Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/06/10/reddit-bans-five-communities-in-new-anti-harassment-campaign/

by kolbe • 11 years ago

256 313 11 years ago

blogs.wsj.com

Most notable is /r/fatpeoplehate, which had become an extremely popular "fat-shaming" community.

Navarr2• 11 years ago

Clarification from the Reddit Admins on their announcement post indicate that they're banning subs where moderators either took no action or encouraged organized harassment (as in going to other subs or websites and actively harassing the person in question) as opposed to subs that just post awful things about people.

almaIV• 11 years ago

I'm not sure how much I believe that.

I've dealt with reddit's administrators from a moderator side before, and they can just shadowban moderators they don't like. It makes no sense to ban a subreddit for the actions of that subreddit's moderators when they can just remove the moderators that are the issue.

I suspect they wanted to ban certain subreddits, and "the subreddit has toxic moderators" is a good reason to give publicly. Nonetheless, they've always had policies for dealing with toxic moderators that don't involve removal of subreddits.

Navarr2• 11 years ago

More "the entire subreddit is involved in the harassment of users by taking action outside of their subreddit"

fleitz10• 11 years ago

Why not ban the people organizing these activities rather than the sub? It's a smoke screen for banning ideas.

lukeschlather• 11 years ago

If the people organizing the activities are the moderators, how do you ban them without banning the sub?

girvo5• 11 years ago

You'd think so, but they're banning any new sub that attempts to be a "new" /r/fatpeoplehate -- if it's not about "banning ideas", but "banning behaviour", then I find that somewhat at odds. I think there's a simpler answer: FPH ended up on the front-page of /r/all constantly, and the Imgur staff "doxxing" (I've heard right before they were banned there was something happening regarding harassing the imgur editors outside of Reddit, though I don't know how true it is) was enough to get the admins to pull the plug.

If you're monetising a website, and the most active and fasting growing sub on your website (aside from the defaults) is a subreddit dedicated to mocking fat people, I think that may make it a difficult sell.

toufka2• 11 years ago

Or, if you're monetizing a website and one of the largest hosts of your content (imgur) is being actively harassed by a minority of your users, you find a way to mend the insult.

It's becoming more clear that Reddit took action specifically because of the Imgur insult, and that makes a lot of sense from a business perspective. But from a wider perspective it looks very focused and targeted - not in a good way.

PhasmaFelis4• 11 years ago

You'd think so, but they're banning any new sub that attempts to be a "new" /r/fatpeoplehate

Is there any reason at all to think that /r/fatpeoplehate5 is not going to be administrated in exactly the same way that /r/fatpeoplehate was?

EC14• 11 years ago

There's over 50 subs currently banned.

fleitz10• 11 years ago

They aren't banning behavior, they're banning the expression of certain ideas.

It would be one thing if the group was about beating up fat people, but posting comments online about them is clearly under the ideals of expression.

If they want to ensure it's behavior and not ideas they should get a judge to rule on whether the expression would be constitutionally protected.

And yes, as a private entity it is their prerogative to ban certain ideas on their site, however, they should just be honest about it, they are limiting speech in a manner that would likely be unconstitutional if they were a government entity, aka. they are abridging freedom of expression.

noahbradley• 11 years ago

For an... interesting take on all of this, there's always /r/conspiracy: https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/39ddf1/rfatpeop...

PopeOfNope3• 11 years ago

Meh. IMHO, the real conspiracy here is Reddit's attempting to make it more palatable for advertisers so they can at least make an attempt at making money.

ljk3• 11 years ago

is /r/fph and relevant subreddit affecting reddit's advertising income that much that they needed to be shut down? if the subreddits were such a huge issue it's kind of interesting that I've never realized it till this thing broke today

Hytosys3• 11 years ago

I would never want my business to boil down to a collective of people who will undoubtedly be on the wrong side of history. It's bad mojo all around, not just bad money.

tdkl• 11 years ago

The sidebar image made me chuckle;as I read about the CEOs statement in the news about making reddit "a safe place" I had a question immediately pop up in my mind. "What's the safest place on Earth? North Korea."

zxcvcxz4• 11 years ago

I don't know how to feel about this. On one hand I'm against censorship, on the other I'm against internet bullying.

/r/FatPeopleHate was engaging in both.

In the end reddit is a private site that can do what it wants. Wikipedia removes things all the time and sites like 4chan remove all sorts of extremely offensive material.

I'm glad the mods of the hate oriented subreddits have been shadow banned, I actually think this shit storm is wonderful and I hope the reddit admins literally pull the plug and shut down. The FPH spammers are complete idiots, buying thousands of guilds and donating money directly to reddit and hurting their cause by vote brigading at the same time. They're sealing their fate.

This whole fiasco has shown the true face of reddit, just a whole bunch of (slightly below) average kids who don't deserve my attention.

I can't wait until reddit dies, but I have no idea where I'll go. I want something like reddit, but more open and transparent, and with a way for users to somehow remove mods.

GauntletWizard2• 11 years ago

Wikipedia has a stated goal, a public management team engaged in discussion and debate with their users, and something resembling accountability. Reddit has the Silicon Valley's most notorious gender-baiting troll as it's head, virtually zero interactions between the corporate side and the unpaid community managers, and no clear rules on what it does and doesn't allow.

Honestly, the writing should have been obviously on the wall when r/jailbait was banned. I think they could have made up reasonings that would have placated the userbase, but they failed to, and they handled the resulting outrage very poorly. I was sorta surprised that wasn't reddit's 'digg moment', but I thought that the HDCP controversy was Digg's, so maybe I'm just ahead of the wave.

__david__2• 11 years ago

Reddit has the Silicon Valley's most notorious gender-baiting troll as it's head…

What does "gender-baiting troll" mean?

scrollaway2• 11 years ago

Reddit has replaced RSS for me. HN is nice but hyper-curated and very specialized; though I prefer the HN voting system and algorithms over reddit's.

Reddit also has a massive advantage when it comes to companies/games/etc communicating with their fan-communities. It's an excellent medium for it as the type of vote-curation that happens there is great to sort topics of importance and the threaded comments are far better than what you would find on bulletin boards.

