Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use.
There is constantly tremendous pressure on you to perform opposing actions, and even making no decision at all will cause you significant mental stress and harassment, regardles of what the issue is.
You have to pick who you want to cave to, and to what extent, and no matter how good of a job you try to do, a lot of people will really really hate you.
This is even more apparent when you see that Reddit has been taking action against a lot more subreddits recently, some of which are listed in the article, and many of which clearly have little to do with the president. The attitude of some of these communities may be abhorrent, but they are still communities, and people do not react well to their communities being deleted, whether a company had the legal authority to, or was justified in doing so, or not.
It's very tough and I wish that we didn't have to go through these things to begin with, and could have more federated and decentralized platforms, or at least more client-side filtering inside of centralization curation. I can always dream.
I don't think people want that. The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc.
Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content?
I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. The sheer volume of users at its height seemed to involve a huge amount of brand new accounts you never saw again / never posted again (except when they show up as a group again), and etc. Or those without brand new accounts show up and post strange dishonest lead in type posts that sort of try to lead folks down a bigoted path ... that you can blatantly see in their post history.
So you'd be in your other community and one day they all show up and down votes and the vitriol begins... it was no mystery that this happened, it was spoken of openly in The_Donald for a time.
> The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc.
Yea, I gotta say, having to previously deal with r/The_Donald brigades on another large subreddit was incredibly annoying and depressing.
Can't speak to spreading fake news, but massive influxes of r/The_Donald users spamming truly vile stuff in an ostensibly non-political sub really sucked (as a moderator, to clean up).
The only thing that works imo is fairly strict moderation, or extremely niche/small communities. Everything else just gets swamped by toxicity. Decentralized vs centralized isn't really the right dimension to look at I think.
And as soon as your small community grows... the trolls come a-knocking.
The iron fist is a double edged sword in some senses.
Although reddit acted as a free speech haven for a long time, it was only overall, and not ever in major specific communities. True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. A marketplace of ideas, and maybe more importantly, the counterspeech doctrine, are incredibly important principals in justifying the existence of free speech. Fiefdoms more often than not were echo chambers, where to see a response to bad speech, a person would have to know where else to venture. By creating filter bubbles, tribes, echo chambers, reddit was not an exemplar of a free speech haven, but instead a collection of lopsided megaphones pointed in opposite directions, strewn across a hard to navigate map.
Strong moderation is what allows communities with strict quality guidelines to function, but also amplifies division.
And on the topic of history, a part of me finds it unfortunate that this banning will make historical, sociological, and psychological analysis of trends, thoughts of the times, past bad behavior etc much harder. It's no what.cd or house of wisdom or library of alexandria loss, but it is still a historical record loss of a huge event that happened. I may not have personally liked The_Donald but it was quite the experience, as a fish out of water, to go look at how other people think, communicate, and reason. The culture that developed there will continue to exist, but the ease with which one could passively observe it, and learn lessons from it is greatly diminished. Another double edged sword.
> True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech
Sure, but in practice this is what true free speech on reddit for a large sub looks like before moderation
* 3 knee jerk replies
* 10 pieces of spam asking you to buy their bit/altcoin or click on their affiliate links
* 5 people who are hurling vile insults at you for whatever reason
* 8 more people who are hurling vile insults at each other, and just happen to be in your comment chain for some reason
* 1 reasonable, well thought out response
* 2 people who are lost and looking for a different sub
* 1 person replying half a year later after everyone's gone
Something in that ratio
With no moderation at all, you're lost in a sea of spam, scams, and insults. And because of the extremely poor SNR, your reasonable replies dry up and just leave.
I agree not everyone has to go the r/askhistorians route of completely iron fist, but you can't actually run a communication forum with millions or tens of millions of subscribers without a lot of automated and manual moderation. True free speech ends up being no speech because everyone got scammed or insulted and just decides to leave to go somewhere smaller. (edit: trying to untangle my confusing sentence)
It might work for smaller communities. It does not scale.
As moderator of a top-100 subreddit: this is SO incredibly accurate. You must be another moderator of one of the big subreddits. 90% of my work is nuking flamewars, spammers, trolls, and low-effort meme replies.
Without automation and human moderators to clean up, it's basically impossible to have a free exchange of ideas or any good discussion. Free speech disappears into the noise.
The idea of free speech is great and was a big step forward in an era where government oppression was a primary fear. But in the Internet Age, I think Civil Discourse is a better goal to aim for.
One of the original ideas was with the up and down arrows, the good content rises to the top. The problem with heavy handed moderators is that they are often biased and many get on a power trip.
This, more or less. Even if someone wanted to powertrip like crazy they literally wouldn't be able to do much. Delete 100 comments? Wait 15 minutes and another 100 will replace them.
People assume "mod powertripping" too quickly. The reality is that most of the moderation is accomplished via automation, primarily Automoderator rules on Reddit. The volume is far to high to manage by hand -- it varies by community and month but it's around 75%+ automated for us.
Automation makes mistakes. A LOT. Sometimes a person catches them and overrides the bot, often they don't.
There are some communities that abuse the automation to enforce bias, of course. For example, /r/news appears to be auto-censoring things about coronavirus or that might be perceived as negative for Trump (ex: the Russian bounties scandal). But this is much rarer than people think -- with the exception of bans, most of the "mod abuse" is simply bots screwing up.
It would be interesting to see an implementation that lets you view but not interact with removed content. click the spam tag to see all the spam, grayed out. in some cases it might be helpful to know what not to say, or that something has already been said and removed. /r/askhistorians would probably be a place where marking something as removed but visible would not be as at risk of propagating urban legend or bad history. hopefully that community would know what they are getting when they peak beneath the curtain.
You can individually lock comments now (new as of a year ago?), but in practice it is incredibly painful/time consuming to do so for a whole subthread of comments. Eventual consistency also sucks there. Easier to nuke the whole thread and remove it from view.
At no point did I intend to or hint at advocating for a lack of moderation. Moderation can be other things besides how it currently exists.
Any commenting system is going to need some way to value signal from noise, and popularity by itself isnt enough.
What I did say, was that moderation, as it stands now, has blowback, which includes but is not limited to creating and reinforcing refined groupthinks.
Yup; give everyone an equally sized soapbox and people will take advantage of it. Imagine a town square full of people all trying to make themselves heard, with a nontrivial percentage just there to make noises, groups that start chanting / singing and lighting smoke bombs, etc.
>Some observers argue that the counterspeech principle makes a better ideal than a reality, primarily because some people or groups in society possess far more power than do others. For example, proponents of critical race theory contend that minorities often are denied access to the marketplace of ideas to counter harmful speech.
>Others argue that some types of speech — for example, pornography and hate speech — are so harmful that counterspeech alone is not an adequate response.
The final result still leaves me conflicted, in a baby with the bathwater sense. Plenty of the speech in the sub was merely speech I disagreed with, and censoring it all is nowhere close to a least restrictive means way to erase hate. Moments like spez editing a users comment are now erased from the record, for the moment at least archived elsewhere.
If a politician ever wanted to go back, look at the pain of others, and use what they learned to bridge divides, to be able to speak to the others, they are now denied this resource for research. That probably bothers me more than the structure of reddit being quasi-free-speech-incompatible. ChapoTrapHouse isnt somewhere I ever went, but from a communication sense, I now feel a missed opportunity to learn how to read their language, and understand or recognize it if I heard it.
Between Reddit, Youtube, Twitch, and India; today itself might eventually be regarded as a historical day, where both public servants and private enterprise stood up and said enough, albeit for different reasons.
> True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. A marketplace of ideas, and maybe more importantly, the counterspeech doctrine, are incredibly important principals in justifying the existence of free speech.
No, you're missing the phenomenon of gish galloping[1]. Toxicity will overwhelm the community because it takes no effort to spew disgusting nonsense and spam while it takes significant effort to rebut it. The mythical "marketplace of ideas" only exists in presence of moderation, whether somewhat decentralized like HN or like the iron fist of places like r/AskHistorians. A literal free marketplace of ideas is a cesspool.
"A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes"
Half way down I said "Strong moderation is what allows communities with strict quality guidelines to function.". Quality could mean very different things to The_Donald and AskHistorians
I know about red. Unfortunately their tracker economy is way too hard for me to compete with my asymmetric adsl home connection( 0.5mbps uplink) and I'm not going to spend money for pirating. I do however have other private sources of music( including various ftp servers utilized by the known unknowns), p2p networks, soulseek etc.
>allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech
That might work where people are physically speaking, and only have one voice, can only shout so loud, and the time taken to speak is equivalent to the time taken to listen. But in a digital medium, on voice can be amplified infinitely in volume and ..volume, at little cost of time to the speaker
Yea wow, I don't moderate r/askhistorians but rather a different sub, and we sometimes pride ourselves on keeping this relatively clean. But then I stumble across r/askhistorians again and remember that no, no we don't have things under control by comparison.
We can barely keep a lid on the vitriol and toxicity, and some of the more blatantly false/scammy advice. r/askhistorians is a whole 'nother level.
Sometimes I honestly wish hackernews was run more like r/askhistorians. Too many people here on hn talk a lot of shit on stuff they don't really know much about beyond a cursory understanding (I'm probably guilty myself).
> Sometimes I honestly wish hackernews was run more like r/askhistorians.
I don't. The moderation and voting/karma system on HN is much better than anything seen on Reddit. People have stupid opinions everywhere in life, but this is one of a few rare havens where it's incredibly easy to find deep and interesting conversation. Reddit ain't it.
What do they do well that can be transferred without basically asking the mods to do more work? Isn't it just a manpower thing? Or do they have a way of verifying expertise etc so you know you're getting answers from experts without having to moderate each comment?
> What do they do well that can be transferred without basically asking the mods to do more work?
Nothing
> Isn't it just a manpower thing?
Yes
> Or do they have a way of verifying expertise etc so you know you're getting answers from experts without having to moderate each comment?
Well ok yeah I think they can vet expertise beforehand and then have a smaller list of approved posters, but most of the stuff I suspect just gets sent into the moderation queue requiring more humanpower to deal with.
