "Hey, you're about to enter a pretty terrible place on the internet. You sure you wanna go here?" Stuff like this does one of two things - either doesn't even remotely stop those interested (you kinda already know what you're getting into by the name of the subreddit), or will push away those who might just get scared away. Anyone of consequence will still get by. Age gates and gates like this are a joke on the internet for a reason. January 1, 1900 is everyone's birthday.

3. "Will not appear in search results or public listings" - Oh, great, so you're TRYING to gate these places, but in addition, you're going to make them hard to see and find in general. You realize this is probably something they want, right?

4. "Will generate no revenue for Reddit" - To quote the animated Garfield Christmas Special, "Big fat hairy deal." The sizes of these communities probably don't do a damn for your revenue anyway, and even so, the users are most likely not exclusive users of those particular corners of reddit. You'll make money off of them elsewhere.

This is all just... Dumb and terrible.

BadKen wrote:

Spez has not answered very many questions in his AMA.

BTW, one of the best messages I've read in response to the post QStone linked above:

/u/str1cken wrote:

I'm crestfallen.
It really seemed like you were going to do the right thing here.
White supremacy, as an ideology, has been one of the most destructive, ugly forces for evil in the history of the human race. Two of the worst atrocities in human history -- the holocaust and slavery -- are a direct result of ideologies of white supremacy, to say nothing of lynchings, disenfranchisement, and the exclusion of nonwhites in general and African-Americans specifically at every level of public and private life in America.
And atrocities abound globally and throughout history as a direct result of ideologies of racial superiority.
Reddit has become one of the #1 hubs for white supremacists on the internet. Continuing to host white supremacist communities in light of everything we know about white supremacy is not only a tacit endorsement of white supremacy but a violation of your own policies against inciting harm or violence.
You want to read subs like /r/coontown as somehow existing outside of the world, outside of the context of the very, very long history of white supremacy. To do so is irresponsible, willfully ignorant, and destructive and hurtful not just to redditors of color and white anti-racist redditors, but to every person of color who encounters members of your white supremacist community on the streets, in offices, at parties and concerts.
You have an opportunity here to fix something terrible inside reddit, to begin healing a very ugly wound that festers inside the heart of your site. And you're choosing not to for reasons I don't and cannot understand.
By standing by and allowing this community and their ideology to flourish on your site, you as a company and as individuals are culpable and stakeholders in white supremacist action, behavior, discrimination, and violence that takes place in the world.
You should be ashamed.

This this this this this this this this this this so much this.

All of this is exactly why I really hate reddit and it says it in a way that I could never really put into words.

Edit: This is also why the "it's a platform, there's lots of good subs, you have to opt-in, etc" just don't matter to me. That's all well and good for how you choose to interact with Reddit, I don't hold that against you, but none of that changes what Reddit, as a company, is responsible for. None of that absolves Reddit.

Yeah, NSMike, I suspect the motivation behind some of those points is to prevent people from accidentally wandering through the sewage. The problem is that the sewer rats don't necessarily stay in the sewer. Targets of hate speech are going to run across it eventually in other parts of reddit, unless they are careful about what subreddits they visit. It's not good for reddit as a whole, and it doesn't solve their PR problem.

If they aren't going to generate revenue from these subs, isn't Reddit essentially paying out of it's own pocket to host them?

I'm sure the marginal cost of hosting them is insignificant. Reddit management sees hosting hateful content as a necessary evil to avoid a chilling effect on speech on the rest of Reddit ("The reason we’re careful [when restricting] speech is because people have more open and authentic discussions when they aren't worried about the speech police knocking down their door." - CEO /u/spez). The problem is that they are not addressing how hate speech overflowing into other areas is going to create a hostile environment that will have a far greater chilling effect than stricter moderation could have.

BadKen wrote:

I'm sure the marginal cost of hosting them is insignificant. Reddit management sees hosting hateful content as a necessary evil to avoid a chilling effect on speech on the rest of Reddit ("The reason we’re careful [when restricting] speech is because people have more open and authentic discussions when they aren't worried about the speech police knocking down their door." - CEO /u/spez). The problem is that they are not addressing how hate speech overflowing into other areas is going to create a hostile environment that will have a far greater chilling effect than stricter moderation could have.

Which is patently silly. There have been a few times I've been tagged by mods on GWJ for something they thought I'd done wrong and I thought the moderation was ridiculous, but I'm also completely aware that effective moderation is absolutely and utterly necessary on any site. Having a place that doesn't moderate content isn't free speech, it's chaos.

Actually, let me rewrite my last sentence:

The problem is that they are not addressing how hate speech overflowing into other areas is going to create has created a hostile environment that will have is having a far greater chilling effect than stricter moderation could have.

As I've learned from here and elsewhere in recent days, a lot of people whose voices would be great on Reddit won't go anywhere near it right now because it's not worth the effort to build a custom subreddit list from scratch.

Reddit is not "a place that doesn't moderate content" - the amount of moderation runs the gamut from ridiculously strict to ridiculously permissive. They just don't have uniform content standards, and the ones that they are proposing are too weak to make the whole site a welcoming place.