Overall, reddit has had a fantastic impact on the internet when it comes to communication, IMO. I hope that sticks.

adamnemecek• 11 years ago

On one hand I'm against censorship,

I feel like censorship isn't the right word for this but I can't think of a better one.

scrollaway2• 11 years ago

Curated speech.

sarciszewski• 11 years ago

I don't think there is one. I'm pretty sure censorship has a pretty specific connotation, but it's the only term in the ballpark of what is being accused.

fleitz10• 11 years ago

It's censorship, in the context of reddit they have appointed officers who censor objectionable speech.

This precisely fits the common definition of censorship (not the legal one)

rcfox• 11 years ago

It's moderation.

"Censorship" implies suppressing free speech, which this is not. It's simply removing undesirable content from a privately-owned website.

tveita• 11 years ago

Keeping bad content off your own site is just good old-fashioned moderation.

Most forums will delete stuff like this - I assume HN would too, and no one bats an eye.

Fannon• 11 years ago

Censorship is when the content has to be pre-approved by an authority in order to be published at all. If content is removed after it has been published (because it violates some agreements / ethics), that's moderation or "legal-stuff".

Of course, moderation can be misused to a point where it's almost effectively cencorship. But IMHO, the order matters here.

EC14• 11 years ago

Internet bullying? What? Just don't visit places like r/fatpeoplehate if you are fat. Just turn it off.

UnoriginalGuy4• 11 years ago

You don't have to visit to get bullied. They were literally posting people's Facebook pages, images posted in other subs, and original photos they took themselves.

There are numerous incidents of harassment against other users on Reddit, and even off of Reddit. The admins said themselves they received numerous complaints.

zxcvcxz4• 11 years ago

You can't deny that they're engaging in bullying. They are literally posting pictures of the reddit mods and making fun of them. That's bullying.

A lot of fit people don't participate or enjoy FPH either. I couldn't imagine one of my college professors asking the fat kids to leave when another student starts bullying them.

If you pulled this kind of behavior on just about any college campus you would be asked to leave, this just shows the level of immaturity these people have.

chisleu• 11 years ago

Yep. I would post from time to time to point out incorrect "facts" they posted. It doesn't matter how well researched and reasoned your argument is. If you aren't towing the line, you are moderated and banned. They auto moderate and message any user who is voted down by the self-proclaimed shitlords.

It is a pretty disgusting place.

infinitone2• 11 years ago

Just like the great Digg v3 Migration to Reddit happened years ago... its happening again from Reddit to Voat.

obstinate• 11 years ago

I think you mean "I hope it will happen", because there is no evidence that it is actually happening.

MBCook2• 11 years ago

If the people leaving are the obnoxious hate monger, bandwagoners, and other general trolls that's fine with me.

If Reddit wants to get some of the amazingly creepy stuff under control, I'm all for it.

albertoleal• 11 years ago

I'm betting that a day/week/month from now, Reddit still lives on. Subreddits, which Digg did not have, would make Reddit resilient to such 'migrations'.

eertami4• 11 years ago

/r/FatPeopleHate was engaging in both.

Blatant lies such as this do not help your side of the argument.

FPH was not engaging in harassment or bullying whatsoever, any instances of this were entirely attempts at false flagging. FPH is not about hate, it is not discriminatory, it is not prejudice, and it most certainly didn't violate any of reddits rules.

wj• 11 years ago

What was it about then?

redml3• 11 years ago

If the problem is "bullying", there's plenty of subreddits that exist solely to bully other subreddits. The administration are showing bias and bending around their own rules, but that's not really surprising for a site that shadowbans its users.

elinchrome• 11 years ago

Reddit has become a real cesspool over the past few years. You'll always find misogyny front and center and you don't have to dig to find racism.

mynameishere• 11 years ago

I've been on reddit for 8 years, and lurked before that. The top submissions and comments have always, and consistently, been standard-issue PC/liberal in their overall view.

teraflop2• 11 years ago

I've been on Reddit approximately that long, and I disagree. It's always been made up of people who like to think of themselves as liberal, in a group-solidarity, shared-identity sort of sense. But the conservative/reactionary undercurrents have been around for quite a while and have been growing with every passing year.

eli5• 11 years ago

I don't think this has anything to do with liberal vs conservative. Nor does outright bullying really have anything to do with "political correctness".

HelloMcFly2• 11 years ago

In the years since SJW turned from a meaningful term into a catch-all for anyone who advocates for social justice in any way other than qualifying lip service[1], the general reddit crowd has noticeably moved away from standard-issue PC/liberal to anglo-centric liberal. Systemic issues of injustice are portrayed as primarily matters of self-fulfilling prophecy. The protestant work ethic is heavily espoused for minorities, but it's all systemic issues when it comes to college grads having a hard time finding a job.

The same is true to a lesser degree[2] for many women's issues, though I hesitate to mention it because this community isn't immune either.

[1] Ex) "I hate racism as much as the next guy..."

[2] Or maybe I don't appreciate it as much.

moonchrome• 11 years ago

You'll always find misogyny and racism if that's what you're looking for :)

noarchy• 11 years ago

I know that /r/politics seems to lean heavily towards what might be termed "liberal" politics, but outside of that it really depends. Most of the subs I read aren't political at all. The nice thing about reddit is that you have some control over that.

halo• 11 years ago

The world view of the founders was pretty clearly "tech libertarianism" (incidentally, not a view I share), which, in the context of the site, meant a hands-off moderation policy, which allowed the site to deteriorate in many ways but flourish in many others.

drhodes• 11 years ago

AAAAAnd reddit just jumped the shark.

a2tech• 11 years ago

And yet subreddits like 'coonville' and 'GreatApes' still exist and continue shitting all over reddit. I know it makes my (black) wife feel welcomed when subreddits she frequents are slammed with the most virulent hate speech you can imagine.

UnoriginalGuy4• 11 years ago

People keep bringing up racist subs, but it is unclear what exactly they're trying to argue. Should Reddit not ban anything because they haven't banned everything?

I'd love to see them squish some of the subs mentioned, but ultimately today is just one day, and I'd prefer to see them take SOME action than sit around waiting for the day that they can sweep Reddit clean in one single swoop (which won't ever happen).

