Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/677190-reddit-private-community-aimee-challenor-censorship

by LordAtlas • 5 years ago

559 525 5 years ago

j0n5ilver• 5 years ago

Like Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, reddit has gone to hell. The only downside to this is the wave of nutjobs that will attempt to flock over to here. I'm crossing my fingers in hope that that they won't discover this place.

unethical_ban9• 5 years ago

Your position on the article is unclear. Has the admin pool gone to hell for hiring a likely passive accomplice in pedophilia? Has the site gone to hell for organizing blackouts when issues come to light (SOPA, this, etc.), or for reasons unrelated to the article?

kyrieeschaton• 5 years ago

Do we need scare quotes around "censorship" when reddit is telling them particular names are unmentionable in any context?

sp332• 5 years ago

Quotes in headlines are not scare quotes. They're just quotes. It's a quotation.

hartator• 5 years ago

Yes, a “quotation”. Doesn’t carry any meaning making the word less impactful. /s

dvhh3• 5 years ago

Some people would argue that "censorship" would not apply to a private company owned platform.

That only governments and their agents are qualified to perform act of censorship.

shaftoe• 5 years ago

Are you sure you're not thinking of arguments about first amendment protections instead of censorship?

omginternets• 5 years ago

Those people are (intentionally?) confusing censorship with the legal right to censor.

What Reddit is doing unambiguously qualifies as censorship. It is also perfectly legal, but that's not the point.

chevill• 5 years ago

Some people would argue that "censorship" would not apply to a private company owned platform.

You're mistaking the argument here. The argument is that a private company exercising censorship isn't violating a US person's constitutional right to free speech because the two things are different. It doesn't mean its not censorship and it doesn't mean it can't be unethical. It just means that the company has the legal right to censor whatever they want.

zouhair3• 5 years ago

I think you are mixing US constitution first amendment with common censorship. Censorship can happen anywhere.

unloco2• 5 years ago

This is a little more nuanced than you imply. In the end, it seems they fixed the automod rule, but sub's are still actively blacking out as we speak. We'll see how far it goes, I guess!

viklove• 5 years ago

So now we've reached the point where we're arguing over the semantic meaning of the word "censorship." While we're here, can you please inform us which word we are allowed to use to describe what reddit is doing?

Spooky232• 5 years ago

Many tech enthusiasts are stuck living in 1999 when the internet was this mythical paradise of unrestricted freedom.

The problem is, it's 2021, and the raging dumpster fire of social media platforms has created a world where extremist insanity has become mainstream public discourse. People who believe that reptiles posing as human beings run the earth are have a platform and some sort of earnest following!

People like to scream "censorship" and social media companies rally behind that and their protection from liability. Arguments are made that making editorial decisions about what gets purchased is a moral or legal risk. That's a bunk argument, because social platforms have no problem at all promoting dangerous, wrong or even illegal content to maximize engagement. Let's be real here -- for all of the weighty principles brought up here, a significant chunk of reddit engagement is porn.

core-questions• 5 years ago

Some people would argue that "censorship" would not apply to a private company owned platform.

These people would deliberately enable corporations to restrict your freedoms, and are simply seeking justification after the fact for it by hiding in the letter of the law, and ignoring its spirit. This goes against the fundamental values of the West and goes against what anyone who ever wrote a free speech law would have intended.

Reddit is one of the public squares of the internet. The only content that should be banned sitewide should be content that is expressly illegal in the countries that host their servers. That's it. Subreddit moderators should have a much firmer hand, because if you don't like a sub, you can create another one. The site as a platform, which was created expressly to be a bastion of free speech originally, should not be in the business of banning people for their ideas.

Reddit instead picks and chooses what people can say and think, and can't even hide behind 'obscenity' as they allow plenty of porn but don't allow anyone who doesn't abide by their strange new set of ill-defined postmodern values. Can we get a list of the concepts that fall into their new wrongthink? Hardly.

I'd prefer they just state their policy aloud, in clear terms, rather than couching it. Just say you can't advocate for or even argue in favour of white people, for men, for heterosexual cisgendered people on the platform. Just be honest and say it like it is. It would be much less insulting and much easier to deal with conceptually if there was even a shred of honour in their approach.

annoyingnoob• 5 years ago

https://www.aclu.org/other/what-censorship

"You know, a free press is not freedom for the thought you love, but rather for the thought you hate the most. People need to tolerate the Larry Flynts of the world so they can be free." -Larry Flynt

diogenesjunior2• 5 years ago

The problem (from the very start) was censorship.

Reddit has always had the ability to censor.

the_snooze• 5 years ago

It seems like online companies go through all sorts of contortions to avoid saying what they need to say with respect to content moderation:

We will try to moderate our platform fairly, but we reserve the absolute right to do so arbitrarily and capriciously. Users are not entitled to any explanation or recourse.

That should be the extent of any social media platform's content policy. I think we'd all be better off setting expectations properly and honestly.

Sebb7673• 5 years ago

In this case, yes. For one, the original title has them. Secondly, as stated in the article, Reddit denies the allegations:

[...] admin u/landoflobsters explains that it was not the company’s intention to remove any mention of Knight’s name, but that there had been “overzealous automaton” when it came to preventing doxxing and harassment. The admin explained that an internal error had led to the suspension of a moderator who had posted Knight’s name, and that the company had “communicated clearly” with the affected party as they resolved the situation.

A now fixed error would not count as censorship. He might be lying, but there's enough reasonable doubt to allow for quotes IMO.

On a side note, though, it's funny that the article choose to put quotes around “communicated clearly” as well.

hinkley• 5 years ago

the affected party

That's mismanagement that doesn't even see it's mismanagement.

A policy problem that affects a person in leadership affects everyone in the group. They should have communicated with the affected parties and it sounds like they left it to the moderator to sort everybody else out.

They chose... poorly.

legitster• 5 years ago

the company had “communicated clearly” with the affected party as they resolved the situation

https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/mbbm2c/welcome_...

