- The great irony in all this hair-trigger martyrdom is that Reddit has always been friendly to censorship. For most of the site's history the most meaningful rules were created and enforced by its community moderators, who could be anyone that decided to create a subreddit. Reddit moderators have censored all kinds of material, including reputable journalism. It's never actually been a model of free speech, unless the ideal of free speech includes 6,000 nations run by the kind of tyrants who have the time and inclination to moderate internet message boards.
"Sick burn, courtesy The Verge," said the guy who moderates a default.
Also, bitchin' url.
I really wish we could "lift the veil" on what moderators of major subs really do. Because we don't actually congregate each morning for a virtual coffee, and plot how to further our communist/fascist/zionist/islamist agenda [select whatever is least like your own philosophy], and have daily competitions on how many people's free speech we can "ban" or truths we can "censor". The disconnect between what people think we do, and what we actually do, is absurd. Sure, once in a while you'll get a rogue mod, but for most moderators the sheer volume of shit is so much that after a while you really don't care which way the bias is, you're sick of the lot of it and want it cleaned up. I easily delete and tag as many comments for being "anti-islam hate" as I do for being "anti-semitic hate". And I'm past caring which side they're on.
The fundamental problem is that Reddit's workings are gnostic by design. "Shadowban" is a horrible concept from the get-go - "my anti-spam measures will be so much more effective if the spammers don't know they're in place." Essentially, Reddit's countermeasures are so shitty that if people knew what they were they'd be useless. Know my most effective fascist automoderator tweak? Require all posts to come from someone with two comment karma or better. Which takes essentially zero effort for anyone actually on Reddit, but is literally impossible from within Hootsuite. Looks like we're oppressing new users, when in fact we're cutting out 50 spam posts an hour.
Not so. Comment karma is not link karma. A user with zero comment karma or link karma can comment freely when the rule is about posts. Besides which, all one needs to do is message the mods and say "I can't see my post" and you get let through. I do this about 12 times a day.
Oh wow! Long time no see. Hope everything has been going well for you, istara. Any new books in the works?
Hello! All well. My third book, Man of the Match, should be coming out soon (just in beta/proofing now). It's another romance. Then I'm trying to get my act together and finally start publishing some of my backlog of murder mystery novels, which will go under a different pen name. I have four completed unpublished ones, but they still need proofing etc. How about you?
I'm glad to hear you are rolling with it! That's awesome! I'm actually working on a website for a romance novelist. I have learned more about the subject, target demo, and ins and outs of romance novels than I ever expected to know in my life. One of the perks of the job. Fun fact - her books with only men (usually shirtless, deliciously ab-by men) on the covers get twice as many clicks as the ones with a man and woman!
Reddit has entertained an untenable combination of goals. They cannot have commercial success, and host communities focused upon the disparaging of others. Like Twitter, they long argued that they were only a platform, but the world simply doesn't view Reddit that way. Now that they are seeking commercial success, they must fit the perception of a place. A safe, commercially viable place.
I think the reason that most people are 'mad' about Reddit changing into this safe, and commercially viable place is that they don't want that out of Reddit. Reddit's investors probably do, but its users don't. So when a site confirms its choice to favor its investors' concerns over its users' then you understandably get the masses angry. I don't care about fatpeoplehate. Or batteredwives or niggers or any of the other subs that could be banned. I don't go to them because I don't want to see them. But I want to see censorship out my choices less. It doesn't change that these feelings exist in the world, and doesn't change anything but commercial viability for Reddit. If Reddit doesn't deserve to lose users, I'm not saying die because Reddit is a site not a living thing, for turning on its users then what would it deserve to lose users for?
They maintain they are a platform because their ultimate monetization strategy is porting their architecture to other websites to use for comments, aggregation and hierarchy. They were going to be Disqus 8 years before Disqus. This is why Conde Nast bought them, this is why they got real serious about Fuck Sears. You build Reddit into your knowledgebase and it's almost like you don't need to hire tech support. Your users do it for you. Unfortunately the codebase is unwieldy as fuck and has essentially no immune system. So they've been biding their time, incubating and training, until they have something robust enough that it can fly the nest and go alight on someone else's servers (for a licensing fee, of course). Unfortunately for them, in the interim "Powered by Reddit" has come to read a lot like "Ebola Inside." I think they started pivoting towards "community" back when they bought RedditGifts, but they didn't really have a clue how to run a community. They certainly don't want to staff up into one.