PS - The two subs you listed have under 5K readers combined. FPH had 150,000. I've never seen any racist sub on /r/all but FPH was bullying on the front page daily.

fleitz10• 11 years ago

There's nothing wrong with them banning those ideas, they just shouldn't claim their not banning ideas.

I don't see why banning racist ideas would be so out there. Sure people are going to complain and leave, but aren't those like EXACTLY the people you want to leave?

mahouse• 11 years ago

This is pretty interesting. The top posts on all of reddit as of now: https://www.reddit.com/r/all

deanstag• 11 years ago

it is quite funny to see another innocuous post amidst all the vile and hateful posts. "How do people even do this shit? (X-Post from /r/gtagifs) " (https://i.imgur.com/po4V0QW.gifv )

Edit : added quotes for clarity

zobzu2• 11 years ago

this guy with the truck is damn lucky.

batiudrami3• 11 years ago

Like the Digg HDDVD encryption drama. http://i.imgur.com/0QLFsPo.png

shpx2• 11 years ago

I love the irony of (poorly, see #8) censoring the original image

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ae/HD_DVD_Night_...

ejcx2• 11 years ago

The idea is to make people who are being harassed on reddit feel safe[0]. This goal is something I think everyone agrees is a good goal. As a policy decision, I think it is pretty weird they started banning communities instead of people.

There are a lot of people on reddit and policing individual users would be a challenge. Would something like a "flag harassment" button have the same desired affect?

0 - http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removi...

girvo5• 11 years ago

This goal is something I think everyone agrees is a good goal

Depends. As it stands, making something a "safe space" is a super broad goal that has some very fuzzy edges. But then, I enjoy dissent and viewpoints at odds with my own, and it's a private company that needs to make money, so I can understand it.

ejcx2• 11 years ago

Yes I agree. Everyone attaches their own meaning to that. I only mean it to be, a website where using it isn't going to get you needlessly harassed, doxed, threatened, etc. and when that kind of stuff happens, people don't find it acceptable.

This is clearly a growing pain for reddit. Something like "reddiquitte" only scales so much.

eli5• 11 years ago

I'd imagine a "flag harassment" tool would be used at least as often by abusers as the abused.

zobzu2• 11 years ago

Admirable goal, wrong execution, not that its easy to get right, but still a classic.

redml3• 11 years ago

The question is safe for who? Who are they trying to appease/attract to the site by changing it? They're just driving away their current userbase who likes things as they are.

The time to set boundaries was during the sites initial founding. It's a little late to have regrets.

kzhahou• 11 years ago

A few weeks ago, /r/fatpeoplehate started showing up at the top of /r/all, every day. This was pretty lame, since I prefer /r/all versus home page.

Anyone know how /r/fph suddenly jumped so high?

girvo5• 11 years ago

Anyone know how /r/fph suddenly jumped so high?

It was the fastest growing subreddit outside of the defaults, and by far the most active. Turns out there's a large contingent of people who seem to hate fat people, at least that's how it seems anyway

eli5• 11 years ago

I'm speculating but it seems like an easy outlet for that "being offensive for its own sake" mindset you see sometimes in kids and young adults. I think it's part of growing up... It just happens that the Internet allows people to focus and concentrate that negative energy.

Gurkenmaster• 11 years ago

Does all of this boil down to these subreddits getting to /r/all? There are worse subreddits that the admins left alone. They should just introduce a shadowban for subreddits that excludes them from /r/all and perhaps hide links from other subreddits to the offending one.

DanBC• 11 years ago

I suspect there's an amount of brigading from those subs. Fatpeoplehate has a whole bunch of users shaddowbanned quite often.

teraflop2• 11 years ago

This article dramatically understates the magnitude of the shitstorm that is currently unfolding. Check out http://www.reddit.com/r/all/ if you feel like seeing all the ugliness.

(And if anyone has any doubts that this is ultimately about harassment, count how many of the posts on the front page (and their comments) are made up of personal attacks and/or obscenities targeted at CEO Ellen Pao.)

I don't fault the Reddit admins for trying to clean things up but I can't see any good that will come of this. To paraphrase a comment that I saw earlier today and now can't find, it's like trying to get rid of an anthill with a leaf-blower; you just end up with pissed-off ants everywhere.

EDIT: Ah, found it. It was in the "can I sue Reddit for violating my freedom of speech" thread in /r/legaladvice. http://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/39c58h/could_so...

fleitz10• 11 years ago

You've got to give Christopher Poole credit, he was never dumb enough to try to police 4chan. This is as laughable as trying to get rid of trolling on IRC.

gkoberger• 11 years ago

Reddit is a venture-funded company with a large staff that needs to monetize. Nobody wants their ad next to a post fat-shaming someone.

I don't agree with censorship, however the two sites aren't comparable.

PopeOfNope3• 11 years ago

Yes, he was. When GamerGate happened, that's exactly what he attempted to do. He replaced most of the mods on the site within a very short amount of time and the heavy handed policing started. Most of 4chan left in response. Many alternative chan sites were started, including 8ch.net.

pendo324• 11 years ago

I feel offended by your recent action(s). Please read http://stop-irc-bullying.eu/stop

jewbacca• 11 years ago

he was never dumb enough to try to police 4chan

This is not true, there was a massive controversy and subsequent schism less than a year ago.

A "folk history" (if you're feeling generous enough to call it that) of the episode here: https://encyclopediadramatica.se/M00t%27s_GamerGate_Sellout

tmerr• 11 years ago

Not to mention there's a game of whack-a-mole going on where similar subreddits have been banned including fatpeoplehate2, 3, 4, 5, 8, and 9.

derefr3• 11 years ago

If they really want to go down this road, it feels like there's only one destination: real Know-Your-Customer-esque identity verification to prevent registration of duplicate accounts, like banks and X.509 CAs do.

If-and-when they do that, they will finally have an actually-effective tool (in the form of being able to ban people "for good") to stop harassment. Until then, it will just go on forever.

ljk3• 11 years ago

not only on /r/all, now on /r/pics a lof of the links are about... body-sizes, opinions about the CEO, etc

emehrkay• 11 years ago

This makes me want to leave Reddit alone.

codingdave• 11 years ago

Me, too. I just blocked it on all devices on my home network. I wouldn't want to touch that community with a 10 foot patch cable.

cma• 11 years ago

Why? Hackernews is way more heavily moderated and would never tolerate anything like those subreddits for a minute.