It sounds like things are still very much opaque.

robbyking• 5 years ago

I moderate a reddit community with ~200k users, and if I didn't use strict filtering along with a slew of Automoderator rules I'd spend half of my day removing spam, shitposts, and submissions that break our posting rules. A few posts a day get caught by mistake, but it's a lot easier to free those posts than it is to remove the dozens of bad ones that would have made it through otherwise. I think it's at least plausible that the same type of thing happens at a site-wide level.

tootie2• 5 years ago

Probably because it's all alleged at this point and reddit has a propensity for flipping out over complete misapprehensions.

kumarvvr2• 5 years ago

Wait, doesnt reddit have control over it servers? It surely can revoke such rules.

Looks like all this drama is to give an illusion of control and free speech. Am I missing some other dynamic at play?

posterboy• 5 years ago

self-censoring is still censoring so reddit inc gets best ofboth worlds, data from the subs and a clean outwardfacing facade.

VectorLock4• 5 years ago

It can. Reddit can simply remove all the mods from the subreddits and make them public again.

Nobody should be under any illusion that they "own" their subreddits.

fnordfnordfnord2• 5 years ago

Eh. Reddit is very unlikely to do that. The subreddits would be overrun with trash pretty quickly.

mc32• 5 years ago

Of course, but that would break some trust where as of now most seizures are of renegade subs. Here if they seize normal subs just because they protest a bad decision by management has the potential of alienating lots of people.

kumarvvr2• 5 years ago

At this point reddit is like FB, Everyone will grumble but continue using it.

unethical_ban9• 5 years ago

Just like armies technically could curbstomp civilians during protests, but many countries realize that's a bad idea.

I don't doubt admins and "powermods" are often the same people, and I'm not defending the morality of reddit as an org. However, the etiquette is that mods have total control over their subs as long as site-wide rules and real laws are not violated.

zouhair3• 5 years ago

Sure. Wikipedia can also stop anyone from editing anything. Good luck staying alive.

commandlinefan3• 5 years ago

You would think that sort of behavior would be the final nail in the coffin for Reddit as a whole - but they've done a lot of things in the past that I would have thought would have been the final nail in the coffin, and they're still as popular as ever.

sixothree3• 5 years ago

Reddit as a whole is less useful since comment sections were demoted from first class citizens to something barely usable. I think they saw imgur as a threat and wanted to better replicate that experience.

cecilpl2• 5 years ago

Can you expand on this? I haven't noticed any change in comment section usability and I've been on reddit for 10+ years.

Sebb7673• 5 years ago

The new design collapses all responses below the second level (and then every two levels) while adding extreme amounts of visual distractions to gilded/awarded/... comments (personal opinion). This annoys me to no end and I presume the grandparent is referencing that.

ihalip• 5 years ago

I'm guessing you don't use the new redesign.

NoOneNew• 5 years ago

Not op, pretty sure referring to the site redesign. If you force to stay on the old design, yes, you noticed nothing different. But the new design, holy shit, unless you want a Facebook's take on imgur experience, it's unusable.

arbitrage3• 5 years ago

their page load times have gotten dramatically worse, now that you mention it

tootie2• 5 years ago

i.reddit.com hasn't changed in 10 years.

pumaontheprowl• 5 years ago

The new UX on the site is unusable. I don't use anything except old.reddit.com and if they ever try to get rid of that, I'll surely stop visiting the site altogether. You have to wonder how long they'll continue to maintain two different web frontends for the site, though.

tsujp• 5 years ago

I'm exclusively on old.reddit.com too. The new interface was the start of the worst, and while we're not directly in the firing line in terms of viewing content and navigation on old.reddit.com we are at the mercy of the general winds of change over the site.

tomjen3• 5 years ago

They have maintained i.reddit.com (an actually useful mobile site) for years at this point.

notJim4• 5 years ago

What's the issue with it? I see nothing but hate, but I honestly don't mind the new design.

Edit: lol, I participate in a lot of contentious threads here, but this simple question where I am genuinely trying to understand something has generated the most downvotes.

bulibuta• 5 years ago

I use teddit.net since it was first posted here on HN. Can't login, but the UX is awesome, just like Old Reddit!

darkhorse132• 5 years ago

Try scrolling down a few hundred posts and your browser will literally crash because there is clearly memory leak on their SPA.

zouhair3• 5 years ago

www.reddit.com --> old.reddit.com

xqyf4• 5 years ago

This plugin redirects you to old.reddit automatically:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

Mediterraneo102• 5 years ago

Reddit comments were doomed in the long run, anyway. The fact that most Reddit commenters are on mobile phones, and not proper keyboards, has led to ultra-short comments light on information or nuance, like Twitter. This is true even on special-interest subreddits for various hobbies, where rich discussion is wilting and image posts and memes have taken over.

Sure, you yourself can still write a couple of solid paragraphs about a topic (the norm on Reddit until just a few years ago), but you will very look out of place among the one-line comments. With time, you feel pushed out of what used to be your own community.

astrange12• 5 years ago

I've noticed some of the popular reddits like /r/interestingasfuck /r/nextfuckinglevel (there's a pattern here) have totally degraded in content. It's supposed to be amazing things like extreme sports but it's entirely Facebook-meme-tier pictures of a guy with some text on top about him recovering from cancer that seems made up.

I can't tell if this is organic or not. If so it might be people leaving Facebook who aren't capable of irony enough to be interesting, but I think it's mobile-optimizing karma farmers.

Nacdor• 5 years ago

This is the Reddit "Out of the Loop" thread that sort of explains what's happening: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/mbeycw/whats_...

It's still somewhat difficult to find a clear explanation because the admins were banning people who mentioned her by name (despite the fact that she is a public/political figure in the UK). That had an extremely chilling effect on the discussions, but now the Streisand Effect is kicking in.

wing-_-nuts• 5 years ago

This all feels very witch hunt like to me. If there's any evidence that she's a danger to children, I feel like people should put up or shut up. All I've seen is people slandering her for the actions of her father (proven) and some comments that might have been made by her partner about his own interests (completely unprovable). It's kind of disgusting what conservatives are trying to turn this into without a shred of proof.

numbers_guy• 5 years ago

Right she didn't nothing more than reside in a house with a 10 year old girl who was being tortured by her father for 11 days, and the went on to marry another pedophile. What a coincidence!

PH012• 5 years ago

The accused internet accounts are all linked via Keybase. The usernames and content go back as far as 2004. Lots of this information is already common knowledge in the UK because of previous scandals.