That's why I say "I wish" heh, it's non practical here
The sound of folks bemoaning getting moderated there is music to my hears.
No people, we want someone who KNOWS, not just saw something on the Discovery Channel this one time ... it's such a refreshing change from the magical internet experts that come and go.
I respect the iron fist of /r/askhistorians but it has the feel of being impossible to contribute.
This is by design but horribly off putting even if you read all the rules.
It feels way worse than wikipedia or Stack Overflow inner circle.
For example a few years ago there was a question about Hitler underestimating Soviet tank production. I submitted a link to HistoryChannel Youtube audio of the famous Hitler-Mannerheim talk of June 4th of 1942. I included even the exact second where Hitler talks about Soviet tank production.
Well, my comment which was 3rd or 4th level down got [deleted]. Why did I even bother?
I had a lengthy discussion with the askhistorians moderator on what the problem was.
* It was not Hitler since the question was about him.
* It was not the fact that this was about as close to primary source as possible.
* The problem apparently was that I did not provide enough context. We are talking about providing a primary source in a comment 3 levels down.
This leads to a horrible ratio of questions/accepted answers.
You would think that with only few historians being able to navigate the requirements the answers would be of the highest quality.
When it comes to recent history it certainly does not feel like it.
Another example: There was a question on Soviet black markets in 1980s
The sole accepted answer referenced one pitiful official Soviet source and that was it. It was a lazy answer.
Since all I had was a wealth of anecdata I could not contribute which was fine but the feeling of incomplete answer really nagged me.
The problem is this, if the official r/askhistorians answer is so obviously(to a biased participant in a recent event) incomplete for recent history how can we trust askhistorians for history where you have no knowledge?
No. I think there are two separate camps within the Democrats, with very little overlap. Progressives on the far left, and centrists. Think Sanders vs. Biden, for example. And /r/politics is completely dedicated to propping up the progressives.
To be fair, I don't think it's filled with fake news. It's filled completely with progressive-biased, one sided interpretation of actual news events.
I'm not sure why this is downvoted. As an European I always found r/politics to be on the other side of funny US politics (dem and libtard and whatnot) and I also found it a bit disrespectful that it was just for US news. I get the whole "we were here first" thing but reddit is a bigger platform than that
I think calling it fake news is going too far. They are incredibly partisan though, but many refuse to admit it. They also bring a lot of their ideas elsewhere.
>Isn’t /r/politics completely one sided fake news to prop up the democrats???
/r/politics is how I imagine the "Two Minutes Hate" from 1984. A complete circle-jerk that has infested many of the main subreddits. /r/pics, /r/nextfuckinglevel, /r/publicfreakout are rather outposts of /r/politics these days. No wonder, when a small clique of politically aligned mods controls the major subreddits.
Even /r/askhistorians joined the blackout in support of 'Black Lives Matter'. What's neutral about that?
There are an endless number of causes one could "black out" for. But they just so happened to black out for the one with a pressure campaign and mob backing, that has intertwined itself with American national political ambitions?
The emotional blackmail of this movement will probably be its undoing.
It is easy to support that stance. Or even perhaps just stopping extrajudicial murder by police as a whole.
Go look at the official BLM list of goals - they are advocating to abolish the police, end capitalism, abolish the western nuclear family & several other far left, badly thought out, unsupportable concepts.
Worse still, the same campaign has spread to the UK, unfiltered and unchanged, despite the fact that we have almost zero people killed by police outside of terrorist attacks, our police don't carry guns, and due to our government's austerity policies, they're woefully underfunded.
As a moderator in a smaller technical subreddit myself, I mostly agree with that assessment.
The best subs I've seen usually have small communities and/or strict enforcement of the community rules (doesn't always need to be through moderator action!).
Unmoderated or otherwise weakly managed communities just don't scale. They never retain any quality if you try anyway. The noise will always dominate.
With no way to set expectations that the vast majority of the audience understands (see least common denominator), expectations which they agree with and which you can meet, you'll get endless conflicts.
Strict moderation like in /r/netsec and /r/askhistory works when done well and consistently by competent mods. It preserves good discussions and gives people and incentive to maintain high quality in their submissions since that's a requirement to even be seen in the first place.
Smaller forums with tight healthy communities often don't need much moderation (usually niche communities with no significant controversies), and can often self regulate by typical social means (just telling people to behave).
All the best contributors are usually driven by some kind of intrinsic motivation, often an interest in the topic at hand and a wish to share their knowledge. If the forum is by far too flooded with low quality content for that to be seen, they will lose motivation to contribute, and as a consequence the signal to noise ratio falls. You're more likely to incentivize new competent contributors to join if the contributions from your existing competent contributors are among the most prominent submissions in your forum.
-----
As for centralized vs decentralized, I see decentralization of forums as a form of an escape hatch when the quality of a forum degrades. The ability to cleanly fork a forum and walk away to a new location with new rules, like in software projects, provides a motivation to work hard to maintain unity in the forum, or else the mods will have nothing left to be modded, and likewise for other prominent members whose bad behavior contributes to division.
> I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community.
It was very clearly a real community, as you can see evidence from the fact that they migrated to thedonald.win when Reddit made it clear that they wouldn't be treated fairly.
> So you'd be in your other community and one day they all show up and down votes and the vitriol begins... it was no mystery that this happened, it was spoken of openly in The_Donald for a time.
> Who wants to deal with that?
And yet Reddit happily ignores vote brigading and other negative externalities from any subreddit that toes their party line, so it seems bizarre to single T_D out. And as far as I know that wasn't the reason Reddit gave, rather they said something about supporting violence which in my opinion was a pretty clear "we're fishing for a made up reason that lets us boot you guys"
Well, if you had any doubt about the character of TD and what it has become at its new home, just cruise around it. It’s full of conspiracy theories, misogyny, racism, and outright calls to violence. It is a common sentiment there that the only good Democrat is a dead one. These “edgy” takes receive many upvotes.
Eh, I've seen almost all of those things on the front page of Reddit, too.
Just recently, on the front page of reddit, I've seen a headline saying to cut off a cop's dick because he tasered someone (I believe it said 'take his badge and his manhood'), ACAB types have been threatening to kill cops, Reddit has doxxed the wrong people for major crimes, etc.
It's particularly ironic because the original justification for the quarantine (which was then edited) was for threatening violence against cops, specifically due to wanting to protect some lawmakers who fled from a vote on cap & trade from arrest.
Looking back, that really seems inconsistent with the number of front page ACAB posts threatening violence I've seen on the front page this month. I mean, either it's okay to threaten violence or not, pick one.
Then again, maybe they did, because they edited that out of the quarantine reason for r/T_D.
> That person replaced gun with manhood implying that the person's manhood is derived from them power-tripping with weapons.
That’s quite the convenient stretch. Pretty impressive how some people are amazing at reading subtext where non exists as long as it plays into their narrative.
> Threatening violence IN RESPONSE to violence is a far cry from INSTIGATING violence against peace.
I mean... police going after law makers isn’t exactly peaceful. But again, whatever fits your narrative is true and everything else is fakenews(TM).
Well, but those rioters were protesting police violence, who get called to deal with people who react violently to their presence due to the history of other police reacting violently to other people they were arresting acting violently who...
Wait, wasn't this the whole theme of the song "We didn't start the fire"?
1) The president was threatening physical harm to people who were destroying non-living objects. Violence and destruction are not the same thing.
2) An exceedingly large proportion of those statues were erected during exceedingly specific historical political climates, which generally feature the following:
>Having been well after the events or the deaths of the figures commemorated
>During periods of economic decline or uncertainty
>Following periods agitation for civil rights, particularly by black Americans, and the subsequent spasm of anti-black violence or political jostling
In other words, those monuments tend to represent oblique commemoration of racist violence, and seem to threaten future violence by their presence. Taking them down is not instigation, it's a response.
I mean, even without this context, how can one argue that the dismantling of an extant object is instigation? Its original erection would be the first act, courting a response of either general respect (it stays up) or general disdain/shame (it's taken down) over the course of its existence.
> 1) The president was threatening physical harm to people who were destroying non-living objects. Violence and destruction are not the same thing.
They don’t have to be the same thing. It’s illegal activity and we shouldn’t have to wait for a person to be physically injured to stop a mob of maniacs.
> 2) An exceedingly large proportion of those statues were erected during exceedingly specific historical political climates, which generally feature the following:
It doesn’t matter if it’s a statue of Krusty the Clown. You can’t destroy public or private property just because you feel it shouldn’t exist.
This is why we have police. To enforce the rules that we as a society have agreed to live by.
The alternative is a bunch of vigilantes beating the rioters. I can assure you that nobody wants that.
> In other words, those monuments tend to represent oblique commemoration of racist violence, and seem to threaten future violence by their presence. Taking them down is not instigation, it's a response.
I mean, even without this context, how can one argue that the dismantling of an extant object is instigation? Its original erection would be the first act, courting a response of either general respect (it stays up) or general disdain/shame (it's taken down) over the course of its existence.
Then get public opinion to agree with you and have the city, State, or Federal government to get rid of them. Your misguided feelings, no matter how strong, do not supersede all others just because they’re not yelling loudly.
People have been trying to get the City, State, and federal government to acknowledge system racism for CENTURIES.
It doesn't work.
Protests and destruction may work.
You are showing that you are more committed to order than to justice, because it benefits you.
"First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."
Many people depend on their businesses to provide for their livelihoods. They may be put on the streets if their business is burnt down during a riot. Will you be there to help them pay to rebuild or to help them rehome themselves?
> It is a common sentiment there that the only good Democrat is a dead one.
A similar sentiment is commonly expressed by far left individuals and groups on Twitter, Facebook and other mediums.
"the only good Tory is a dead Tory" has been the popular refrain for decades.
It's depressing these sentiments are carelessly amplified and approved by so many.
Edit: Apparently this has caused a stir. I encourage others to not read into this comment anything but disdain for the kind of discourse where "the one good BLANK is a dead BLANK" is accepted.