Veedrac• 11 years ago

It's worth noting that reddit is a big place. The majority of subs are largely free of this nonsense - it's the accumulation of it all that makes it look so prevalent.

I only noticed what was up when The Verge wrote an article on it, for example, since I tend to browse subreddits directly.

lnanek2• 11 years ago

I think banning the fatpeoplehate subreddit wouldn't have gone over so badly if it wasn't for the fact that Ellen Pao was already kind of hated on the site for constantly banning and deleting anything disagreeing with her viewpoint about her law suit.

Even political cartoons with her driving the tank and the reddit alien with a down vote in front were getting deleted, which were quite funny and appropriate, since she was shadow banning and deleting people basically for down voting her law suit.

It's tough to stand up and defend the fatpeoplehate group, but when someone abusing their power and deleting anything they don't agree with in a lawsuit does it, well, in this case maybe a villain ruining the site on her managed to do something not terrible, but because she is a villain it comes across a lot worse.

leereeves6• 11 years ago

They even censored

https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/39ddnb/if_you_dont_...

"If you don't believe in freedom of speech for those you loathe, you don't believe in freedom of speech." (1600 points and gone from http://reddit.com/r/bestof)

AlexC04• 11 years ago

Do you have any source that gives more detail about a post of "editorial cartoon" being deleted? That does seem an odd example.

Editorial cartoons are a pretty fundamental part of journalism. What if Tony Blair could delete news of the world editorial cartoons?

Seems to cross a line and, all due respect, until I saw proof that a delete happened, I'd be more likely to believe it was a histrionic "just-so-story"

I mean, Pao deleting this stuff personally? Even admins doing it?

It doesn't seem reasonable to me.

jfuhrman4• 11 years ago

Please stop spreading this nonsense. I expected better from HN.

constantly banning and deleting anything disagreeing with her viewpoint about her law suit.

There are multiple posts on multiple reddits, each with thousands of points and comments that were not deleted. Some posts were deleted by sub moderators(not the same as Reddit staff or Pao) on some subs because they were offtopic and were being vote brigaded and had comments full of hate speech.

E.g of posts:

http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/30j9mn/ellen_pao_loses...

http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/38qkmx/after_losing_he...

It doesn't make any sense why she would leave those posts up if she really was deleting stuff. It's interesting how the folks against her have made it look like she was. It's just sad how easily so many people are manipulated by false information.

Examples of comments that were being made and upvoted by the brigades on unrelated big subs:

Somebody needs to fire this whore right fucking now. What a tampon smear...
She's a lying cunt who is using her pussy pass because she didn't get what she wanted; a big pay-out for being a whore.

Why would subreddit mods want to deal with hundreds of such comments when the story is offtopic to their sub?

baby5• 11 years ago

I never understood why reddit was so lenient with its community. There are so many racists and hateful subreddits, that attract more and more people like that, that makes the community as a whole worse.

I'm really glad that moderation actions like that are taken, and I'm sad that people reply to that by "harassing" the CEO...

Hopefully such people will get frustrated by such events and will eventually leave reddit.

Note that it's mostly people posting to /r/punchablefaces that are reaching r/all right. Another hateful reddit for you...

PS: FWIW, /r/all has always been pretty bad. If you want a good reddit experience do like me: unsubscribe from most subreddits and suscribe to smaller subreddits with active moderators.

PhasmaFelis4• 11 years ago

I never understood why reddit was so lenient with its community. There are so many racists and hateful subreddits, that attract more and more people like that, that makes the community as a whole worse.

There's a large segment of the online community in general that understands the ideal of free speech to mean that no one may ever be prevented from saying anything, in any location or context. These folks believe that the banning of /r/shitniggerssay deserves exactly as much righteous indignation as, say, secret police disappearing anyone who speaks against the government. Reddit was founded on this ideal, and has only recently started to move away from it.

This understanding of "free speech" was obviously originated by petulant children on BBSes and Usenet groups casting about for a justification to (ironically) silence anyone who disagreed with them. I'm not really clear how it became something that otherwise-rational adults espouse in defense of people other than themselves.

IvyMike• 11 years ago

I never understood why reddit was so lenient with its community.

I liked that reddit bent over backwards to allow a wide variety of opinions, even ones that were ignorant or hateful. I viewed it as a noble stance.

But once upon a time, the "ugly" subreddits were ignorable and mostly self-contained. (At least to me, usually)

that attract more and more people like that, that makes the community as a whole worse.

Yup. This trend surprised me--the recent exponential growth of some of the toxic hate subreddits. I guess I was naive. The uglier subreddits more and more frequently show up on /r/all, the users would encourage each other to post more frequently, and there was a thriving community built around the hate. It struck me as mentally unhealthy for all involved--the rapid innovating of negativity and the stoking of mild opinions into full on hatred.

arfliw9• 11 years ago

I never understood why reddit was so lenient with its community
do like me: unsubscribe from most subreddits and suscribe to smaller subreddits with active moderators.

Answered your own question. Because people can do that and not have to deal with that crap. reddit is many things to many people. Some people enjoy that stuff and reddit wants as many people as possible on the platform. The site was also founded with free speech and an open platform as something they believed in. And they've stayed true to that.

Goronmon6• 11 years ago

I think people are just upvoting anything that is critical of reddit at the moment. I doubt most people actually care who, if anyone, is being targeted.

powrtoch• 11 years ago

The front page is pretty worrying.

The situation seems almost identical to when Reddit axed r/jailbait: one of their more embarrassing communities started to get too much attention, its users were increasingly behaving in a way that was damaging Reddit, and Reddit decided to kill it (ostensibly for the greater good of the site).

But even though that pissed plenty of people off... I don't recall the front page being totally dominated by calls for anyone's head on a silver platter. Reddit's userbase seems to feel especially threatened by Ellen Pao, and it's hard for me to believe that the difference is anything rational.

Goronmon6• 11 years ago

Reddit's userbase seems to feel especially threatened by Ellen Pao, and it's hard for me to believe that the difference is anything rational.