At what point do you acknowledge that her partner has been doxxed as a self-confessed paedophile? The alternative would involve an incredibly elaborate plot targetting a random US citizen years before he happened to meet the person involved.

someonehere• 5 years ago

The guy she married posted a lot of rape fantasies of children on his Twitter. Someone connected all the dots and circled around that it’s possible based on actions of known associations.

Someone also mentioned that she lived in the same house at the time her father locked up and tortured the ten year old. If you’re oblivious to someone being tortured under you’re roof, you’re either really naive or part of the problem.

undefined1• 5 years ago

I find it interesting that Reddit still manages to find themselves invoking the Streisand effect in full force.

BitwiseFool4• 5 years ago

I think the decision makers at Reddit are fully aware of the Streisand Effect but they don't care because they know the userbase has a short memory and things will go back to normal within a week or two.

wccrawford• 5 years ago

I think it's even worse than that.

They'll remember, but still keep coming back. You can't even blame short memory for it. They literally don't care more than the inconvenience they'd face in going elsewhere for forums.

And as long as that's true, the things they dislike will keep happening.

The_rationalist• 5 years ago

Well effects do not systematically happen. I'd say that as a general rule people don't care, even if they should. So if a Streisand happen it would mostly be because of a tini active and loud minority and maybe a medium sized passive community of "retweeters", the vast majority being as always passive and silent.

bpodgursky• 5 years ago

I hate references to the Streisand effect, because in the age of digital censorship, you have absolutely no idea which stories are _failing_ to invoke the Streisand effect.

I'm absolutely sure a lot of news is completely successfully censored, and calling out the effect on the ???5%??? of stories which break through does nothing except hide that fact from us.

ALittleLight3• 5 years ago

One way reddit is strange is that the users and mods seem to hate the admins. Every reddit post I read from the admins the comments are full of people raging at them.

thefz• 5 years ago

A lot of users hate the mods too.

adzzzz4• 5 years ago

I'm still shocked Reddit is allowed into the wider ecosystem of tech infrastructure. Between hosting explicit gore content and very extreme pornography with borderline legality at best (Including under Alexis's and Steve's leadership allowing a jailbait subreddit to continue for years) I would have thought they'd be booted from AWS etc.

tornato7• 5 years ago

Reddit must be spending 10s of millions of dollars a year with AWS. They're not about to boot them off without a court order.

unethical_ban9• 5 years ago

Well, that would be improper, so I'm glad they haven't been.

Booting people off core infrastructure (IaaS, colo, DNS) for reasons outside violation of law is a very slippery slope.

adzzzz4• 5 years ago

The cartoon depiction of sex with minors is almost certainly illegal in many districts and countries.

skrowl2• 5 years ago

Tell that to Gab / Parler / etc

commandlinefan3• 5 years ago

borderline legality

There's a technical term for something that's borderline legal: legal.

DanBC• 5 years ago

That's a deficient understanding of law in a society that uses case law.

varispeed3• 5 years ago

Do you want projects that you disagree with deplatformed? That's pretty extremist position to take. Why do you think it is a good idea?

adzzzz4• 5 years ago

I want content that condones pedophilia, bestiality, and other extreme pornography deplatformed yes. Why do you want to keep it up?

blibble• 5 years ago

this is all over the UK press now too:

https://metro.co.uk/2021/03/24/chaos-at-reddit-as-dozens-of-...

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-reddit-censoring-the-...

they couldn't have handled this worse

unethical_ban9• 5 years ago

reddit admins responded and specifically said their automod got aggressive, remediated it, and that talking about the admin is alright as long as it isn't a dox attempt or threatening behavior.

Keep this in mind as you see other people claiming falsely that anything is still being censored.

maxk42• 5 years ago

Reddit's automoderator is not a wild animal that gets "aggressive." It's a simple regex: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/automoderator/full-documentation Someone edited the rules to deliberately block any mention of the name in question site-wide.

arbitrage3• 5 years ago

and whoops it took a reallllllllly long time to identify and fix.

totally understandable, right?

notahacker6• 5 years ago

Tbf admin real names seem like quite a reasonable thing to include in such a regex (unless they're so common it's likely to be an accidental collision or publicly known) which is consistent with Reddit's explanation

The allegation is that the name was only mentioned in the body of a linked (paywalled) article though...

aniforprez• 5 years ago

The problem with the automated moderator excuse seems to be that it started with a post that was removed that was an article that merely mentioned her name in passing. It was not part of the title and the article was not about her. It was a single sentence in the article itself that triggered the admin action which no one seems to be buying as an automated action. It seems highly suspect that the fallout of an automated moderator is a human mod getting perma-banned for it just for sharing the article

BitwiseFool4• 5 years ago

Reddit feels very Soviet lately. Everything is heavily manipulated and it seems like users are aware of that fact but are powerless to change anything.

ryandrake• 5 years ago

They can always just stop using Reddit. Digg went this way, too, and it ended badly for them.

andrewzah2• 5 years ago

Was digg as big as reddit is now?

The issue for me is I don't know of other good places for long-form discussion and good link aggregation in general. Most of the time in smaller subreddits there aren't really any issues.

What alternative is there to /r/AskHistorians? Etc.

ok1234563• 5 years ago

People revolted against Digg because their redesign was a mess. Reddit's redesign is an equal disaster and viewing it on a phone is impossible because it employs dark patters to force you into an app.

Yet, there's no proportional response in this case.

arbitrage3• 5 years ago

lately

haven't been around reddit for long then, have you

BitwiseFool4• 5 years ago

I used "lately" in order to avoid having a back and forth debate about a specific timeframe. The heavy information manipulation has been happening for years, but it feels especially strong since 2018. I know it was happening well before that but the admins and powermods have been especially craven as of this last year.

andrewzah2• 5 years ago

It definitely has gotten much worse in the last few years. From Spez silent-editing users posts, to reddit employing an "Anti-Evil Operations team". I've been using reddit since ~2012.

afavour• 5 years ago

“Soviet” feels like a dramatic overstatement.

Rebelgecko3• 5 years ago

Have you seen the new feature where subreddit visitors get quizzed on whether or not a sub contains undesirable content?

andyxor• 5 years ago

i guess you're not a conservative, try saying something on reddit which doesn't align with their leftist hivemind narrative and see the reactions.