Not only is "The only good Tory is a dead Tory" not a popular refrain at all [1], but a quick search for "The only good Republican is a dead Republican" returns a lot of hits for the "[...] dead Democrat" quote and almost none for the search phrase.
These attempts at false equivalence reliably appear in these situations, and there's reliably nothing to back them up.
The difference is the right is trying very hard to move the Overton Window and make "[...] dead Democrat" an acceptable mainstream sentiment suitable for national news.
[1] You certainly won't hear it from any left-leaning MPs or in Labour constituency meetings. And if that weren't true, recordings would be all over the media.
Google autocomplete is not as reliable as you think it is. There have bbeen been many articles and complaints about the algorithm it uses to autocomplete, but one thing is clear - it is not mostly based on the popularity of what other users have typed.
A quick note: Anti christian sentiment is very much not a left wing stance. Quite the contrary, I’m more like to find crap like that in libertarian circles. The left wing are often the ones jumping in to defend religious tolerance.
About the dead cops and dead fascists... sure I’ll admit to that. However that is very much not the same. Fascism is an ideology that is a direct threat to a large number of people’s livelyhoods. To declare militant intentions against such an ideology of hate is a matter of self defense. The same applies to cops (albeit to a lesser extent).
> Quite the contrary, I’m more like to find crap like that in libertarian circles.
Libertarians with philosophical disagreements with Christians are perfectly entitled to them. "Libertarians" who murder Christians are, by definition, not actually libertarians. See also non-aggression principle etc.
Also of note, libertarians are not "left" or "right" -- see that political compass thing they're always using -- because "left" is economic restraints with social freedom while "right" is economic freedom with social restraints and libertarian is both economic and social freedom.
Christianity is quite pro-social restraint, which is adverse to both the left and libertarians, but the libertarian position is something like "you can believe whatever you want but don't pass any laws forcing it on others." Which, of course, becomes a conflict if the Christians want to pass laws forcing it on others. But ask a Democrat what they think about a law prohibiting contraception.
> Fascism is an ideology that is a direct threat to a large number of people’s livelyhoods.
There is another thread in here about how there aren't that many real communists in the US and the people who get described as such aren't literally communists. You could easily say the same thing about fascists.
Opposing fascism is very different than opposing "fascism" while defining it as anything to the right of Bill Clinton.
Libertarianism literally started on the very far left - an anarcho-communist named Joseph Dejacque. Right libertarianism is about a century younger, and the main distinction is view on property rights, which left libertarians tend to see as oppressive government overreach. (Dejacque enthusiastically supported Proudhons famous 'property is theft')
Left libertarianism and right libertarianism agree on nearly everything. It's not like "left" and "right" which are effectively polar opposites.
Right libertarianism has an antitrust problem -- if the state establishes corporations and enforces property rights then corporations can become powerful enough to be de facto governments. Left libertarianism solves it by deleting property rights, which of course has its own drawbacks.
A middle ground that might work is to allow humans to own property but not corporations, because the largest accumulations of capital have always taken corporate form.
Obviously the non-purist can also solve it by having government-enforced antitrust laws.
> You certainly won't hear it from any left-leaning MPs or in Labour constituency meetings. And if that weren't true, recordings would be all over the media.
I didn't/wouldn' claim we would hear it from left-leaning MPs.
> a quick search for "The only good Republican is a dead Republican" returns a lot of hits for the "[...] dead Democrat" quote and almost none for the search phrase
This is muddled by one particular incident with a video Trump posted. Searching the "democrats" phrase in quotes gives 160,000 results. Searching it with -trump -president gives only 4,000 results, and even then some (maybe most) of those results still seem to be about the incident (but spelling his name as "Dump" for example).
In my experience edgy calls for violence are indeed more common from the right than from the left, but this is a bad way to try to measure it.
> I see someone isn’t a fan of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.
Organizations change.
In the same way that just because the democratic party has a horribly racist history doesn’t make the current party horribly racist.
> By the by, a lot of the “left wing” violence recently was caused by right wing militia “boogaloo” people.
The “boogaloo” are a conspiracy theory.
Which is more believable:
1) A far-left wing group that has been around for decades and part of many violent protests across Europe and has branches in the US is involved in another set of left wing violent protests.
Or
2) A right wing group that nobody has heard of and doesn’t seem to be associated with any of the exisiting far-right movements has deeply infiltrated left wing protests and is causing trouble.
Since I’m partial to conspiracy theories (2) might be possible if it’s actually the feds.
I guess the far right activists on trial for the murders of both the law enforcement and security personnel killed during the protests can try the 'actually we don't exist: it was the left or the Feds' defence but I'm not sure it'll work out for them...
A salon.com piece isn't exactly a credible source.
Salon.com is an extremely biased leftist online medium.
There is also no organic 'Boogaloo movement'. The general consensus inside right wing circles (chans & discord) is that the MSM here attempts to create a bogeyman out of thin air to explain away the intrinsic violence of the racial BLM movement and these revolutionary 'Antifa' types. exercising the cognitive dissonance of "violence is the language of the unheard" and "all violence is a right-wing militia 'false-flag' attack".
The overwhelming opinion (inside those right wing circles) is that it isn't necessary to do anything at all, for the Marxist Left is shooting their own knee by showing their true face through wanton violence, riots and the excesses of 'cancel-culture' witch-hunts, for which deplatforming is the 'dog-whistle'
The credo is:
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." — Napoleon Bonaparte
I have to say, I'm saddened that bringing this up has caused such a fuss and has caused others to make assumptions on my position. That these sentiments are common is not a new development but it is depressing.
The difference* of course is that none of those people have real political power, Democrats are not trying to appease them. The far left aren't the force behind a Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer. Those on r/the_donald are Trump's base, the one's that he tries to appease.
*US centric view only, don't know enough about European politics to have an informed opinion.
This isn’t even about picking a political side. Being racist, misogynist, or calling to violence is not an opinion, it’s even downright illegal in some countries. There are plenty of subreddits on the political spectrum for example on economic theories, socialistic or capitalistic, or the pro/limiting immigration. But the line is clear with hateful content.
Of course it's not about picking political sides. I certainly did not intend to do so, if that's the impression you have taken. The sentiment is universally contemptible.
On principle yes. But I don't know where you live where this is commonplace, do you really see that in your daily life in the real world? There are misandrist feminists, but look further than Twitter drama, most feminists in real life are pretty compassionate with men. For example the concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_masculinity despite what you may think is mostly about psychological distress and suffering on men. Same with anti-racists activists, it's mostly about compassion for other human beings in real life, anti-white racism is a fringe thing.
Is there a real discernible difference between that and efforts on politics to label trump a rapist. Both are false allegations that haven’t been proven. At least this t_d post is very clearly fake/satire. While the stuff that gets up voted on /r/politics tries very hard to take itself seriously even as they push lies.
Folks like to drawn in people with discussions about how some views aren't allowed on reddit and tales of political persecution ... but that there is a good example of a lot of TD's content.
It wasn't a place that was about conservative views, or a political party or politician ... it was mostly just fear, hate, and lies.
And for a place with lots of defenders crying out over censorship, any wiff of a differing opinion in their sub was met with a ban...
It isn’t perfect. Most major subs uphold a reasonable measure of decorum. It’s a big place, I am sure you can find examples of everything you see on TD.win. The point is Reddit is trying to enforce its rules and maintain reasonable standards (IMO)
> Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families.
> While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.
Just visited the site. Looks like you need to go through capticha/cloudflair wait and then you have to create an account. I never got that far.
But you went through all of that and verified your email. Now you are reporting it is full of [insert trending bad words]. Are you part of that community? A reporter?
Were there any upvotes on comments you approved of?
I have never created an account. As far as I know you don’t have to. I am very curious. I like to peek in and see where the most extreme Trump supporters are at these days. It’s not pleasant and I tolerate it in small doses only, but I think it is important to understand them, even if I strongly disagree.
Edit: it’s currently going direct to a login screen. That’s not normal.
I made an account on thedonald.win today, just to try and understand what other people's opinions are. You don't need an email ID for signing up, so it's pretty easy.
That being said, yes, quite a few people in the community are toxic. However, I don't see any activity that would cause them to be removed from Reddit altogether.
Keep lookin. There are plenty of occasions where there will be posts and memes with a lot of upvotes that have things that would get you banned from most any other site: calls to violence, outright support for white supremacy, etc. They are cleaning things up some lately, but it’s all still there. It’s abundantly clear to me, at least, why they got banned.
T_D was chock full of calls for violence since its early days. In particular, I remember looking one day and seeing its whole front page covered in posts glorifying Pinochet for the way he treated his domestic enemies. The mods quite clearly had no good faith interest in keeping this kind of content out, only stepping in (except to ban users going against the narrative) when they were threatened from above.
I am mystified by how often I see the opinion that "T_D did nothing wrong". Speaking as someone who also finds the far-left spaces on Reddit frightening and repugnant, there is no question that T_D was among the worst of the lot and had the most mainstream reach, which makes it a fine target for responsible moderation efforts. If you want to question why Reddit doesn't follow their content policies to the letter in perfectly even-handed moderation across all users and subreddits, that's fine, but the claim that T_D didn't have a serious penchant for calling for and glorifying violence kind of makes it difficult to take that question seriously coming from you.
The one that scares me a lot more is how many people I've seen promoting another Reign of Terror (e.g. we should bring back the guillotine) with no hint of sarcasm. I can only wonder just how serious they are and if they realize just how unpleasant that period was for the French (not just the rich and powerful).
People have the right to free speech - which means the _government_ can not tell them what they cannot say. It doesn't mean they can exercise that right free of consequences from society or businesses.
Your slippery slope arguments won't go very far when there are Literal Actual Nazis out there making comments about Jews, flying swastikas, and heiling Donald.
I feel like my comment is fairly explicit about it being fair to question how Reddit's banhammer has or has not come down against other communities, so I fail to see the relevance of this whataboutism. The point is that T_D has loudly and repeatedly glorified and called for violence, so if someone claims otherwise then the conversation really ought to end there. Adherence to outright falsehoods precludes one's ability to meaningfully participate in any nuanced discussion.