Well, she has basically said that she wants to start cleaning up the "objectionable" sides of reddit. Plus, there is a strong sentiment that content that's critical of her (even the less hateful stuff) has been removed often in the past.

Kalium3• 11 years ago

Pao is attempting to "clean up"... in an environment that cherishes its traditional freewheeling and unrestrained discourse. Even if the stuff getting cleaned up is just the stuff that most people agree deserves it - for some value of deserves - it's a troubling precedent to set.

Some people find themselves wondering what opinions will be deemed unsafe next. The policies are not exactly clear-cut, and neither are the actions of the administration.

pvg• 11 years ago

/r/all is not the front page. Reddit is at a scale at which this will probably blow over, likely for a better Reddit. Other teacup storms like the removal of /r/jailbait, their handling of 'the fappening' and gamergate don't seem have affected reddit much at all. It seems almost more like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlOSdRMSG_k

philwelch4• 11 years ago

Previous Reddit CEO's have made lots of statements about wanting the site to allow relatively free expression, aside from things like doxxing and pedophilia. Ellen Pao has instead talked about turning Reddit into a "safe space", which is a common euphemism for eliminating dissenting viewpoints.

FPH in and of itself isn't the most defensible or tasteful subreddit, but they're going to start by banning the least defensible subreddits first. Once the precedent is made, they can start banning political dissent subreddits.

Johnwbh• 11 years ago

"But even though that pissed plenty of people off... I don't recall the front page being totally dominated by calls for anyone's head on a silver platter. Reddit's userbase seems to feel especially threatened by Ellen Pao, and it's hard for me to believe that the difference is anything rational."

I mean its almost like her being an asian woman rather than a white male makes a difference

txru2• 11 years ago

Here's /r/all as of about a half hour ago. Not cool.

http://imgur.com/a/5KMCS#0

tomphoolery• 11 years ago

This is what I'm doing about it: http://i.imgur.com/E5tIRGg.png

baby5• 11 years ago

meh. Mostly from r/punchablefaces which is another hateful subreddit.

eertami4• 11 years ago

Why not? It's pretty funny.

a89anqm2ovn• 11 years ago

Wow. Even though I'm somebody who thinks reddit has crossed the line into thought-policing the frontpage of /r/all is surprisingly ugly.

An nice juxtoposition is the top post of the default homepage is social justice outrage about a police officer shooting somebody.

voltagex_• 11 years ago

I think that's the end of my Reddit use then, the toxicity in a few fringe subreddits has spread into full blown septicemia.

That's really sad - I don't think there's many communities like /r/assistance and even /r/buildapc around.

yanks• 11 years ago

Just cut your ties with all the main ones and keep around the few you like, I did that ages ago and while my front page is a lot slower it I still get good content and decent people, and I honestly had no idea this stuff was going on until I went on hacker news, so that's nice.

oliyoung• 11 years ago

as another comment said "If you want a good reddit experience do like me: unsubscribe from most subreddits and suscribe to smaller subreddits with active moderators."

r/hiphopheads, r/nba and r/comicbooks are great communities in their own right

zxcvcxz4• 11 years ago

They should just shut down the site. Who knew the internet would devolve into middle school bullying of fat people? It was just ten years or so ago that the kids started to get on myspace. We've reached the point where even the dumbest people have internet access. They've ruined everything.

beloch• 11 years ago

An analogy I like is "using a leaf blower in a sealed room full of leaves". Sure, you'll kick users out of their former resting spots on the floor, but they have nowhere to go and will just settle back into new resting spots after being in everybody's face for a little while.

olefoo• 11 years ago

The magnitude of an online shitstorm is never as big as any of the people involved believe it to be.

This is reddit in the act of growing up. And it's about time and a a good thing in my opinion.

I like that I manage my filters well enough that I visited reddit several times today and was blissfully unaware of this particular bit of drama.

chjohasbrouck• 11 years ago

Wow, that /r/all. I really thought Reddit was better than that.

eivarv2• 11 years ago

Can someone explain how and/or why so many people have come to believe that freedom of speech obligates others to provide an arena for them to spread their opinions?

I see mentions of thought-policing etc., but that's really wholly different from censorship and moderation.

renata• 11 years ago

Nobody does, but up until now the reddit admins have been very supportive of the idea that they are a home for any content that isn't illegal. Former CEO of reddit, Yishan Wong: "We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19975375

This is an obvious departure from this ideal.

evanriley• 11 years ago

I'm hoping this thread gets deleted, because the shitstorm is just going to come here sooner or later.

ChikkaChiChi• 11 years ago

Notch has the right idea. Why not just block the subreddits you find offensive?

https://twitter.com/notch/status/608706518972788736

Reddit just put the world on notice that they are willing to become user babysitters, and historically this has never ended well for the company involved.

sehr2• 11 years ago

AFAIK it is literally impossible to ban 150,000 users from your reddit viewing experience or whatever.

The issue wasn't with the subreddit, it's with what it was doing outside the subreddit.

colept2• 11 years ago

The reddit admins failed to consider the Streisand effect: they made all of reddit an outlet by taking away the container that kept the hate isolated.

freebsdgirl6• 11 years ago

That's a request that was made recently to OAPI. Um. We might be working on that.

dopamean• 11 years ago

I think the problem is when people organize a trolling campaign in one subreddit and the conduct it in another.

batiudrami3• 11 years ago

Because it was spilling out into other subreddits. I had FPH on a filter, but you could go to any other post with a photo of someone who was overweight and there'd be an upvoted comment calling them a "hambeast".

nemothekid2• 11 years ago

I don't think banning a subreddit will solve the problem os assholes on the internet. People have been saying hurtful things before keyboards were a thing.

pbhjpbhj• 11 years ago

Hambeast has to be about the least perjorative insult ever used on reddit though. If you're going to police insults then doesn't it seem a strange place to start? Wouldn't you if instigating a new policy disallowing insulting language give a warning that this was about to happen and then expect to apply the policy equally??

Neckbeard seems to be a very similar level of insult (ie mild and related to appearance) and that is widespread. Actually just calling someone "ugly" seems more offensive than either of these.