In fact even moderate liberals on reddit often complain of being attacked and banned for expressing even a slightly different opinion on supposedly politically neutral subs.

it would be fine if it only came from users, one can just ignore nasty DMs and such, the problem is admins and mods are heavily censoring opinions and ban all dissent, so echo-chamber effects are extremely strong.

And it's not only political sub-reddits, the entire site is promoting a particular political ideology in a most "soviet" way possible.

throwaway57522• 5 years ago

Immature and melodramatic. It is not accurate at all and diminishes the deaths and repression of millions of people because someone disagrees with some websites moderation policies. It is a really regrettable and out of touch way to describe it.

bad_username• 5 years ago

I grew up in the Soviet Union, and am a redditor since 2013.

No, that is not an overstatement.

mountainriver• 5 years ago

Yeah I got off it, haven’t missed it. It seems to be a reflection of the Soviet totalitarian mindset the far left is taking nowadays.

unethical_ban9• 5 years ago

Not that it relates to the article (the blackout is a very transparent action) but I agree. The manipulation of content to the front page and /r/all is more and more blatant and without repercussion. And more and more subreddits are becoming "safe spaces" where challenging a narrative gets you banned - See /r/conservative, /r/LateStageCapitalism, /r/OurPresident, /r/BlackPeopleTwitter, etc.

The refrain of "just create your own subreddit" is not practical to combat the indoctrination being manipulated to the top by these orgs. IIRC commondreams.org is behind the /r/AOC and /r/MurderedByAOC subreddits entirely.

heterodoxxed4• 5 years ago

| commondreams.org is behind the /r/AOC and /r/MurderedByAOC subreddits entirely.

Do you have evidence of that?

standardUser3• 5 years ago

The subreddits I frequent seem utterly unchanged. Reddit is a big place. I understand that people refer to some ambiguous cross-section of "Reddit" as a shared space we are all aware of and can generalize about. But I don't relate to that concept at all.

asdff2• 5 years ago

I don't know. From my big subs to the smallest ones, it seems like the signal to noise ratio is at all time lows. Bots and spam really do pollute the site a great deal.

ytq114• 5 years ago

I recently retired (before this drama) a 12-year-old Reddit account with close to a million combined karma. This line, that individual subreddits defy any concept of Reddit identity, needs to stop. The overlaps between moderator groups and users, as well as the impact to ALL subreddits from decisions by the administrators, mean it is completely fair game to talk about Reddit as a singular entity.

The notion that individual subreddits mean Reddit Is What You Make of It is useful only to distract just like you’re (unintentionally) doing here. It helps deflect some of these situations by having folks who unsub all defaults saying “looks great here!”

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

Perhaps because you are a perfect fit for reddit's culture. Plenty of communities have left (part of the reason why discord is grown) . There is definitely a culture there, and it's getting narrower by the day

kkoncevicius• 5 years ago

I thought this too for a while but ... one small subreddit I read is "DermatologyQuestions". Here is the top post of this month: https://www.reddit.com/r/DermatologyQuestions/comments/m9ndf... And to get a better perspective - read the comments too.

Maybe there are some more niche more secluded "better" subreddits. But as far as unpopular goes DermatogoyQuestions is pretty niche, and is oriented towards doctors and patients. And yet the worst parts of reddit still get here, and are upvoted straight to the top.

testfoobar• 5 years ago

I miss humor and authenticity from old reddit the most. E.g. the classic: "I also choose this guy's dead wife." or the AMA with the vacuum repair guy.

These days just about any popular thread that I wander into, I see wide swaths of "deleted" comments. I'm sure they were deleted for many good and valid reasons.

IMHO, reddit's aggressive moderation suppresses spontaneous comments and is off putting to lurkers. The wittiest comments are likely spontaneous. And lurkers are not likely to engage in a discussion if they feel it may be off topic.

So we miss out on spontaneous humor and the random insights of brilliant people.

All of this makes reddit a sadder experience.

Akinato• 5 years ago

I'd argue that it's not Reddit's aggressive moderation, but that Reddit is now so popular that the racist, illegal, fickle beast that can no longer stay on topic. If they weren't so aggressive, they'd have a much bigger problem of everyone thinking they're a cesspool of hatred.

genericone• 5 years ago

The Grandpa Wiggly (PawPaw) debacle, and many other events from ancient-reddit-history, disagrees with your claim of "authenticity of old reddit". I think the allure of audience has always driven fakers though, but definitely not to the extent corporate-ness has currently taken reddit.

Spivak4• 5 years ago

Are we on the same Reddit? All of the comments in popular subs are off-topic rehashed jokes. It's a struggle to find on-topic discussion in anything but the smallest subs.

slg5• 5 years ago

That old reddit was also a haven for near child porn and other sorts of immoral or illicit content. Reddit needed strong moderation to become a functioning business and probably for the good of society as a whole. Maybe their current approach to moderation is overzealous, but let's not look at "old reddit" through rose-colored glasses.

sixothree3• 5 years ago

Speaking of AMAs. I feel like these "Scheduled AMAs" broke the spirit of reddit very early on. I am referring to celebrity appearances where an account is created for the purpose of a two hour celebrity "appearance". I've always felt like if they aren't sticking around answering the long tail of questions then they shouldn't be doing an AMA. So I just don't participate.

zionic2• 5 years ago

Exactly this. The comment sections of all but obscure interest subs have been complete garbage for years. The only interesting content is if you sort by controversial but most don't even know about that.

Number1578• 5 years ago

I've tried posting a few times but it just doesn't work. Absolutely everything is censored or sent to auto moderation immediately. And I'm not posting anything remotely controversial. E.g. one time I moved to a new place and wondered about banking in that location. Nope, can't post that. Even worse, messages look like they're posted when they're actually not visible. It's dishonest. They're orchestrating the conversation based on what they want you to see.

StevePerkins• 5 years ago

I would LOVE to find a Reddit alternative, that is more in the vein of that early days spirit.

Unfortunately, it seems like the only options out there are either:

1) Reddit clones, that attract people who are angry about the worst subreddits getting banned at one point or another. Pretty much nothing but non-witty hate speech, and meta discussion about how much Reddit sucks.