Nazi is pretty well defined, as are incel, redpill, boogaloo bois, etc. If you are part of one of those clubs and decide to exercise your right to free speech (which is your right), suffering the consequences should be expected. Consequences may include social sanctions and violent reactions. People react to speech. That's natural.
Orwell coined the term "doublethink" to describe two contradictory concepts held simultaneously. Something like this:
>Consequences may include social sanctions and violent reactions.
>exercise your right to free speech (which is your right)
Orwell wasn't describing an ideal or inevitable way of thinking, but the result of brainwashing.
Now. When people say that free speech only applies to government restrictions, they're talking strictly in the context of U.S. laws and the First Amendment. Surely we should never consider the possibility that freedom of expression is a concept that predates the United States by centuries and which could possibly live in a grander moral context.
> Orwell coined the term "doublethink" to describe two contradictory concepts held simultaneously. Something like this:
> >Consequences may include social sanctions and violent reactions.
> >exercise your right to free speech (which is your right)
This is a false assessment. The fundamental government-blind right to speech does not include a right to group inclusion. There's nothing contradictory about you having the right to speak while other people also have the right to sanction you for spreading hateful (or in this case sophistrous) bullshit. After all, social sanctions are also a form of speech.
This comes up in all kinds of ways. It's not contradictory to have moral rules against violence while also allowing self defense or group defense. It's not contradictory to have moral rules against stealing while also allowing recovery of stolen property or government redistribution of wealth as a requirement for participation in the benefits of society. And it's not contradictory to have moral rules in favor of speech and against hate while also allowing the community to punch a nazi in the face for being a nazi.
>And it's not contradictory to have moral rules in favor of speech and against hate while also allowing the community to punch a nazi in the face for being a nazi.
There it is again. Yes, it absolutely is contradictory to proclaim that you support freedom of expression while threatening to punch someone in the face when you disagree with their ideas!
> Less well known [than other paradoxes Popper discusses] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
Emphasis mine, obviously. For the most part, political extremists in America don't seem to be at the "fists and pistols" point—at least, they generally are not actively committing violence—but they have certainly denounced rational argument by their conduct and the rhetorical strategies they employ. A liberal society needs an active and healthy immune system to prevent pockets of radical illiberalism from growing unchecked.
I'm not necessarily in favor of punching "Nazis" in the face yet, if they haven't started the violence first, but Nazism is toxic and so is the inclination to treat all opinions as equally valid. Such opinions should certainly not be allowed by e.g. any responsible operator of a social media platform.
It's tricky. I'm not a fan of Nazism myself, not least because I wouldn't survive very long if they succeeded. Punching them in the face is the least of what I would need to do to survive.
.. but what stops me from calling you a Nazi if I personally don't like you? You can take a few steps away. Someone can say something, and a response can be, "the logic of this argument is Nazism." I've seen this argued (badly). Now are we in scope yet?
And if someone wears a red tie (or a MAGA hat), does that then bring them in that sphere? And if so, if that represents the views of, I don't know, 40% of the population, is it wise to censor that? I mean, is it even practical, morality aside?
Let's add them to the list. OK, we get the red hats. Now, someone says something that support police? OK, good, we found more Nazis. OK, now, someone criticizes feminism ... etc. etc.
The circle of verbal hygiene slowly expands, and it comes for you eventually.
I definitely agree that it's tricky, and I don't think "Nazis" are the only threat we face today. Anybody whose approach to discourse is to shout down ideas rather than engage with them in good faith or just ignore them and walk away is suspect, IMO.
For instance, after 2020 so far I'm definitely at the point where I have serious doubts about the judgment of any Trump supporter or even any Republican voter, but if they try to have a real conversation with me it's not like I'm going to start yelling and throwing punches. On the other hand, if they're driving around outside a hospital screaming at nurses and threatening them, I'd be more in favor of "sanctions" against that person because I think that sort of conduct goes beyond mere expression. The right seems to delight in conflating violence and threat with free expression.
Illiberalism seems to be winning, unfortunately. The purity spiral crap on the left is just as upsetting to me as the right's zeal for ignorance, even if I don't think it's doing nearly as much damage right now.
> Illiberalism seems to be winning, unfortunately. The purity spiral crap on the left is just as upsetting to me as the right's zeal for ignorance, even if I don't think it's doing nearly as much damage right now.
That's why I'm terrified and why I want to support freedom of expression. Because if we start classifying ideas as "problematic" and shutting people out, then what is remaining to iron out differences? You can say a chess match (that might be interesting), but the truth is it'll be a shoving match or a gunfight.
I see a rise of an illiberal mob from both right and left, and they share in common the idea that the other side is completely irreconcilable. But it's not. They also agree that somehow the other side's ideas are dangerous (the ideas themselves). It just feels that way because social media -- back on topic here since we are on a Silicon Valley news site -- exacerbates these differences.
This is to me the biggest reason that I support freedom of expression. Because "stamping out ideas" doesn't exist. It's a fiction. You don't "defeat racism" or "defeat Nazism" by shutting down media. Ideas are behind these things, and the ideas are held by humans. Humans continue to want to express those ideas. Those humans will go elsewhere, and they continue to exist.
Even worse. People are going to vote for whoever they want to vote for, and the ballot is secret, so they don't have to tell you. So why not just foster an environment where everyone can express their ideas and there are no Problematic ideas? First you get to see what a lot of people think, in their own words and not in the words of those that agree with you. Second, there's a chance, even if it's a low one, of challenging those ideas with your own ideas.
Spamming, doxxing and violent threats aren't considered freedom of expression by almost anyone, and are rarely defended on moral grounds. I'm talking purely about ideas.
I mostly don't disagree with you, but I think it's precisely the "illiberal mob[s]" you describe that are most threatening to open discourse. You may not be able to destroy ideas, but you can sure make it difficult for them to flourish.
An example from the left, this time: a year or two ago, an Asian woman (Amelie Wen Zhao is her name, IIRC) wrote a YA novel whose premise involved a) a completely imaginary society based more on an Asian cultural background than anything else, and b) human enslavement. She was attacked by a disgusting social media mob hailing from the YA "community", who used both covert (backchannels/"whispernet") and overt (calling her a racist on Twitter and whipping up a controversy, apparently without actually having read her book) means of attack, justified because (according to them) slavery as a topic/theme in literature is reserved for black authors. These attacks were so violent in their extremism that at the time I swore up and down they were mostly "Russian bots", and I still don't know.
Anyway, I'm not black, nor Asian^[1], but this just seems crazy to me. She did initially delay the publication of her book and could easily have canceled it entirely. This is what I mean by shouting down ideas. I (an amateur novelist) see a lot of forum posts from new writers asking what they can and cannot write about, worried about exactly what happened to Zhao—how many great stories have gone untold because of this insanity?
I think this effect manifests a bit differently on the conservative side—they simply refuse to acknowledge the truth or directly address arguments, and this codes as strength to people who share their ethic. I mean, I think extremists on the left do this too, but I feel like righties are more comfortable with this aspect of their nature, less concerned with virtue signaling and more with active expression of antisocial values (e.g. "rolling coal" on cyclists is funny, ha ha).
So, again, I do think we mostly agree. But how would you suggest we foster an environment where these illiberal mobs don't have power, without censoring/censuring them and their speech somehow? This seems really important, because by their nature these groups seem to be the most interested in gathering and holding on to power over the discourse.
^[1] I capitalize 'Asian' because it's derived from the name of a continent. I doubt I'll ever capitalize 'white', because why would I? and I'm not on board with 'Black' yet either, just from a linguistic point of view. I mean no disrespect by it, and I'd love to hear arguments as to why I should drop that capital B in there, because I'm sure this is going to get me in trouble more and more going forward. But so far (and yes, I've done some reading) I'm not convinced.
> I don't want to iron out differences with a person who thinks that jews, queers, women, people with dark skin, poor people, or any other category that isn't defined entirely by hatred of the other are less than. I think I'd rather throw that person into the ocean.
So try to throw them in the ocean. At least you're honest. But please, please don't say that you support freedom of expression. What you say, if you want to be honest, is, I support physically stopping these individuals. I want to stamp out these individuals. Not the ideas, the people. Be honest and say those things out loud. "I want to eliminate the evil people."
Of course, a rational person might respond and say, "Wait a second, who decides that this person said that <blank> are less than?" What if someone is interpreting it that way, only. The controversy is playing out at this very moment all over the place. We're accusing people who are saying ambiguous, or sometimes nuanced things. Sometimes you can go back and say, wait a second, I don't think this is what this person was trying to say at all. Other times you can say, I don't think, for example, JK Rowling was correct, but I don't think what she said was remotely hate speech at all.
>You absolutely do by shutting them down at every turn, because those ideas don't spawn en masse on their own. Those ideas are spread, and they only spread because people with libertarian "every voice is sacred" positions don't immediately stamp them out.
That's why, as a Left person who clings to classical Western ideals of liberty, I consider that your position is extreme and scary, and to be fought against in any way humanly possible. Sentences like that reek of a dangerous totalitarian impulse. "The end justifies the means."
> Let's see. So on one side you have people who are willing to get violent because they want within their lifetimes for everyone to have healthcare and a roof over their head and food to eat and equal pay and to not have to worry about nazis and they're angry that some people actively obstruct liberty, equality, and fraternity...and on the other side you have rampant ethnic, gender, or economic bigotry including real actual nazis...and your answer is "both sides". I mean...ok...that's one perspective.
I appreciate your honesty.
My only response is, I think you should read about Revolution and its excesses. I've just finished A Tale of Two Cities. It's about the Guillotine. There are many such tragic tales, and sane people don't want them repeated. No moral high ground is a justification for tyranny.
I feel your perspective is an invitation for tyranny.
> Be honest and say those things out loud. "I want to eliminate the evil people."