Reddit certainly have a legal right to censor whatever they wish on the site but I feel they have a responsibility to the community not to do it in an arbitrary or disproportionate way.

ianburrell• 11 years ago

Reddit doesn't support hiding subreddits from /r/all by default. Blocking subreddits requires either paying for gold, or using RES or other software.

rtpg3• 11 years ago

historically this has never ended well for the company involved.

Really? Places like Something Awful ban for hate speech, and that site has continued existing for a while just fine.

The fact is banning of the worst of the worst makes life better for most of the users, and they're grateful. I can't think of a single community that has suffered overall from banning racists and mysoginists.

What I've seen is those banned people end up going to form their own little secret clubs, and it's just a cesspool of seething hatred. Fine, stay in your corner, means we don't have to deal with it.

sergiotapia• 11 years ago

This marks the beginning of the end of Reddit. It's been a long time coming and Reddit has become a huge promotional platform for pseudo user generated content submitted by shills and celebrities.

A lot of people are migrating to Voat.

http://voat.co

sehr2• 11 years ago

I genuinely hope they do, it would be nice to browse reddit without them

UnoriginalGuy4• 11 years ago

That site has been down all day. But frankly if they get all of the racists/fat haters/misogynists/etc then Reddit will be significantly better for it.

The site always had undertones of this stuff, but as the popularity grew these previously minority voices got louder and louder and harder to ignore until I myself don't spend a whole lot of time on Reddit now.

baby5• 11 years ago

If you look at parent's URL you will see mostly garbage. The migration of the shitty reddit to voat.com has begun :)

feybay2• 11 years ago

You'll all be there in a few years if it sticks around.

infinitone2• 11 years ago

This. I was one from Digg to come to Reddit, but since then the quality of posts has gone to shit. Comments worse than Youtube sometimes.

ghrifter• 11 years ago

Yeah take a gander at some of the bigger 100k+ subscriber reddit comments...low effort comments with grammar or spelling mistakes.

For instance, /r/games used to be super awesome with great comments and discussion. Since it got bigger over the past few years posts are lackluster, comments are nonsensical, and so on...gah now I'm ranting

Aoyagi• 11 years ago

I'm quite sure that it will take more than that to kill Reddit. The fact that I haven't heard of Voat anywhere else but HN reinforces my belief.

spodek• 11 years ago

HN users consistently imply this place has better comments than Reddit. "Reddit is a cesspool." "Can we please not bring this to HN as well." etc.

I've never had a problem avoiding content I didn't like there. Meanwhile I saw great discussions at various times.

Here, on the other hand, I've nearly stopped reading. Besides the unjustified elitism, constantly I'd post on a thread here only to see it disappear with no explanation. I don't understand HN's weighting and it seems to change without notice, or it did a while ago. Arbitrary curating means someone is arbitrarily imposing their values on discussions. I prefer allowing legal speech.

I generally preferred Reddit to HN and will probably end up going to Voat.co like everyone else talks about.

EDIT: Case in point: When I posted the above, the story was number 1 and it was about fifty minutes old. When it hit one hour, it dropped to number 5. The stories that it dropped behind were 5 to 12 hours old so I doubt they suddenly got surges of activity.

In the time I wrote the above edit this story dropped to number 11. Soon it will probably drop from the front page. Who knows?

I don't understand HN's weighting. Maybe this story is getting downvoted and user behavior is driving its trajectory, but it seems arbitrary and tells me to leave the site.

EDIT 2: corrected voat.co address thanks to ljk's comment.

zxcvcxz4• 11 years ago

HN isn't very good, but it's a little better than the current state of reddit, which is like a middle school without adults. At least people try to be intellectual on HN.

batiudrami3• 11 years ago

It really depends where you look and what subreddits you subscribe to. Opening reddit this morning looked exactly the same to me as any other day, except for one thread because I'm subscribed to /r/subredditdrama.

eruditely• 11 years ago

Hacker news is consistently superior to reddit. I think we're just being difficult.

ljk3• 11 years ago

I generally preferred Reddit to HN and will probably end up going to Voat.com like everyone else talks about.

correct url is https://voat.co!

therobot24• 11 years ago

Arbitrary curating means someone is arbitrarily imposing their values on discussions.

This has been bothering me about HN for some time. Maybe it's due to a smaller user base, but having stories disappear, specific user's comments always being weighted lower, and childish hellbanning is really discouraging. It does give the sense of a 'country club', where if you're not of the same bread and butter as those making the rules then you're not welcome.

dang• 11 years ago

Moderators haven't touched this post. Upvotes and flags are in the usual tug-of-war that happens with controversial submissions.

baby5• 11 years ago

constantly I'd post on a thread here only to see it disappear with no explanation.

We surely don't have the same experience with reddit then, most big subreddits have a huge amount of rules and posting to them will just cause a bot/moderator to remove your thread and ask you to make changes

mahranch4• 11 years ago

cause a bot/moderator to remove your thread and ask you to make changes

He said "disappear with no explanation". Most of the time, bots will comment on why a post was removed. Not only that, the rules are indicative of why your post was removed. It serves as an explanation. Here on HN, you get nothing. Not even a list of rules which need to be followed.

robot222• 11 years ago

Reddit also has an astroturfing problem

jacquesm2• 11 years ago

Astroturfing being present or not is simply a function of size and influence.

smsm424• 11 years ago

HN users consistently imply this place has better comments than Reddit

That isn't a big surprise, is it? If they thought otherwise, they'd be commenting on Reddit about how HN sucks :)

Reddit and HN have different audiences. I tried both and found HN suits me much better. If it's not your cup of tea, nothing wrong with that too.

Yes, HN story ranking is arcane and I wish there were better tools to track content I like. But it also has a lot of insightful people and great discussions while trying not to devolve into circus.

mahranch4• 11 years ago

will probably end up going to Voat.co like everyone else talks about.

Good luck with that. The users exiting reddit are precisely the kind of users you don't want on your website. The young, trolls, immature and racist/bigots. They're essentially filling their community up with 4channers. That site is already filled with reddit's /r/conspiracy users. They run many of the most popular subreddits.