2) Random phpBB bulletin boards, that are too small to have the critical mass of early Reddit. Of course, today's Reddit is WAY too big, and suffers from the "Eternal September" problem. A smaller, lesser-known alternative would be great. But it has to be large ENOUGH, or else it's not much different from a private Slack or Discord.

tomc1985• 5 years ago

I miss the free-for-all reddit where anything used to go.

I also miss when the youth of the time weren't so in favor of heavy-handed censorship. The current zeitgeist puts the CCP to shame.

raverbashing2• 5 years ago

The amount of astroturfing (or just unchecked trolling) certainly seems to have gone up

drunner• 5 years ago

I feel the same way about reddit that I feel about google search now (like many others it seems according to the HN thread the other day).

It is only useful to me for very, very small subs that act like enthusiast forums of old.

duxup6• 5 years ago

I think the note should be added that the subreddit moderators can be just as 'soviet' and disconnected from the actual sub users....

I was a part of a few subs where sub moderators chose to participate in some reddit protest and go private.

The response to closing the sub temporarily, by the users you see in the sub was nearly 100% negative and a series of moderators who nobody ever sees came out to defend their choice simply demonstrated how disconnected from the sub they were (some didn't even seem to know the sub rules...).

There's a weird multi level stratification on reddit with admins, mods and users and I'm not convinced any of the 3 see eye to eye / understand each other.

mik09• 5 years ago

a good place to check is who's investing in reddit for the last few years. spoiler alert it's not aaron schwartz. i've been shadowbanned from r/news quite a while ago and started engaging in other forums like saidit. saidit had a couple waves, i was kinda the first wave, eavding various reddit bans. that's about a year or two ago. then during the election there was a second wave, and then when r/superstraight got banned, another wave (sigh.) then when gab got attacked, when parler got nuked, we got more and more people.

sidlls• 5 years ago

The politics subreddit is among the worst. It seems like it is essentially run by operatives of the DNC. (I’m entirely non-partisan: I believe both major parties are right-wing parties, and neither serves our public interests well).

astrange12• 5 years ago

If you think the US Democratic party is right-wing you should see literally all European political parties, who all hate immigrants and love economic austerity.

https://twitter.com/mcopelov/status/1374544227300999169

(At one point a Nordic politician asked Bernie to stop calling them socialist.)

lettergram2• 5 years ago

There is the ".win" community -

https://patriots.win/

https://communities.win/

Which does have a more classic feel.

Zeratoss• 5 years ago

It certainly has a more bigoted feel.

root_axis2• 5 years ago

Everything is heavily manipulated and it seems like users are aware of that fact but are powerless to change anything.

Is there any popular link aggregator on the internet that this doesn't apply to?

pugworthy• 5 years ago

I think it really depends on what subreddits you frequent. Me personally, I find it a refreshingly fun place. Same with Twitter

This is probably because I'm focusing my participation on subs where the users are unified by a similar interest in an area of creative expression and participation.

Follow controversy, anger or FUD and you'll just get sucked into it in a sort of meta way. Anger because of the anger, controversy because of the controversy, FUD because of the FUD.

bvm• 5 years ago

why do these posts keep being removed from the HN front page?

eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26567842

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26557175

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26554697

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26556187

TameAntelope4• 5 years ago

I don't know the specifics of the HN submission filter, but if you spend any time on /new you'll see how often the same content gets submitted over and over again, which often results in flags. Additionally, new accounts and low-reputation accounts also tend to have their submissions flagged by default, and require a "vouch" to be unflagged.

In other words, HN's submission filter is fairly aggressive, I doubt anything nefarious is taking place.

rincebrain• 5 years ago

dang commented here[1] that "Users are flagging them. The only thing moderators have done is decline to turn off the flags."

I doubt there's a conspiracy of users flagging them, either, so you're most likely correct.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26561855

Karawebnetwork• 5 years ago

They were all links to active threads. This is the first link to an article on the topic.

threatofrain• 5 years ago

Not only is this a very interesting story, but it's still developing and there isn't much to discuss until we hear the next development.

In other words, is Reddit telling the truth when they stated it was autoban mistake?

badpassword123• 5 years ago

Well, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26557175 was also flagged when the post was getting popular. HN has really been going on a censorship spree lately as well. What's even worse with HN is that sometimes your comments appears to have been posted, but if you log out or go in private browsing, your comment cannot be found at all!

chippy• 5 years ago

Users tend to flag stories. The system also has a kind of automated flame detection system. The moderators can override both.

dannyw6• 5 years ago

Just consider HN to be actively moderated. It's an opinionated community that does not strive to be a democracy.

onewhonknocks• 5 years ago

Now this post is on page 2 as well.

jandrese• 5 years ago

More discussion on this topic from two hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26567842

nojito• 5 years ago

Reddit protests are always so humorous to me.

For every mod that "leaves", dozens more will gladly step up to take over.

Reddit Admins will also not think twice to remove mods that do things like this to "hurt reddit"

Rebelgecko3• 5 years ago

Reddit has addressed the situation here, in a mealy mouthed sort of way: https://www.reddit.com/r/modsupport/comments/mbqgx2

However they seem to be denying the accusations that admins (possibly including the individual in question) were manually editing contents containing her name.

This whole situation is incredibly bizarre to me. In the first place, why would reddit hire a 23 year old admin whose greatest accomplishment is being forced out of politics due to her connections to multiple pedophiles? Why did they taking such extreme steps to hide the admin's name, when they don't offer the same protections to mods or other users of the site? Does reddit have any audit trail or safeguards when admins edit comments? It would be interesting if they did a postmortem on the situation, but so far they seem reluctant to say that anything went wrong on their end.

unloco2• 5 years ago

I pretty sure that response was as close to a post mortem as we are going to get.

brabel2• 5 years ago

due to her connections to multiple pedophiles?

You mean, her own father? The article says her fiancee also had been accused of saying he feels attracted to children but they claim his account was hacked, which may be true as no one in their right mind would tweet something like that.

sodality2• 5 years ago

And her partner.

tommica• 5 years ago

If the tweet was years ago, then I can easily imagine a kid tweeting something like that to be edgy/something else - I know I've said some stupid stuff as a kid

PH012• 5 years ago

Her partner posted content about being attracted to children as far back as 2015.