I would eliminate people who publicly espouse the domination of me and/or people I care about for the crime of being black/jewish/queer/women/caring/etc, not because of anything about them intrinsically, not, say, for being white, though they mostly are, but for being the kind of person who espouses the domination of me and/or people I care about for our color/genitals/love. You trying to equalize the sides of that is extremely...telling.
You mean physical violence. Physical violence is not the only kind of violence. It seems common for people in the "nazis get to talk too" camp to forget or ignore that.
It's because it's an ideological cudgel. It's non-standard, strange to the vast majority, and feels extremely dangerous to those who are versed in history. If words are violence... the sky is the limit in terms of restrictions to speech.
It's nonstandard and confusing and shall always remain as such.
If you think it's confusing, then the best I can say is that you have a _lot_ of reading to catch up on. But here is at least a very abbreviated primer on terminology to help alleviate your confusion https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2652990/
No thanks, I'll just stick with the normal definitions of words rather than do "a _lot_ of reading" to learn what the latest ideological contortions are.
Telling someone to fuck off is fine. If we're talking about Reddit and some group that goes around spamming other subreddits, that's a different topic than the "punch a Nazi in the face" meme that repeats itself among the Orwellian types who see no problem.
Threatening someone by punching them in the face or social ostracism (which can range from discomfort to job loss) is a restriction of freedom of expression. That today people can talk about that casually while in the same breath saying that they support freedom of expression is deeply disturbing. "You don't HAVE to hand over your money to me right now. But, hey, there might be consequences..." - no one would argue that this coercion and a robbery. But "If you say the wrong thing there might be consequences in your job or life" is somehow getting a free pass.
I don't consider myself required to provide an overview of all the subs on a platform if I'm talking about group's actions and why that would be undesirable in the context of an moderated platform.
More specific to reddit:
When it came to TD they spoke of it openly and clearly on their own sub for a time, it was no mystery, same goes for calls for violence, racism, and etc.
I certainly saw users from TD claim that anything they saw as voting going differently than they wanted as brigading... the plot line of them being perpetual victims on reddit and in life was consistent and applied to everything.
Back to my point, who wants to be exposed to that kind of behavior when you're looking for a community to interact with?
An individual can migrate a forum without any assistance. Not denying that The_Donald was a community, just saying that the migration of content is not evidence of the extent to which something is a community.
> And yet Reddit happily ignores vote brigading and other negative externalities from any subreddit that toes their party line, so it seems bizarre to single T_D out.
Except T_D literally was not singled out. CTH was also banned, along with approximately 2000 subreddits.
> "we're fishing for a made up reason that lets us boot you guys"
Reddit has listed "communities that promote hate" as a reason to ban subreddits for at least 5 years. Not sure how this is "fishing for a made up reason."
It appears that you are advocating for censorship then. If you think all this /r/politics stuff is contemptible, would you agree that banning T_D was good, even if it was, as you assert, a biased measure?
How many left-leaning subreddits were banned? There're several toxic commie subs with a lot of hatred thrown around, but nobody seems to care. r/politics was default for ages and it wasn't exactly a welcoming place.
/r/Politics is centrism? Wow. If that's centrism, that I'll continue working to ensure a #Trump2020Landslide! These arrows will move even further to the right:
We need some sort of logic behind words and meaning. To call /r/politics or CNN etc left wing is too much. I don’t have an exact argument on hand. It just feels so wrong to subvert the expectation of a word or phrase this much to casually call stuff like this left wing.
As op said:
“ Edit (since I can't reply): r/politics is American liberalism, which is centrist.”
I don’t care about being that specific. Just don’t call it left wing.
Your bias is really showing in your second paragraph. So it’s not about rule breaking repeatedly like many subreddits including I bet /r/politics? There’s a certain frequency with which it has to occur? I Highly doubt that guideline has been followed consistently.
r/Chapotraphouse which is mentioned in the title was left leaning. On the ither hand many other right wing subreddits were not deleted. Hard to see how people make this a partisan issue.
I find it wierd what some Americans consider to be communist. A communist is not somebody who advocates for
* equal rights for all people independent
of ethnic origin, skin color, gender or
religion
* public transit
* universal access to health care
* affordable higher education
* affordable housing
* or even wealth redistribution via taxes,
for example via welfare or a guaranteed
minimum income
A Communist is somebody who advocates for
* collectivization of the means of production
I'm not quite sure there are many actual Communists in the US.
That's the end state that Marxists believe will obtain (though Marx would have thought advocating for things like that odd). However, in practice, communists often support social changes that facilitate a state of affairs that is favorable to communism. They often employ the aid of unwitting supporters which is why most people who support these causes will flatly deny that they are communists because they aren't, at least not totally or consciously. (Note that when I say "communism" I am using the meaning it has been typically given in practice which is synonymous with "state socialism".) Gramsci, Rudtke, and Marcuse advocated this approach.
For example, many groups that advocate the dissolution of the nuclear family or sexual revolution have a communist origin. Why? Because it is an act of social engineering that aims to strengthen the power of the state by isolating individuals and creating a dependence on the state in various ways (the promotion of sexual license and various depravities also takes the old Augustinian[0] observation and turns it on its head, using such things to blind and enslave the populace). There is historical precedent for this as well in places like the Soviet Union. Pavlik Morozov comes to mind[1].
A great timely example is BLM. If you visit the BLM website and read their mission statement, it reads like something straight out of a Marxist handbook. This is no accident. The founders of BLM are indeed committed Marxists (they've been open about it) and routinely celebrate Marxist criminals like Assata Shakur who is wanted by the FBI. BLM is hardly the only organization that does this. It suffices to note the influence Saul Alinsky has had on many on the left including many prominent people on the left. The community organizing tactics outlined in books like "Rules for Radicals" are nothing more than revolutionary tactics that are used to transfer power to oneself.
(Incidentally, much of what we're seeing is class conflict masquerading as racial conflict.)
[0] “Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.”
> For example, many groups that advocate the dissolution of the nuclear family or sexual revolution have a communist origin
There is some history to that and I think this criticism was directed at family structures in Germany and other countries around the start of the last century. People today probably could not imagine anymore, but children at the time would have never even thought about disagreeing with their parents. They had complete authority. My grandmother didn't talk much about the time, but as she grow older, she often described the situation of her growing up.
So the critique was very warranted at the time and certainly for quite a while after the war until the sexual revolution. These structures don't exist anymore today aside from a irrelevant periphery, but the talking points remained the same. A revolution won't come anymore since the goals were already reached.
Doesn't mean there cannot be additional empty promises.
Such kids-seniors relation is not a requirement of nuclear family structure at all. Somehow people managed to keep nuclear families intact with very wide range of intra-generational attitudes.
A lot of critique of nuclear family is talking specifically about family where kids are raised by parents and how that is unfair to kids who weren't so lucky with good parents. In the early soviet union, some of more radical revolutionaries wanted to just put all kids into foster homes to ensure a fair start for everybody. And prevent non-state-mandated ideas from finding a way from parents to kids. Intra-generational legacy is a touchy topic as well.
I agree. I tried to make the point that they are shooting beyond reason. Just that at the time the criticism was valid. It is literally a circle jerk that somehow survived. The state cannot have guardianship of kids beyond their fundamental rights and basic education. But only to a degree for the latter with consent from parents. Everyone arguing beyond that is completely crazy in my opinion.
It's been a while since I visited r/politics or r/latestagecapitalism, but both of those (used to?) have plenty of calls for collectivization, permanent revolution etc.
By the way, I'm not American and my birth certificate says I was born in USSR.
I'm not quite sure there are many actual Communists in the US.
Even if there are any (and there probably is, given the number of people in America), more importantly, they certainly hold zero political power and have no sway in any but tiny, niche political discussion.
These days, "Communist" is more likely to used by a conservative commentator in bad faith when trying to lazily vilify their opponent (communism has a bad rep in mainstream American politics since the cold war) than to actually refer to a bona fide communist. See also: "socialist".
This seems to be a thing in this forum as well - the highest-rated sibling comment to yours is one who attacks black lives matter as Communist in a sort of pseudo-intelectual way.
And a white supremacist is not someone who advocates for bringing jobs back home, or enforcing immigration law. But people still feel free to call Trump racist because of those policies.
The reason is that people view him as having ulteriour motives beyond his stated ones.
Everyone is for affordable housing, so being in favour of that has no political bearing. But there are different proposed solutions to that. Putting a wealth cap of $10 million is a very communist-like solution, and I don't think it's unfair to describe the subs were those views are predominant as socialist or communist leaning.
> a white supremacist is not someone who advocates for bringing jobs back home, or enforcing immigration law. But people still feel free to call Trump racist because of those policies.
And his multiple criminal/civil findings of guilt for discrimination against black people and minorities in his real estate businesses?
I'm going to take a guess that _that_ may be why people call racist, not because he "advocates for bringing jobs back home" (while happily continuing to move / keep his own production in China and Asia).
Although I disagree (yes the view that his immigration policy is fundamentally rooted in fear of brown people is common) I'm not trying to make it about Trump, or to argue pro or against him per se.
I'm trying to say that the person I responded to is basically strawmaning. No one says that giving affordable housing is necessarily communist. But instead the particular solutions are.
Conservatives want affordable housing too--they just think that other solutions are better.
It's a common argumentative fallacy. If you don't support my solution, you must be against the problem.
If it's fair game to say that Trump's immigration policy has ulterior motives (basically he doesn't want brown people in the country) I think it's fair (maybe not true, but fair game) to say that people who want to tax wealth are communist or communist leaning.
Part of the communist ideology is they mix up equality of outcome and equality of opportunity. If you optimise for the former, you end up with everyone being just as poor as one another, hence the link.
The people throwing around "Communist" in public are conservatives rallying around a mythical memory of the TV version of America circa 1960, before "they" came and ruined everything.
The "they" may be: hippies, liberals, new dealers, big government advocates, black people, women, etc.
Remember the core demographic watching TV and listening to radio is old and getting older. "Communist" evoked "Soviet Union" (aka the main enemy), and that association sticks. The problem is that the demographic that gives a hoot about the Soviets is aging out, so now we're stuck with the next generation, who tends to be more explicitly focused on contemporary grievances.