That place is doomed to fail. And as far as I know, they've already begun banning users and blacklisting domains. So much for "free speech".

chazu• 11 years ago

There are lots of normal, high-functioning and even helpful users having discussions daily on 4chan. This is something that is often glossed over by folks who don't understand chan culture: its chaotic neutral, not chaotic evil.

themeek• 11 years ago

I do not know about this specific case (looking at the subreddits I truly doubt it is an example) but there are examples of systems using anti-harrassment as a means to censor particular groups, links, and ideas.

With a title like "'Troll hunting' algorithm could make web a better place" (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-04/14/google-algori...) this algorithm seems like a true boon. It's only slightly suspicious (and can easily be explained away) that two of the three websites used in its study were political websites. You'd have to be pretty zany to leap to the conclusion that the paper had anything to do with censorship.

It would look worse if one of its co-authors (Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil) received funding from the DoD to study the propagation of information through social media online (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.01383.pdf) as part of DARPA SMISC - a strategic communications (DoD term for propaganda) research group that studies how information flows on social media and how to direct and disrupt it.

Many researchers take grants from all over though, and anything in this area of study is likely to get investment from the DoD. So still it's more reasonable to think that, since he works in that area, of course he will receive DoD funding.

Yet it was posted with 22 likes to NATO's Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (https://www.facebook.com/StratComCOE), a Facebook wall also contains a review of a book called "The Weaponization of Social Media" and announces its participation in a conference on “Cyberattacks and Propaganda: the Battlefield of Future”.

As evidenced (again) as recently as this week by a group of people who run an anti-TPP website, there is an inter-website system for blocking posts to certain content (https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/38pmg8/hey_redd...) - Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, etc all simultaneously blocked this website. Whether this was an error or not (it probably was), it points out there is a centralized system for blocking content.

Both the Facebook emotion experiment and the Facebook vote experiment had ties to funding to the DoD (and Air Force though blurbs about funding from the Air Force, which handles cyber in the US, was erased from the academic's page when there was public attention; it was reported to be a clerical error).

This is not to say that this is used inside the US to block US contibuted content. While the history of the United States Government in applying strategic communication and information support to US audiences has been slippery, and the Smith-Mundt Act (anti-propaganda law) was recently weakened under the justification that global interconnectedness of conversation, news and social media makes it difficult to prevent US propaganda intended for foreign audiences from making it back home.

The new CEO of Reddit is on the board of a Washington Defense Thinktank. This anecdote doesn't imply anything. But it does mean that you should be asking Reddit and its CEO hard questions, you should be skeptical of intentions, and you should demand that Reddit - like all other companies that own your communications and socialization - keep themselves to the highest possible standards.

cousin_it2• 11 years ago

Has any large website ever managed to stay censorship-free?

baby5• 11 years ago

any website is "moderating" its content. Even 4chan.

fierycatnet• 11 years ago

This is like dream come true for voat dot co. I highly doubt there is going to be mass migration like it was with Digg but Voat is going to get quite a few users in the near future for what it's worth.

In any case, Reddit has become a new mainstream site full of propaganda, censorship, shadowbanning, hand-picked news, etc. I've noticed a sharp decline in the last year or so.

It's not even their new policy, it just feels like it Reddit got big enough to finally join any other mass media source of information, not in a good way.

freebsdgirl6• 11 years ago

This is like dream come true for voat dot co.

A dream they weren't prepared for. The site has been in failboat mode all day. Should have designed to scale for all of those users that want to hate on fat people.

s73v3r3• 11 years ago

Have fun with your mysoginistic, racist, hateful community.

pjscott• 11 years ago

In case anybody was wondering what the five communities are, here's the list of names:

/r/FatPeopleHate

/r/HamPlanetHatred

/r/TransFags

/r/NeoFAG

/r/ShitNiggersSay

cft• 11 years ago

I truly hope that this will have one of two outcomes:

1. End of Chairman Pao's CEO term

2. End of Reddit.

I find only these two outcomes desirable, because the third one is chilling free speech in the internet, the one that Ellen Pao is gunning for.

wetmore2• 11 years ago

Lol, take it to /r/conspiracy bud.

im3w1l• 11 years ago

When something that was previously (more or less) politically neutral takes a stance people get upset. Especially when there is vendor lock-in.

Some thought experiments:

Imagine if Comcast blocked access to all liberal sites.

Imagine if Microsoft word was changed so only pro-liberal documents could be created. For extra fun imagine if people could be "shadowbanned" so all their files were silently deleted.

Imagine if Google could only be used to find websites that supported global warming.

Imagine if Facebook messages could only send "patriotic" messages (as determined by their moderators).

Imagine if Intel processors could only run non-violent games.

These may seem weird comparisons because when we think of forums, we think of moderators having the power. But reddit isn't a forum. Reddit is basically a site that hosts forums. And now it wont host some of them anymore. Not only will it stop hosting some of them. It stopped hosting them unexpectedly, with a self-righteous "fuck-you".

kayamon• 11 years ago

That's not an especially useful comparsion.

If Google didn't let people search for what they wanted, they'd just go use a different search engine.

If reddit doesn't do what people want, there are other websites for them.

namlem2• 11 years ago

The google example is bad, but I think it applies to reddit and facebook. There are no real alternatives to speak of. Now, if they really adopted policies that harsh, people would leave anyway and the competitors would experience a massive burst of growth. However, milder forms of biased content filtering could probably get through.

tdmule• 11 years ago

If we accept the premise of Reddit not as a forum, but as a host, perhaps a more apt analogy would be other hosts.

For example, both AWS (http://aws.amazon.com/aup/) and Google (https://cloud.google.com/terms/aup) have very broad acceptable usage policies that allow for doing anything deemed legal by US law.

jacquesm2• 11 years ago

This is probably the best illustration of the 'no broken windows' theory at work on the web. You can start a new community and keep it 'clean' from day one, but you can't let your community turn into a cesspool and then one day decide to clean it up, the inmates will be able to achieve critical mass and they'll happily burn down the asylum if they can't have their cesspool back.

What I really don't get is that they choose these 5 subreddits to ban, reddit has at least 50 (and probably more) subreddits that are arguably a lot more offensive than the ones they just blocked.

fleitz10• 11 years ago

Yup, it's like trying to clean up a crack neighborhood when the rent is already cheap everywhere else.