A five year setup followed by a Twitter hack seems incredibly unlikely.

Edit: The unique name used for her partners keybase account is associated with similar content posted in 2004. The evidence appears concrete that her partner is a self-confessed paedophile.

colpabar• 5 years ago

no one in their right mind would tweet something like that.

You must be blissfully unaware of the child-oriented fetishes that exist online. I know kink-shaming is a no-no, but I find it hard to believe that adults who participate in these activities don't have any desire to include real children. Just like I find it hard to believe that someone who uses an "islamic terrorist" target at a gun range doesn't have any desire to shoot a real one.

EDIT: replace "islamic terrorist" with "gangster thug" (I don't like altering comments in this way so just pretend I did)

defen• 5 years ago

You mean, her own father?

To be clear, the connection is not just that he is her father. He raped and tortured a 10 year old girl in his own house while living there with Aimee. Then after he had been charged but not yet convicted, she hired him as her campaign manager.

s1artibartfast• 5 years ago

I hate to be the guy that point this out, but no one should be Shamed for admitting they have a problem. Context matters whether they Were admitting attraction or endorsing the molestation of children

tyho2• 5 years ago

Stop defending pedophile apologists before you know the full facts of the case.

Her father raped and tortured (a car battery was involved) a ten year old. This happened over multiple days whilst the child was tied to the rafters in the attic of the family home. This is the same house Aimee Chancellor was living in at the time. But she claims she didn't know and she was not on trial. Regardless, during the trial photos of Aimee with the victim were discovered on Amiee's phone.

After her father was arrested and charged with 22 counts of sexual violence, she forged documents in order to hire him as her election agent. This is a position where he would have had contact with children. She was kicked out the Green party when this came to light.

She then joined another political party, and was kicked out of that after her fiance was found to have tweeted:

"I fantasise about children having sex, sometimes with adults, sometimes with other children, sometimes kidnapped and forced into bad situations."

They were both contacted by the media about this, she claimed he had been hacked, he claimed that these were only fantasies, and would never act on these urges... She later married him.

Amiee Chancellor is a despicable human being who can only be viewed positively if she is compared to the people she chooses to surround herself with.

esja6• 5 years ago

The account wasn't hacked. Aimee lied about that, along with many other things, in order to protect a pedophile (again).

Sebb7673• 5 years ago

possibly including the individual in question

Even assuming that Reddit learned nothing from the /u/spez-debacle and that admins can still edit comments, it would be a problem in its own right if she already had such far-reaching permissions when just getting started.

trident50004• 5 years ago

The CEO himself admitted to going into The_Donald subreddit (before it was banned) and editing user comments. I don't think this guy is leading the charge to admin transparency.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/reddit-ceo-edits-user-comment...

pen2l2• 5 years ago

This gets brought up a lot. And it's a bit of a doozy to make sense of.

First, consider the context: the CEO (spez) was an easy punching bag on the_donald subreddit, in fact it was a bit of a meme there to attack reddit's admins (and those in the know do know that the attacks were often crossing a line, like accusing them of being pedophiles and things of the nature). The change that spez made was a bit of a joke itself, it was turning an attack on its head. If the edit had been made in the early early days of Reddit, especially in the jokey context it was made in, I don't think anyone would have batted an eyelash. But in the last few years, right around the time these things happened, it became clear that Reddit is a big deal.

I think what I'm trying to say is, whatever may be your feelings of Reddit and its stature, this particular act by spez was pretty insignifiant in the grand scheme of things. Indeed the subreddit that this happened in actually no longer even exists, the_donald and similar subreddits were banned to make Reddit a friendlier place such that it's now an easier decision for corporate America to put ads on there.

caslon10• 5 years ago

It was a single time, and in a way that was an obvious joke (literally just regex to switch his name with mods' names). It's not exactly heinous, what he did.

ineptech2• 5 years ago

You left out some context: he did that in a (failed) attempt at lulz. It was a long thread where (IMHO) he was fielding tough questions pretty frankly and honestly, as one might hope he would, but he ruined it by editing someone's post to troll them. In context, it was obvious that he did it, he wasn't trying to be sneaky.

I'm not justifying it; obviously it was dumb, given that people are still using it to denigrate him years later. But the implication that this means he is more likely to have edited other peoples' posts surreptitiously is (again IMHO) not true.

lettergram2• 5 years ago

For reference, they moved to: https://patriots.win/

It's been interesting to watch the community actually grow (it was thedonald.win, but there was a difference between moderators - aka the domain owner wanted to make money).

dvfjsdhgfv• 5 years ago

I'm asking myself the same question. There many LGBT+ activists out there; hiring this particular person is just asking for trouble. And the current censorship situation simply makes no sense.

duxup6• 5 years ago

Reddit administration seems pretty ad hoc, undisciplined, at times weirdly disconnected from the community, and uncoordinated as it could possibly be.

Then again so are all its subreddits, and the volunteer mods are about as opaque and strange as the admins, with the added excuse that they're doing it for free.

The fact that the ecosystem has survived seems more like happenstance.

nonplussed• 5 years ago

It'd be interesting to see demographics on moderators. My perception is that they must skew young because who else has time to do all that work for free?

Volunteer moderation is one of those things that must baffle economists. Here you have people putting in a lot of work for free for a profit seeking enterprise.

Blikkentrekker7• 5 years ago

This doesn't seem to be particularly different from H.N., most other websites, or even the political leaders of many nations.

More often than not, the man who seeks power is ill-suited to have it.

numpad0• 5 years ago

I think they’re very coherent, connected to reality and mission driven, except their mission being clearly far from that of users or what user think it is, deliberately.

akhilcacharya• 5 years ago

The obvious answer is they probably didn't, this is probably a pseudo QAnon/Pizzagate conspiracy theory where people were "censored" for the harassment of a random person.

kart23• 5 years ago

Reddit admins have confirmed she is an employee. And there are a bunch of reputable articles of her actions and controversy from years ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/mbqgx2/a_clarif...

skinnymuch• 5 years ago

Funny that you so casually dismissing something with many facts around it makes you more like any Q related stuff.

esja6• 5 years ago

I agree, but a minor nitpick: Aimee was forced out not just for being connected to pedophiles, but also for lying about and/or endorsing them (among other issues). A massive failure of safeguarding from the Greens and Lib Dems, and now from Reddit.