>And yet Reddit happily ignores vote brigading and other negative externalities from any subreddit that toes their party line, so it seems bizarre to single T_D out
Do you have evidence for this, or is it just your gut feeling?
I am a member of several non-conservative political and non-political groups that were banned because of the bad behavior of members of those subreddits.
Users of The_Donald regularly got away with behavior that got other communities wiped off of Reddit entirely.
A counterpoint to the post: wasn't r/ShitRedditSays, a subreddit that repeatedly brigaded threads that had racist/bigoted comments, one of the first prominent subreddits to get in trouble for brigading?
They migrated a long time ago, and the sub itself was all but abandoned. Reddit's ban today is the equivalent of them saying "You can't quit, you're fired!". It would be hilarious if it wasn't so damn predictable and depressing.
> Reddit's ban today is the equivalent of them saying "You can't quit, you're fired!".
This implies the Reddit ban is directed toward TD specifically, which it’s not. This is Reddit taking a long-term stance on what type of content they want on their platform. To sit here and downplay its importance is a predictable talking point and just as depressing.
> This is Reddit taking a long-term stance on what type of content they want on their platform.
It's hard to take that "long-term stance" seriously when they basically make policies up as they go along. Now they're telling us that they want to make the site free of hate against identifiable groups - except if that group is in the majority, then the policy doesn't apply and it's 100% okay to whip up hate against them! Yay nihilists and misanthropes, I guess? Isn't that a bit ludicrous?
Sorry for this bad English of mine, but the_donald room was a sewer and it is very well documented by now. Society does not have to allow the voices of racism or racists, hating of women, or other antisocial behavior. Already racists do not go jail, women hating does not go to jail, hating gays does not go to jail, but there is no other obligation for tolerating it.
> And yet Reddit happily ignores vote brigading and other negative externalities from any subreddit that toes their party line
Which subreddits do you think they should have banned, specifically? What is the "party line", exactly, that these subreddits "toed" to get themselves out of enforcement?
Look, I mean obviously Reddit's moderation isn't always going to be fair. Moderation never is. It can't be. Nonetheless T_D spent four years as a cesspool before they pulled the plug. I mean really, did you read it? If anything, they were protected by virtue of being a policical fan group of the POTUS.
People that think there is some "party line" at Reddit should look into the founders' political views.
To put it in perspective, spez is a right-wing libertarian who fought to keep r/Jailbait alive because it was the most visited subreddit at the time, despite it being a subreddit for posting suggestive pictures of minors.
They didn't single T_D out. It was one of 200 subs banned in today's wave, many of them for similar transgressions. And t_d survived several ban waves before.
I'm having a hard time believing this comment was made in good faith. There is nothing made up about T_D, they were blatantly vote manipulating and planting posts in other subs. This has been well known for a while and reddit has done everything in their hand to let the sub exist while trying to make it abide by the platform's rules.
The constantly see right wing people complaining about some massive number of left-wing subs that are breaking the rules but I've never ever seen any actual proof of that. Care to provide some links? Meanwhile I have seen T_D doing it consistently for years and the amount of leeway reddit has given them has been huge. The only left-wing sub that I can think of was chapotraphouse and that's gone now as well.
The reason given was "supporting violence against police". They changed it later to "supporting violence" when they realised that T_D was a teddy bear compared to the left-wing forums who were outright calling for police extermination by all means possible.
Not directly; I'm increasingly thinking centralization is not the problem.
The problem is size.
The intersection of "things that everyone agrees are acceptable" goes to zero as the size of the community increases, and while communities have strong selection effects that prevent them from being anything like "a uniformly random selection of people slammed together", regression to the mean means that you get there as size goes into the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions.
I don't think there's a solution, because no matter what technical tools you put into place, you can't get around the fact the people don't agree about what's acceptable.
What we need is a diaspora back into a community structure where HN would be just about the largest sort of community out there, instead of still a relatively small one. Decentralized tools could help with that, but if "decentralization" just ends up building "decentralized" communities trying to contain a million people in the "same place" you'll just get the same problems again. It's kinda orthogonal. "Reddit, but once a community hits 10,000 people it becomes progressively harder to join" would quite possibly work fine, for instance. (I envision something like an exponentially-growing waiting list delay, such that getting to even 11,000 users would be difficult.)
Obviously, legislating some sort of limit here is virtually impossible. Somehow the technical structures need to support it and afford communities in the hundreds to low thousands, but somehow make it inconvenient to grow beyond that. Or afford more complicated structures where membership is not a binary status. (A social graph would work, if it wasn't being run by an entity that desires to aggregate people together more to more effectively advertise at them. Or more accurately, a set of graphs.)
I would put it as "the problem is society" essentially as opposed to size per se. I personally doubt that what is essentially a forcibly sharded technical approach akin to what MMOs did to deal with larger loads and content saturation would be useful. Content depends upon O(n) users subdividing it would reduce the utility and make it lose out and worse breed a new tribalism. Combine that with side channels and I am skeptical it would get better.
It doesn't have to be a "forcible shard". In fact I think that's not terribly effective and there's better ways to do it. Weblogs did it fairly well, way back when.
Also, don't forget that you don't belong to one community; it's not like you log in one day and get assigned to your immutable chunk of the internet. You wander around the read versions of various communities, pick a couple of communities you invest it, pick several more to half-follow, get tired of the abuse in one and switch to another, meet someone in real life who encourages you to join another community, and so on.
Basically, the sort of "tribalism" that you'd encounter is whatever "tribalism" you associate with HN, because the structure I describe already half-exists, scrounging around the remnants from reddit and Facebook in tens of thousands of forums and active blogs and other such things. I don't think it produces any more or less "tribalism" than you get from anything else.
I feel like reddit tried doing just this. You see this quite clearly when you visit niche subreddits. The problem is that the large subreddits have a larger impact on the direction the site takes. They make demands of the admins and they spread their culture to adjacent subreddits. The barrier between two subreddits is likely lower than two websites.
I agree, but I think that size and the speed by which information spreads makes social media what it is.
Social media is like being in a room with thousands, possibly millions, of people. If you have a gathering of this many people in real life it's entirely possible for the crowds to go out of control and for them to turn into a mob. This mob then gets worse through one-upmanship.
Subdividing these groups might breed new tribalism, but it'll make it less likely for a situation to spiral out of control. It takes more time for information to pass the barrier between communities. You also won't get as many people engaging in group-think, because your in-group isn't as large.
IMHO decentralization (via federated protocols) is the most viable option here. Taking Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/) as an example, people are able to connect globally with each other, but you also have a moderation framework that allows for true decentralized control over content.
You can join an instance with moderation policies that align with your ideals or even host your own instance.
In addition, mastodon, and even the protocol, has a lot in place to mitigate targeted harassment by a community.
Individual Instance blocks, where a user can block an entire instance are in place. Instance blocks on your instance, where an admin blocks another instance for all the users of that instance.
And, community driven, blacklists where an admin can copy paste from.
Even more interesting, is that some instances block any instance that in themselves don't block another instance. In practice, this means that if you don't block Gab, there are a lot of instances that don't want to talk to you.
This works. This gives people the freedom to pick and choose or to move somewhere where they have more or less freedom to listen to others.
That is one way of looking at it. But it really depends on the intention behind such a block.
The other way to look at it, just as valid, is for an admin to protect her(or his) "citizens", the people on her instance.
If you intended an instance to be a safe-haven, you don't want people being able to raise mobs to harass people on your instance. Hence, you want to block instances that allow such behaviour.
But, you also want to avoid accidental "retweets" (boosts), replies and whatnot to reach your instance. So you want a thick layer of insulation: not just blocking one "bad" instance, but blocking the instances that interact with that "bad" instance as well. There are probably technical means to get such an insulation, but neither Activity-Pub nor mastodon has these in place. So being liberal in blocks is a pragmatic means to keep your instance a really safe and happy place.
(Do note that you might not need such a safe place -I don't- but people with trauma's, insecurities, issues, or just a wish for a safe and happy place might. And it being federated allows for admins to create such a place. A place where you can be a furry-amongst furries, or a victim amongst a supporting community).
Gab is a legit nazi/white-supremacist site. You trying to twist it to an attack on republicans/conservatives is laughable, unless you think that they are somehow synonymous.
Regardless, it's embarrassing how careless the political-left, whatever you want to call them, carelessly use the terms nazi, racist, white supremacist, etc.
Who does the moderation? Some really messed up stuff gets uploaded to basically every social media platform [0] and I sure as hell do not want to deal with that.
It’s server admins’ responsibility, so if it’s run by individuals the admin bans when he has time, if it’s run by a company then it’s done at company expense, and if moderation standards of two instances conflict then either operator takes it as offense and blacklist the other one.
My understanding of Mastodon federation is that the Europe/American instances generally play along, some alt-rights oriented are cut off, and then there is group of predominantly Japanese instances running incompatible legal ideology on completely incompatible language so European admins generally reject those as horrible dark corners of internet(?)
> I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. The sheer volume of users at its height seemed to involve a huge amount of brand new accounts you never saw again / never posted again (except when they show up as a group again), and etc. Or those without brand new accounts show up and post strange dishonest lead in type posts that sort of try to lead folks down a bigoted path ... that you can blatantly see in their post history.
This is very much a side note, but I do wonder what sorts of things would be enabled with more visibility into this kind of information. For example, average and median ages of all accounts in a thread or subthread. Per-user visualizations of posting histories (time of day, subreddit, etc). Information that would enable automated correlation (by time or subject) of posts from different accounts. Stuff like that. I'm sure they must have something internally that does at least some of the above.
For general web forums, I would personally like to see personal SSL certificates required to create an account. That would at least weed out people creating multiple accounts. As for cases where anonymity is required, there could be other information that balances out missing info on the certificate. For example one field would be how much they paid for the cert (assuming the CA has variable pricing). So someone could for example pay $20 for an anonymous certificate (just a certificate number and pseudonym, possibly an anonymous email), yet it would be cost prohibitive to get unlimited number of certs to create fake accounts.