You cant gentrify reddit because there's no incentive to be the first to go back to the cesspool.

thaumaturgy• 11 years ago

What I really don't get is that they choose these 5 subreddits to ban, reddit has at least 50 (and probably more) subreddits that are arguably a lot more offensive than the ones they just blocked.

I think this is the key thing that's really got everyone all in a tizzy. There are a pile of subreddits that the vast majority of Reddit users would like to see gone: topics that aren't just politically divisive, but are offensive for the sake of being offensive. Instead, the only thing that's consistent about Reddit's decisions to police subreddits is that it's inconsistent. Reddit's administration looks like they're generally OK with whatever's on the site up until it gets some kind of exposure elsewhere and only then does it get banned, and then the reasons given for it don't make any sense given the site as a whole.

I think Reddit is actually in a unique position to start cleaning up their site. They don't have any real competition at the moment and they have a huge userbase. They could probably institute and enforce new consistent site-wide policies and actually get away with it. But this blindfolded "pin the ban on the subreddit" game is only succeeding in irritating their users and making the admins look ham-handed.

On a side note, I was a little disappointed to see kn0thing's name prominently on the announcement. He's always seemed like a smart, level-headed guy. I'd genuinely love to hear from him how the subreddit banning policy makes any kind of sense. (Alexis, are you lurking here?)

mmcwilliams• 11 years ago

The point wasn't that they were banning subs that had offensive content, it was that they were banning subs that were actively harassing individuals. In my opinion, judging by a rough timeline I have of events, the final straw was when /r/fph went after imgur employees.[0]

What I find funny about people complaining of censorship is that the sub in question would routinely ban people for saying positive things about the people they were trying to harass.

[0] http://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removin...

mmalon6• 11 years ago

My two cents:

1) Reddit is a business and has certain interests at stake. If they want to seriously monetize their inventory (i.e., subreddits and pages), it needs to be with content that jives with advertisers. Odious content and sub-reddits are kryptonite to advertisers. Clorox doesn't want to see their advertising next to fat-shaming/racist/misogynistic horseshit.

2) Whether or not you think Reddit is suppressing "freedom of speech" is irrelevant (I personally don't think they are). What matters to Reddit is that those who contribute objectionable content according to advertisers leave the site, either because their subreddit has been shut down or because they find Reddit is suppressing their freedom of speech. All those pages were a cost to Reddit that had no chance of making money. When they're gone, they don't have to worry about them anymore. Reddit is probably rooting for other platforms, like Voat, to get traction so that people who want to post horseshit don't linger and leave immediately.

archagon2• 11 years ago

People always say that Reddit is fine, you just have to unsub from the defaults. That's nonsense. The defaults are representative of the userbase of the site, and their values seep into every crevice. Furthermore, Reddit has never actually been about "free speech". The vast, vast majority of people who browse Reddit don't do it because they can say whatever they want; they do it because it's an esay way to aggregate and consume light content. I mean, this should be obvious to anyone who uses Reddit with any frequency. The people who trot out the free speech defense — at least from what I routinely see on the site itself — are often exactly the ones who enjoy reading vile subs like /r/fatpeoplehate.

If Reddit can't survive this cleanup, then good fucking riddance.

jokoon• 11 years ago

I really wonder if there's not some money involved into those subreddits. It seems pretty easy for a PR company to just create fake accounts and build a popular subreddit and pretend that "the reddit community is angry".

I'm really starting to doubt that plain users can put so much energy in hating fat people, and I'm really dubious that it would create such chaos.

I wonder if the popularity of reddit has not brought some attention from PR groups.

themeekforgotpw3• 11 years ago

The West is so inconsistent. It will cheer as Charlie Hebdo mocks the prophet of a quarter of the living people on Earth.

"Free speech!"

But then it will close down forums where some people say mean things about some other people.

"Propriety!" "It's 'curated' or 'managed', not censored!"

andrewflnr• 11 years ago

It's almost as if The West isn't a monoculture, and contains people who disagree with each other.

themeekforgotpw3• 11 years ago

I don't think we can characterize it as that. Of course there are people who disagree with one another (everywhere).

This comment above is about consensus - or its approximate form - that ends up dominating the conversation.

_pmf_2• 11 years ago

It will cheer as Charlie Hebdo mocks the prophet of a quarter of the living people on Earth.

I think the gentlemen shooting bullets at the Charlie Hebdo authors contributed quite a bit to this attitude of defiance.

themeekforgotpw3• 11 years ago

I think state sponsored messaging helped as much. But sure. I don't think that's at odds with the claim at the top.

digitalzombie• 11 years ago

Ugh... the majority of the ban was pretty reasonable. The fatpeoplehate was the one that got many redditors' panty in a bunch.

Now I'm stuck with all these fatpeoplehate post on the front page.

_pmf_2• 11 years ago

Claiming that insulting obese people in an extremely offensive and aggressive manner for the sole purpose of personal entertainment has anything to do with free speech is something that even the average 14 year old Redditor should be able to recognize as a bit bold.

Eupolemos• 11 years ago

I'm all for moderation, be it votes weighed by algorithms or by taking a stance on communicative quality. I'm for it, because otherwise easy gratification comments is all I'm ever going to see.

But I am very much against the "For Safety!" stance. That is not what Reddit is about. I don't think angry Redditors is for Hate, they are against Safety.

IMHO, that is pretty simple.

thrillgore2• 11 years ago

I think community oriented websites have stress moments, typically policy or technical in nature, that signal the period in which uniques begin a steady drop-off. Digg has its with the move to approved submitters in v4. I fear while banning FPH was the right thing to do, this is going to stunt the uniques that Reddit draws.

And i'll leave it at that because it looks like, if the comments are telling, Hacker News is going full-on Eternal September right now.

chippy• 11 years ago

Digg users went to reddit, and reddit techies went to HackerNews. The classic early adopters, high technology users were the people going first. They went because there was a better alternative.

Firstly it's the wrong sort of user that is thinking of leaving reddit - these are a lot of the latecomers and consumers rather than the early adopters. Secondly, these types of users will not be going to Voat because it is not a better alternative.

If someone comes along and creates a better alternative, we will be pulled towards it, not pushed from something else.

Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign

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