It's astonishing to me that a person like this can become an admin on a website used by millions of teenagers. We already know that admins can access private messages and other personal information.

mam28• 5 years ago

I am 100% convinced that the rate of pedophile is higher in:

- positions of power (we have had a few in france who were judges / party representatives etC...)

- any job close to children, which includes in particular schools, but also..

- church

Why ? Because if you woke up tommorow as a pedophile, without any morals, and wanted to maximise the "chances" to satisfy your sexual attraction, where would you go ? Exactly.

LeifCarrotson• 5 years ago

Normal rules of balance can be twisted or broken in this case, depending on your desired outcome.

On the one hand, you've got the (reasonable) rule "always condemn and distance yourself from pedophilia". On the other hand, you've got the also reasonable rule "never discriminate against someone because of their gender". If the Greens, Lib Dems, Reddit, or anyone else involved had chosen not to hire her, she could stir up outrage against them for gender discrimination. If they did hire her, the public could stir up outrage against them for their connection to pedophiles.

It's easy to agree that both pedophilia and gender discrimination are bad. It's harder to take action, especially when people have prior agendas.

newsclues2• 5 years ago

Couple this with the pornography subreddits. After pornhhub had issues with user generated content, Reddit needs much stricter regulation.

ryanmarsh2• 5 years ago

It's astonishing to me that a person like this can become an admin on a website used by millions of teenagers

Unfortunately not so astonishing, people like that are drawn to and commonly inhabit exactly the kinds of places you wouldn’t want them. There are some fairly recent public examples you could easily find.

wcarron2• 5 years ago

I have seen allegations on reddit that Aimee also moderated a number of subreddits, specifically ones pertaining to minors, before, during, and after her fathers' rape and torture of a 10 year old in the house she lived in.

Allowing a person who willfully ignored pedophilia and torture be in a position of power near/directly engaging with minors, and then hiring that person, is despicable.

lawnchair_larry2• 5 years ago

The obvious answer is because diversity trumps qualifications, and Silicon Valley companies are desperate to get their diversity numbers up.

StellarTabi• 5 years ago

Yep, gotta meet those diversity quotas, everywhere except board of directors, of course.

jefftk3• 5 years ago

However they seem to be denying the accusations that admins (possibly including the individual in question) were manually editing contents containing her name.

Are you talking about replacing contents / titles with "[Removed by Reddit]"? That's the "Content Removed by Reddit Admins" category in https://www.redditinc.com/policies/transparency-report-2020-...

Rebelgecko3• 5 years ago

According to the r/UKpolitics moderator that got banned, one of their comments was manually edited multiple times (first to change the content of the comment, then to fix typos in previous edits)[1]. Reddit hasn't refuted this.

From context I've seen elsewhere, my guess is that the mod posted the text of the Spectator article in its entirely as a comment on their submission. Then, someone edited out the sentence which contained a passing mention of Aimee, but in a nongrammatical way. Then someone went back to fix the edit, and a little while later the comment was full-on deleted (so now it shows up as [ Removed By Reddit ]) [2]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/mbytxw/_/gs0wor...

[2]: Visible from the mod's user page but not on the submission itself

jbroson• 5 years ago

I think the idea that we should cancel people because of what their parents or partners did is incredibly wrongheaded.

Is there even a shred of evidence this person did anything illegal, immoral or unethical themselves?

they hired their dad, BEFORE he was even convicted of crimes she had nothing at all to do with. That's the worst thing this person ever did?

Usually I'm not a "cancel culture" critic but this is just insane.

Accujack2• 5 years ago

Does reddit have any audit trail or safeguards when admins edit comments?

No, and despite being told multiple times over the years they have not made any attempt to develop anything like this, despite it being an obvious step to prevent admins from controlling group think on the site.

My theory is that the company is worried that if they start letting people see under the covers that all the users will realize how much the site is used to manipulate them... deletions of "wrong think", bot posts, etc.

camdenlock• 5 years ago

why would reddit hire a 23 year old admin whose greatest accomplishment is being forced out of politics due to her connections to multiple pedophiles?

Hiring trans people gets you a lot of Virtue Credits. The incentives are clearly there.

It’s ridiculous, of course. And I say this as a trans person.

shultays2• 5 years ago

I remember related articles being flagged on HN as well. That is some very effective moderation tools

tinus_hn• 5 years ago

You yourself can flag any article you want, you just have to click a link at the top.

jl6• 5 years ago

This person was probably hired because they have great trans advocacy credentials, which seems well aligned to the political orientation that Reddit is converging on. It’s easy to imagine how safeguarding issues were overlooked in a rush to hire an ally.

binaryblitz• 5 years ago

ding ding ding ding

stjohnswarts• 5 years ago

I suspect they are circling wagons and presenting a united front but this person will be fired or "resign" in the next day or so. She must not have told them about her history. You would think a network savvy company like Reddit would have HR department that can do a google search on someone's name though.

smegger0012• 5 years ago

I wonder with her being a UK citizen how much the EU/UK"right to be forgotten" laws has made it harder to do background checks on this.

wlonkly• 5 years ago

This Verge article was updated an hour and a bit ago to say that they have indeed "cut ties".

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/24/22348255/reddit-moderator...

exar0815• 5 years ago

Well, there is also the fact that Ellen Pao, former Reddit CEO, is linked to Partys by Epstein.[1]

Also, there was a lot of circumstantial evidence alleging Ghislaine Maxwell was a powerful mod on reddit, with a very disgusting collection of "evidence"[2]

[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/ghislaine-maxwell-attended-k...

[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/hnckn0/umaxwellhil...

whymauri2• 5 years ago

Ellen Pao's tweetstorm about Epstein was so bizarre. I honestly viewed her as a good ally and champion for a lot of my values. Seeing her casually divest that she mingled with Epstein and co. completely shattered that.

How can you advocate for women's rights and inclusion while fraternizing with Epstein and not seeing anything wrong with that... man, it bummed me out.

SamBam7• 5 years ago

Number 2 has beed deleted.

mansion7• 5 years ago

One can be forgiven a lot of one's politics are correct, especially if one has the mitigating status of minority status, even if it's a minority status that one grants oneself and no one is allowed to question.