Also, along with personal SSL certs, it would be nice to have a system to keep track of a person's reputation score across multiple forums.
A less common, but I'm seeing more frequent tacit are user accounts where they delete their posts after X time so the account looks like it has been around, but you've no idea where / what was posted.
Those users almost always head down the rabbit hole after a few posts....
It should be difficult to get in or at least have some reputation system built-in like StackOverflow. Proof that you behave and have valuable opinions. It is quite bad if thousands of bots can be made easily and post spam, fakenews and manipulations.
> Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content?
What's wrong with a decentralized "platform" that works like the web?
Anybody, right now, can submit some bigoted trolling to HN. It'll get flagged and killed in ten seconds. And then people don't much bother because there's no advantage in immediate failure.
You can have a "platform" that shares formats and protocols and supports shared links but has independently-moderated subsections, and then the contents of each one is reflected in how it's moderated.
Email is not controlled by Google. There is myriad of other big players in the field, plus you can get an email server on your own domain up and running in ~ 5 minutes
Email is controlled through gmail in the same way as webdesign is controlled by SEO directed towards google search. People need to access the users on the google platform, and google sets the terms for that.
That is, if you want your email to work you got to play by the rules dictated by google or a very large portion of all email will go away into a black hole.
I imagine that Google is waiting with bated breath for the day when their user base is large enough that they could get away with this, and are sitting, all day every day, with their finger hovering over the button.
It is our role to make sure that they never get sure enough of themselves that they press that button.
That's nonsense. Anything decentralised uses a certain set of rules how independent entities interact with each other. Such rules form a protocol. For example, XMPP is one such protocol. One can build reddit-like or Facebook-like service using xmpp, which will work across multiple independent servers. (In fact, that's what we are going to do, unless we run out of funds first)
I don't think so? So if TD was a mastodon community, many others would blacklist their content, but unless members of TD go and make accounts elsewhere that'd be the extent of it, no?
No, they send 'envoys' to other social media sites to argue with and harass those who speak up against them anywhere on the Internet. Think "flash mob" crossed with "sealioning^", and look to Gamergate for being first to that particular line. For example, there's a lot of green accounts posting comments here about where to find their new community.
That's honestly one of the Big Questions™ about stuff like Mastodon; is how resilient it is against that sort of behaviour.
On a lot of levels, it seems to be designed to allow multiple groups to share blacklists, so that if a given target is a bad actor anywhere, as long as other groups trust the group they initially burned, word is allowed to get around and close the door in their face before they even say a word somewhere else.
That's really the sign of our times when it comes to internet communities - almost all communities have this "innocent until proven guilty" stance for random strangers. Having been a moderator before on at least one internet community, it's almost like you're a police detective "building a case". You don't just get a whiff of "gee, this person's probably acting in bad faith, let's just ban them" - you have to gradually build up a strong dossier of sorts proving that they're genuinely bad, otherwise (at least in the old-school communities I grew up in) it reflects extremely poorly on you.
But because of this, they're susceptible to all sorts of really rudimentary social hack vectors, some almost feeling as silly as "the same guy coming back five minutes later wearing a Groucho Marx mask and a slightly altered name - and fooling everyone".
-----------
I feel like that's really the novel thing about Mastodon et al - being able to ditch these social norms lets people unload a whole raft of scorched earth tools - like pre-emptive IP bans that follow people around and are in place before they even arrive.
They're dangerous tools - we could easily make ourselves susceptible to attacks where trolls get people kicked out of their own communities by impersonating them elsewhere, but it feels like the pendulum's been swung way to far in the "gentle and understanding" direction for decades, now.
How is Mastodon able to defend against abusive single-message throwaway accounts registered by a distributed swarm of malicious human beings?
My stalker of 20 years has been registering a new account every time they contact me for 20 years, specifically to abuse the “your first message is trusted and delivered” approach, with every social platform they’ve stalked me on. If my stalker has known how to do this for decades, then clearly these forum folks know how to as well.
By my read, Mastodon is vulnerable to this distressing and threatening behavior as long as each account is treated as a throwaway, even if it’s banned as soon as it’s caught. This allows the flash mob of abusers to sign up for a mass of Mastodon accounts, send a single threatening abusive message from each to one recipient, and then throw away the accounts and start over. They would succeed in their targeted harassment goal, while Mastodon would - as it defaults to “allow untrusted third parties to contact anyone” - continue acting as a delivery platform for abuse that cannot be stopped.
If I’ve misunderstood and there is some aspect of Mastodon that protects against anonymous users being treated as innocent long enough to deliver an abusive message, that would be invaluable to know.
The most important thing to realise is: This is ONLY happening because the internet is now centralised.
Put aside Trump. Put aside politics. Put away US culture wars, and all other mass politics. It does not matter who is banned or why. Understand that what is happening now is the INEVITABLE result of an internet concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
We have less websites. More natural tech monopolies. More points of failure: host, DNS, DDos protection, CAs. As any or all of these become centralised, website and communities are placed under the inevitable threat of censorship. Yesterday it was about copyright, today it is about politics, some day it will probably be about creed or race. When you give unaccountable power to the few, they will use it as they see fit.
This couldn't happen in a decentralised web, with more sites, players, hosts, more places for communities and discussion, more places to go if the site-owner turns sour.
We had a web 20 years ago where everyone from a Nazi to a transvestite from transsexual Transylvania could have their own place on the web which no-one else could take from them. We have lost that. Now several people can take your place on the web away. A small number of centralised gatekeepers control what is allowed to stay online.
Fake news for us, but not to those who were part of it. It wasn't fake news at all. They are going to group again somewhere else.
The member might see this as action to silence. This could make them even more angry and isolated. Reddit meanwhile will be a unreliable source of information to them.
They correctly saw that, in the run-up to the election, all the big leftist tech companies would assert themselves and silence conservatives in an effort to "prevent the next Trump situation" as Google's Jen Gennai put it last May when she thought she was talking to a fellow "diversity advocate".
“duxup” writes:<blockquote>Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content?</blockquote>Apparently, yes: Hundreds of millions of people are still on Facebook.
How's this different from email? Management of server reputation, spam filters, etc.
One and gone spam servers are frequent and are dealt with through putting low trust in new servers and using heuristics to flag behavior that look abusive.
> I don't think people want that. The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc.
> Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content?
No, but I think people want equal, consistent, and predictable enforcement. Notably, lots of other communities are allowed to exist despite having much more and more overt bigotry including celebrations of political violence and even concerted attempts to slander people and get them fired or harassed. The difference is the groups they target and the transparently BS justifications for targeting them ("well actually, racism doesn't mean 'hating a person or group because of their race'" or something like that).
Maybe. Those other ones aren't banned though while TD was. Combined with the fact that their new rules explicitly allow for harassment of majority identity groups, I'd say this isn't a good move.
That's the point. Other communities are worse than TD and go reprimanded. And it's not just communities like TD; people are canceled, terminated, etc for completely not racist offenses such as "making an OK symbol by accident" or "standing next to a woman who wrongly suggested a minority person was vandalizing a store" or "citing a prominent Black academic's research on nonviolent-vs-violent protests" or "publishing an interview wherein a Black man says that he wishes there was more concern for crime problems in predominately Black communities", or "publishing an op ed from a US senator that expresses a viewpoint shared by more than 50% of the US public", or etc. Meanwhile people can go on years-long racist tirades on Twitter and be promoted into the NYT or say things like "literally all members of $RACE are irredeemably evil" in a book and hit the top of the Amazon and NYT best-sellers list and get diversity consulting gigs all over the country. There aren't words to describe how far beyond parody these double standards have become.
EDIT: That's a lot of downvotes. I'd be really interested to hear what specifically people disagree with. Do you contest my assertion that a double standard exists? Or maybe you don't agree with my negative characterization of TD? Or do you contest that the implication that double standards (in general or this one in particular) is morally wrong? Let's talk about it (leave the downvotes by all means, but let's have a productive discussion).
I said that TD was reprimanded for doing things that were at worst on par with other groups. You said “that sounds like TD up until recently”. I said “That’s the point” and went into more detail about my original claim (namely that the double standard targets not only conservatives but all but the most extreme leftists).
As for “ideology of persecution”, that could apply to anyone citing examples of a double standard. At best it begs the question.
I've been thinking about this a bit lately, and I don't see how. People are going to game the system, and decentralization just means they can play the game for longer, or in all new ways.
How do you establish a pattern of bad behavior by a person if that data is balkanized across a hundred independent nodes? They can feel out the line between ban-worthy and nuisance and if they happen to overstep a little bit a few times, they can still annoy 90% of the userbase. You have to have centralized moderation information and infrastructure.
People who don't want to be moderated, therefore, don't want this kind of decentralized system, and the maintainers would be fools to offer it. What they want is their own system, but someone else to do the work. An open-source Reddit engine, perhaps. When they discover how expensive it is to run, especially with people acting up, then a few of them may become self-aware.
Not just hate you, but stalk, threaten and harass you.
There are some people where even just saying-- as a moderator-- "Hey, can you chill out and at lease pretend to treat other posters with some respect" will trigger a full on war against you.
There aren't many people like this, but it only takes a few because even a single obsessed person can spew a lot of hate.
I think don't expect intelectual work to work on reddit is very scalable for a start, or any faceless interface. There's a reason sciences still hold conferences, which should appear rather uneconomic if internet was a viable competitor. It was never meant to be thst, but many people seem to think so, effectively isolating themselves and becoming detached from reality.
This is just a random internet comment of course, so ymmv
It actually isn't always possible to log out and walk away. Sometimes people find out where you live and go there, or find out where you work and contact your employer.
As they used to say in the 90s internet, "When you die on the internet you die in real life."
The internet is a huge part of many of our lives, especially with the quarantine. I think we should be more hesitant before deciding on "harassment victims should just stay out of it" as a general solution to harassment. For some reason we rarely consider that a legitimate solution to harassment in physical locations; if a stalker shows up to you whenever you go to any park in your city, people generally agree that the solution isn't to say that you specifically should just stay out of parks.