I think it's less about one subreddit and more about the articulate expression of a feeling that has been gnawing at many of us for some time. I've loved Reddit for years, and before that I enjoyed smaller forums. They all had some problems, but generally provided a place for intelligent, unfiltered discussion. It's the same thing I used to love about online gaming. The internet was like the Wild West and a Parisian cafe and an 18th century British coffee house rolled into one. The relative lack of regulation and standards along with minimal corporatization made it a wonderful place to expand your mind and engage with other human beings. But as days go by and larger sites suck up more and more of the user base, the Internet is starting to feel more like a shopping mall. Reddit felt like a holdover from the "old" days for a long time, but it (literally) got bought out, and it's starting to show. Some of the great posts now and then maintained the illusion that it was still a great community, a place where you could really interact and benefit from it. I guess what today's post did for me was shatter the illusion I'd sort of desperately been holding onto, the idea that I could get back that feeling from years ago.
When thinking about the internet in general now vs. say, like 5 or so years ago, I'm always reminded of that scene in Pirates of the Caribbean where Cutler Beckett remarks that the world is smaller and there's less room for pirates now, that the pirates are a dying breed. Not that the internet is smaller...it just seems like it's being more sanitized I guess? Rather than being a sea of individual, anonymous-focused sites, people tend to cluster around the big sites. I think. I'm rambling. There just seems less place for anonymity on the internet. It's all commercial- get rid of offense, get rid of antagonism, make everything palatable to the general public instead of the small group of awkward tech-savvy people. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Yeah, I feel like reddit is like Starbucks in the 90's. First it was very local and mostly unheard of, then you start hearing about this cool place but it kinda feels exclusive. Then you see it in a few big cities, maybe while looking over someone's shoulder, but then before you know it there's 3 in Hicksville and that's their main demographic.
Other than the loud minority of trolls trying to get revenge by flooding other subreddits, what I have found distasteful is the lack of consistent enforcement. I certainly disliked jailbait and creepshots and fatpeoplehate, and I can see why they would be banned and can even get behind some of the reasons. The thing is that almost all of the given reasons aren't really the case or else places like srs would have been shut down too, as they have a long history of inciting harassment of individuals including doxxing. All that said this isn't going to be the end of reddit, just like every other scandal that seems to pop up around once every 3 months fails to be the end of reddit. I just know that I'm personally sick of both the admins' wishy-washy rule enforcement and the trolls petty revenge.
Consistent rule enforcement, what a dream. I like to think that if SRS had been in the group of initial bans, this whole outpouring/protest wouldn't have had nearly as much steam. As is, with them only banning non-politically correct subreddits, it's obvious that this whole thing wasn't about saving people from harassment, it was about cleaning up ugly stains on reddit's front page. I loved "the fattening" because even if it was under the guise of saving one dumb subreddit, it was basically a huge protest against the bad practices of reddit admins.
I agree to a certain extent. I think it's really easy to forget that reddit is not only a company looking to make a profit, but one beholden to a board of directors who are looking to be able to sell it off and make a profit. The best way to do that is to make it seem like it's a safe place, but not actually do too much to make that a reality as that would be expensive.
Here's the problem: this is what the world sees. Common refrains- - Redditors are awful - Reddit admins have no ability to deal with them - Why ban fatpeoplehate but not eleventy-seven more heinous subs - Southern Poverty Law Center's "most hateful place on the Internet" It's an absolute PR debacle that anyone with a pair of binoculars could have seen coming from beyond the orbit of Saturn. Reddit Inc. doesn't give a shit about their users and never have. But this is highly visible to any potential VC firms or business partners, and it is not helping them.
Hey, lmao - ever heard of the argument from authority? That's where someone who knows their shit says something about the shit they know about, and you accept it as a qualified opinion because they know their shit. That's like how nobody gives a shit what you think, but the Southern Poverty Law Center at least gets their conclusions discussed in a civil tone. Put it this way: if you and the SPLC disagree about a subject that the SPLC was specifically mandated to address and study over 40 years ago, you are likely to look like less of an ass if you at least entertain their research, particularly when there's a link in the post you're responding to.
It can't hurt to remember, also, that in an argument of which is the biggest cesspool of humanity, Reddit or 4chan, no matter who anyone decides "wins," both still lose. Reddit doesn't want to be seen as a cesspool. It certainly won't help their PR team one bit to grab another scapegoat, point at it, and start shouting wildly, "Not as bad! Not as bad!"
This is my favorite comment from the whole debacle:You know that scene in Futurama where Fry drinks too much coffee and suddenly the entire world slows down and he saves the gang from a fire? That's how I feel. Only with smugness instead of coffee. I feel like I've just reached smug nirvana. I can't take any more of this. Everyone is so, so stupid. Just so stupid. And I am so smart in comparison. Oh. Oh my god.