SixteenBlue wrote:
BadKen wrote:

Spez has not answered very many questions in his AMA.

BTW, one of the best messages I've read in response to the post QStone linked above:

/u/str1cken wrote:

I'm crestfallen.
It really seemed like you were going to do the right thing here.
White supremacy, as an ideology, has been one of the most destructive, ugly forces for evil in the history of the human race. Two of the worst atrocities in human history -- the holocaust and slavery -- are a direct result of ideologies of white supremacy, to say nothing of lynchings, disenfranchisement, and the exclusion of nonwhites in general and African-Americans specifically at every level of public and private life in America.
And atrocities abound globally and throughout history as a direct result of ideologies of racial superiority.
Reddit has become one of the #1 hubs for white supremacists on the internet. Continuing to host white supremacist communities in light of everything we know about white supremacy is not only a tacit endorsement of white supremacy but a violation of your own policies against inciting harm or violence.
You want to read subs like /r/coontown as somehow existing outside of the world, outside of the context of the very, very long history of white supremacy. To do so is irresponsible, willfully ignorant, and destructive and hurtful not just to redditors of color and white anti-racist redditors, but to every person of color who encounters members of your white supremacist community on the streets, in offices, at parties and concerts.
You have an opportunity here to fix something terrible inside reddit, to begin healing a very ugly wound that festers inside the heart of your site. And you're choosing not to for reasons I don't and cannot understand.
By standing by and allowing this community and their ideology to flourish on your site, you as a company and as individuals are culpable and stakeholders in white supremacist action, behavior, discrimination, and violence that takes place in the world.
You should be ashamed.

This this this this this this this this this this so much this.

All of this is exactly why I really hate reddit and it says it in a way that I could never really put into words.

Edit: This is also why the "it's a platform, there's lots of good subs, you have to opt-in, etc" just don't matter to me. That's all well and good for how you choose to interact with Reddit, I don't hold that against you, but none of that changes what Reddit, as a company, is responsible for. None of that absolves Reddit.

They don't need absolving.

BadKen wrote:

I'm sure the marginal cost of hosting them is insignificant. Reddit management sees hosting hateful content as a necessary evil to avoid a chilling effect on speech on the rest of Reddit ("The reason we’re careful [when restricting] speech is because people have more open and authentic discussions when they aren't worried about the speech police knocking down their door." - CEO /u/spez). The problem is that they are not addressing how hate speech overflowing into other areas is going to create a hostile environment that will have a far greater chilling effect than stricter moderation could have.

I'm not sure the BoD of Advance Publications or its investors are so keen on an unprofitable division spending money it doesn't have so that really horrible people have a place they can chat online for free.

BadKen wrote:

As I've learned from here and elsewhere in recent days, a lot of people whose voices would be great on Reddit won't go anywhere near it right now because it's not worth the effort to build a custom subreddit list from scratch.

Sadly true. I do know of some good communities there...but I haven't signed up for an account myself.

I saw a javascript snipped passed around on Tumblr the other day, designed to block incoming traffic from Reddit, because people are worried that they'll get harassed out of the blue when someone puts a link to their blog on a hate subreddit. (I think linking technically isn't allowed by the moderation rules on the TiA subreddit, but that doesn't stop everyone...) That's the reputation they've got to deal with: in some circles "Reddit" is synonymous with "harassment".

BadKen wrote:

Reddit is not "a place that doesn't moderate content" - the amount of moderation runs the gamut from ridiculously strict to ridiculously permissive. They just don't have uniform content standards, and the ones that they are proposing are too weak to make the whole site a welcoming place.

Not to mention the mods are often forced to manually enforce the local rules, which I imagine gets tricky when you get noticeable enough to attract a constant stream of people from elsewhere on Reddit who are used to looser or non-existent moderating. Contemporary trolling also includes a strain of polite but nasty plausibly deniable harassment, and stuff like following a target around and downvoting everything they say...

I really wish people would stop talking waving the free speech flag when it comes to acting like an unholy prick to minorities in a private space. It's got eff-all to do with the first amendment and everything to do with unfettered entitlement.

It's a private, commercially operated space. Take a stand and say "we don't want your kind here". Or don't, but don't pretend it's because you're upholding high minded ideals.

iaintgotnopants wrote:

If they aren't going to generate revenue from these subs, isn't Reddit essentially paying out of it's own pocket to host them?

My guess is that the Reddit admins understand that statistically, if they ban the "problem subs", they would actually end up alienating a large amount of their active users. I'd like to see the Venn diagram of "most active users overall" and "active users on problem subs". I don't imagine it'd be a perfect circle, but I think there's a large overlap.

Bloo Driver wrote:

My guess is that the Reddit admins understand that statistically, if they ban the "problem subs", they would actually end up alienating a large amount of their active users. I'd like to see the Venn diagram of "most active users overall" and "active users on problem subs". I don't imagine it'd be a perfect circle, but I think there's a large overlap.

Why would they care about those users, especially if they've already decided to wall off the problem subs and not monetize them?

I doubt there's very many users who are going to leave Reddit forever because they shut down some of the skeezier as well as outright offensive subs. They'll Female Doggo and moan for a while and then completely forget about it.