We've just witnessed two celebrities on the same show, make tweets comparing a political situation to Nazism. Only one was fired for it.

One was conservative, the other liberal. If you immediately knew that one kept their job based purely on that description, the question of why Reddit would hire such a disastrous individual becomes much less mysterious.

znpy2• 5 years ago

Reddit is getting shittier and shittier as the years go on...

znpy2• 5 years ago

I just want to comment again because something else came up in my mind.

I've learnt through the years that "about us", "company policies" and "our values" pages are mostly marketing bullshit.

Who we hire, fire and promote show the actual values of a company.

What does this mean regarding reddit, considering this situation?

Everybody should draw their own conclusion.

phreack• 5 years ago

Why did they even hire such a controversial person in the first place? It's baffling how they're doubling down on defending her after her previous actions. I wonder if this'll all cool down in a couple of days with everyone forgetting about this or if there'll be a new established rhetoric in inflammatory communities like 'reddit admins are confirmed pedophiles'.

ALittleLight3• 5 years ago

From wikipedia Aimee's accomplishments seem to be resigning in disgrace from a couple of minor political positions and convincing a transportation department to stop using the phrase "ladies and gentlemen".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimee_Challenor

ganzuul• 5 years ago

They seem to be the product of a very dysfunctional home, so don't judge them too harshly.

Dma54rhs• 5 years ago

Good PR, trans activist etc.

akustik• 5 years ago

Here's a bit more info about this person (it's a bit hit-piece-y for me, but it doesn't look false) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjYkx-ZhUQ4

Number1578• 5 years ago

'Censorship', or censorship?

javajosh2• 5 years ago

Ugh, what a ball of mud. Well, I think there are two problems here: first, that Reddit has a bug in its anti-abuse software, and second the mob decided to abuse Reddit for hiring this woman who's history is, at worst, questionable.

This is "cancel culture" in a very dangerous form, one that if taken to its conclusion, could prevent someone from ever being employed again. That is a very harsh punishment, handed out without a trial or defense, it is NOT justice.

Furthermore, it puts a potentially chilling effect on employers, and harm employees. The first reaction of employers will be to keep their employee identities entirely secret, and to enforce that secrecy in the work contract. This will harm workers who want to move to a different job, and talk about the work they did.

My firm hope is that this protest is more an emphatic bug report than a mob looking to murder someone's career after spending about 30 seconds thinking about it from all sides.

smbullet2• 5 years ago

at worst, questionable

Don't you mean at best?

javajosh2• 5 years ago

No, I mean at worst. It doesn't sound like she was involved in anything illegal. She was never charged, let alone convicted. The allegations are all innuendo without proof, so yes, I meant "at worst".

imwillofficial• 5 years ago

Why the scare quotes around censorship? People are clearly getting censored. People are mad about it. If that censorship is justified or not is another discussion.

varispeed3• 5 years ago

Is Reddit now partially owned by China? If that's the case then I believe there will be more of that. It's just part of the agenda to create divide and chaos in the West.

jtdev• 5 years ago

Not sure on any ownership stake by the CCP, but it does seem that U.S. social media companies in general have zero loyalty to the U.S., its people, or the principles that the U.S. was founded on and stands for.

I get the impression that U.S. social media companies have a very sympathetic mindset and relationship with the CCP driven by social media company's desire to use their technology to surveil and drive the economic, social, and political direction of humans on a mass scale.

reducesuffering• 5 years ago

Tencent has a 5% ownership stake.[0]

[0]https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/reddit-300-million/

mancerayder2• 5 years ago

Why is censorship regularly put in quotation marks by the press?

LatteLazy• 5 years ago

People immediately say "Censorship isn't censorship if...".

mancerayder2• 5 years ago

That's what the problem is. Censorship is defined as limiting or removing content. It doesn't mean it's always illegal or legal, or morally correct or immoral, but because it has a bad connotation, and there's a pro-censorship (let's be honest) Zeitgeist at the moment, the press (the same press that should be fighting against most forms of censorship) has this desire to numb the effect of the word with quotes. Like it's not really censorship, it's, oh, eye-roll, "censorship."

swayvil• 5 years ago

This post just got removed from the front page. Reddit isn't the only place with a censorship problem.

topspin• 5 years ago

Yep. 4 hours old with almost 500 comments and it's been disappeared.

The best possible outcome is for Knight to take all of these highly selective champions of free speech to the cleaners in court for 'harassment.'

moonbug• 5 years ago

....and nothing of value was lost

akhilpotla• 5 years ago

An interesting question I've been thinking about, though I haven't really gotten anywhere is: At what point does a private platform become a public utility, so that censorship is not permissible on the site?

I agree that reddit shouldn't be censoring anyone or certain topics since it feel like a public utility. But if I were to have a blog, I think I should be allowed to block someone or delete certain comments based on how I think my blog should be, but my blog isn't a public utility. Or is it?

astrange12• 5 years ago

Your platform hasn't been granted a monopoly on anything and has no moat, so why would it ever be a problem?

daringfireball.net is a blog with no comments and at some point someone wrote a browser extension that just adds a comment section the owner of the site has no control over. Bit mean but that could always happen to you.

jerrygoyal• 5 years ago

Prediction: next reddit will be the decentralised one. Yes, those decentralised communities already exist but will become mainstream once those achieve good usability (UX) and accessibility (apps)).

mam28• 5 years ago

Wtf https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/c...

LordAtlas• 5 years ago

The Reddit CEO has announced that the employee in question is no longer employed there.

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/mcisdf/an_up...

But it's such a weaselly post.

First, it admits they didn't vet her before hiring: "We did not adequately vet her background before formally hiring her." Apparently, a basic google search is too difficult for HR.

Second, it says this: "On March 9th, we added extra protections for this employee, including actioning content that mentioned the employee’s name or shared personal information on third-party sites, which we reserve for serious cases of harassment and doxxing."

OK, and they _still_ didn't check why people were opposed to this person? Still no Internet search or, oh, reading the comments people were posting?

Notice that this "protection" was two weeks ago, not recently.

tim333• 5 years ago

Screw ups happen I guess. Looks like they got to know her through earlier work and assumed she was ok.

Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

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