Agreed, it was always fun to go on the game threads and post/read people's reactions live. Especially with slow moving/commercial-filled football games, it gave me something to peruse over during the downtimes.
I just hope the smaller subreddits I frequent don't die.
Well, the article put it really well -- if reddit dies because of the end of those hatemongering subreddits, then it deservers to die. In practice, it's not going to die, or even get close to it. If the past has taught us anything about reddit is that people will remember this for about as long as Dory remembers what the last sentence said was. Still, some people will leave reddit. These people will probably be more old time reddit users that are tired of the community that trolls. Trolls will continue trolling around there, and, if anything, might try to switch to voat (since the interface and functionality is pretty much the same, as compared to hubski).
I guess I'm in that boat. I've been on Reddit since 2009 or 2010 and the quality has gotten to the point where if I forget to log in, I don't even recognize what the default front page is anymore. The people leaving now are either going to go back because they don't really care about any of this and it's just the issue du jour, or they have been planning to leave for a while anyway. I'm in that. I'll maintain a presence until that presence is reproduced elsewhere, and then I'll be gone for good. There's just no site that does what Reddit does as well as Reddit when Reddit does what Reddit does well.
Bit of a dumb article, no? First, the people leaving reddit are shitlords who want to harass people. Trolls, basically. Reddit is banning trolls, not everyone. So to say that reddit is going to collapse because they're clearing out the dross is a bit silly. Second, Reddit's troll base is made up of individuals. Where do you think those individuals will go if they choose to leave Reddit? From one perspective, 'Reddit' isn't going to die because 'Reddit' is middle-class 15-25 white male America. From another, we now have a swarm of angry trolls looking for somewhere to fight for the First Amendment rights. They'll just set up shop somewhere else and start their self-validating circlejerks there. Voat won't do it because - if the admins have any sense - they'll make it untenable for Reddit to set up there by not upgrading their server requirements to cope. The Reddit exodus will then move on. Hubski has better infrastructure to cope so is at greater risk. I don't think many of you will disagree with the use of the word 'risk' there.
Most people who leave Reddit in dust-ups like this are the ones disheartened by the community. It isn't so much a "I demand my free speech" crowd as a "I don't want to be associated with these vile chuckleheads" crowd, particularly as the most vocal users of Reddit during any controversy tend to be the ones most "oppressed." The trolls aren't leaving Reddit, they're demonstrating (quite amply) that Reddit can't do anything about them. It's the ones that don't want to put up with the hassle of a troll war that leave.First, the people leaving reddit are shitlords who want to harass people.
I disagree. In this instance the ones who are angry enough to leave aren't those disaffected by the hivemind. This is happening as a result of banning and shadowbanning a lot of users. There's a lot of wack-a-mole. They've tried going hydra on subreddit creation and been shut down as soon as their posts appear on /r/al/new, they've tried invading other sites, they'll soon - in my view - turn on the circlejerk/SRD crowd having a good laugh at their expense. But ultimately they'll leave. This isn't a case of reasonable heads drifting away because of shitty behaviour, this is people leaving as a result of being banned for shitty behaviour. Normally people leave in search of better content. In this instance people are leaving looking for a platform. The difference is obvious.
You are mistaken. The angry ones are mostly staying. Have you modmail to check? A default sub to maintain? And when I check /r/all, what I see is a bunch of scrambling to quell the rebellion. There's no good way to have this discussion without it turning into a dick measuring contest so I'll simply say this: I don't see what you see and you don't see what I see.
I hope for the sake and sanctity of all that's good in the world Voat takes as much of Reddit's nastier users so they don't pollute the rest of the internet and every other site aiming to take away reddit's traffic. The containment site would do us all a lot of good.
The shitlords tend to stay and mess with the place. Digg had the same thing happen. People like me that just want ta place to hang out and post once in a while when the topic is interesting bail when nonsense like this happens. /r/all is disgusting right now. Do I as a (granted self identified) normal person want to be a part of that? Hell no. They could have used this announcement to ban so many truly vile places, yet they chose this one. They could have banned /r/picsofdeadkids or /r/cutefemalecorpses or /r/spacedicks and this shitstorm would not have happened. I left reddit when the whole /r/jailbait thing went down what? three years ago now? Damn time flies on the internet. I left not to defend creepy people posting borderline kiddie porn, but the attitude of the admins who one day say "FREE SPEECH!" and the next day lose their spines when a reporter writes a story about the consequences of that philosophy. Reddit is looking for a buyer to cash out. This is my hypothesis anyway. This is the sanitation scrub before someone like Newscorp buys it and turns it into nothing but ad space.