Yes - and? If those bad actors are screaming down every meaningful discussion in the forum you moderate (and supposedly care about), all the people you'd want to stick around will leave. If moderators would care little enough about the community that they log out and walk away, the wouldn't be moderators.
You realize that people will look through 20 years of post history, triangulate every piece of information you've ever mistakenly let loose that you haven't thought about in a decade, and use that information to harass you outside of the internet, right?
My first high school crush has been doing this continuously for 20 years^, in case anyone things this is a made-up story. Stalking behaviors are not rational, and they do not care that 20 years have passed. Stalkers do not care that you walked away.
^ They don't seem to realize that after the wave of 28 death threats in an evening 15 years ago (in writing, I still have them for the cops), I'm simply not going to communicate with them ever again, unless it's to their local constabulary to deliver a restraining order. I half expect they'll show up here to reply to my comment with a green account and go on yet another thousand-word crazy monologue rant about how they are entitled to my friendship after 20 years of never-ending harassment. We'll see.
This resonates with my experience moderating a local facebook group.
I get attacked and threatened by racist instigators and BLM supporters alike because people feel that any moderation against them is solidarity with the other side. I point to the group rules violated and they still assume bias on my part. I AM biased (in favor of BLM) but still get treated like crap when I'm doing my best to moderate fairly, for free, in my spare time, for the benefit of the people treating me like crap.
Also paid moderators can't be trusted to moderate without bias. Supporting the ability for Trump-friendly speach (as long as it's relevant and civil) may get you bluelisted+defunded by advertisers who get harassed.
Users won't allow for (use) decentralized platforms until there is a good way to censor them. Once that happens, what would be the point of switching.
Facebook and Reddit are successful BECAUSE they are censorship machines. Facebook spends far more man hours on "curating" content compared to engineering.
Same with Reddit. Add up all the "moderation" time spent removing negative or controversial posts and I bet much more time is spent on content compared to programming the site.
You are not wrong, but even if a perfect decentralized clone existed tomorrow you'd only get young men and programmers to use it, the average TicTok users wants to see beautiful people doing stupid things, they don't care how it happens.
Actually, that's not quite true. Reddit's first wave of popularity came from a lack of censorship. There was a decryption code posted on a news story on Digg that allowed one to decrypt a bluray. Digg got a cease and desist, took it down, and people started protesting on Digg posting the code everywhere. During this time was the first wave where people started jumping from Digg to Reddit because of the lack of censorship.
The lack of censorship was so bad Reddit used to have a lot of child porn on it and Reddit fought the US gov on it stating it shouldn't have to censor content.
I suspect The_Donald has been shut down primarily due to a lack of moderators. This causes drama to get escalated outside of the sub and the Reddit admins do not want to deal with it. Reddit is still very much anti censorship.
Something like r/watchpeopledie, they don't have to censor, and it seems contained. I wouldn't want to visit it, not more than once, it may not be healthy in general, but taking it down seems to be "just" censorship?
Other than pornography they seem to have markedly cleaned up and taken a much more advertising friendly focus; seems much less to have the dingy back alleys it once did (but maybe that's a biased view).
Haven't they closed subreddits to quash some radical conservative talk?
Are you part of the Reddit administration?
Rightly or wrongly there appears to have been a lot of censorship over the last couple of years.
>Something like r/watchpeopledie, they don't have to censor, and it seems contained. I wouldn't want to visit it, not more than once, it may not be healthy in general, but taking it down seems to be "just" censorship?
I can say for me personally after spending some time on that subreddit that I am far more cautious and safe in everything I do. I always look out for falling objects, wear helmets and safety gear when appropriate, drive even more defensively etc. The sub opened my eyes to the dangers of planet Earth, all the ways it tries to kill us, and I don't think I'm alone on this.
This is just not true. They are very transparently trying to kick off users/communities that they don't "like".
For example basically any subreddit associated with the "alt right", except I believe /r/DebateTheAltRight or whatever it's called.
It's very simple:
(1) Identify community that you don't like, generally due to association with anti-leftist political views
(2) Find an instance of a threat of violence, regardless of context (i.e. the threat coming from someone who isn't a "real" community member)
(3) Use (2) to have a justified reason for "quarantining" the community, which is just the first step in a long, slow death-squeeze. From my understanding, those at /r/The_Donald saw the obvious writing on the wall and thus migrated to the donald.win quite some time ago.
> Remember that Brendan Eich was forced out of Mozilla for his views.
He was forced out due to a 1000$ personal donation to a political group that was Christian/right leaning. Political speak: "Incompatible/Hostile views"
I seem to recall there was slightly more to it than that. I don't have the time or inclination to get drawn into this now but I didn't want an incomplete summary to stand unchallenged.
That is about it. That, and that given the opportunity to apologise for it, he didn't.
He immediately lost the respect and trust of most mozillians and a lot of the public, which itself made him unfit for the role. I don't know if you can really say he was forced out; you don't keep a CEO around when nobody in a company of hundreds of employees trusts them.
> That is about it. That, and that given the opportunity to apologise for it, he didn't.
It was personal funds right? Why should he apologize? Should you apologize for buying something from a competitor? Who do you apologize to for making a private transaction with your own money?
> He immediately lost the respect and trust of most mozillians and a lot of the public, which itself made him unfit for the role.
He did? Was he unable to perform his job? They uncovered this after the deed was done. Was that faith lost while they didn't know about it? If you asked Firefox users right now: how many people would even be able to tell you about this situation?
> I don't know if you can really say he was forced out; you don't keep a CEO around when nobody in a company of hundreds of employees trusts them.
Did the employees get polled on this? (My bet is no)
Dude/dudette, you're barking up the wrong tree, I didn't care about Eich then and I don't care about him now. I'm just confirming the post YOU wrote above, so quit it with this weird tone.
Also, your expectations of a CEO of a corporation as large as Mozilla are out of whack. If Pinchai, Bezos, Satella, Musk etc were publicly put on the spot for personal views that were antithetical to their respective corporations and lost the trust of their employees and the public, they'd either apologize or lose their job. Weird hill to die on.
But that's exactly what I mean when I say political persecution.
If his political views cause him to lose the respect of his employees, and losing the respect of his employees causes him to be unfit, then his political views caused him to be unfit.
I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me. But the fact that that's considered a hostile view is precisely the kind of persecution that I mean.
I don't think they're especially successful right now.
Their President is barely holding on to majority support in Texas and is losing every purple state. He seems powerless to appease his law&order base by stopping the riots and indicting their leaders as he wants to do. Their Supreme Court justices keep ruling against them (another bid to chip away at Roe v Wade knocked down just this morning). Their online presences keep getting canceled (Twitch ban against Trump just this morning). The New York Times has decided that publishing a right-wing essay by a Senator, with which the majority of the party agrees, is a fireable offense.
Their right-wing legislature failed to repeal ObamaCare. The right-leaning Supreme Court prevented Trump from canceling DACA. Although the courts didn't explicitly prevent Trump Wall construction, they did the next best thing: allow it to get tangled up in litigation, injunctions, and counter-injunctions for 4 years, thereby preventing substantial progress.
Lots of people have lost their jobs for criticizing BLM, whereas criticizing the right is practically obligatory. I see a lot of rhetoric, and very little success.
> 3/ Gordon Klein, a professor at UCLA, has been placed on leave after he refused to cancel a final exam following George Floyd's death
> 23/ David Shore, a 28-year-old data scientist, has been fired for tweeting an article by a biracial Princeton African-American studies scholar suggesting that rioting is politically counterproductive.
> 32/ Tiffany Riley, the headmistress of a high school in Windsor, Vermont, has been forced to take "administrative leave" after writing a Facebook post in which she said, “Just because I don’t walk around with a BLM sign should not mean I am a racist.”
> 37/ Emmanuel Cafferty, a Hispanic truck driver, has been fired after a fellow driver put a picture of his arm hanging out of his truck window on Twitter and claimed it was the white power symbol. A BLM protest was taking place nearby.
> Find an instance of a threat of violence, regardless of context
Doesn't the fact that finding instances of violent rhetoric among alt-right posters, regardless of context, sorta make the case that maybe this is an endemic problem and not a purely political suppression?
There are a lot of really hateful people among that group, in ways that just aren't true for other politically aligned communities.
I mean, the Dirtbag Left folks have their assholes too (note that the Chapo sub was banned too), but they're comparatively rare, notable in isolation, generally have names associated with them, and (really importantly) tend to be shamed and controlled from within their own communities.
The alt right is a bunch of assholes, plus a bunch of people who make a habit of tolerating assholes. That's a toxic combination if you're Reddit.
> Doesn't the fact that finding instances of violent rhetoric among alt-right posters, regardless of context, sorta make the case that maybe this is an endemic problem and not a purely political suppression?
No? Because in an anonymous online forum anyone can just hop in and drop a “... kill em all!” message and whoops, there goes your forum. It’s impossible to prevent, at best you can only react to it. You are completely at the mercy of admins as to whether or not they believe such content is “inherent” to your community, and surprise surprise, they do.
Except, again, this doesn't happen on other large left-leaning forums at Reddit. When was the last time /r/twoxchromosomes brigaded the voting at /r/news to attack an inconvenient story? When was the last time a mod on /r/relationships was banned for hate speech?
I think it'll be a good thing, Reddit and most Silicon Valley companies hostile to free speech are going to decline as competition as alternatives that truly appreciate the constitution of the country they operate in are born.
I actually like how Reddit moderates for the most part, they do keep things relatively "clean", but they are also thoroughly corrupt politically, horrendously biased in favor of anything left wing and beyond reform. Outside of a few minor subs, I don't "browse" reddit anymore at all. Everyone fair and honest who visits /r/politics or /r/worldnews knows by now they're being lied to, constantly and without relent, so only one type of reader still goes there willingly.
I think it's not super useful to generalize things down to being about censorship in the abstract. It can be true without contradiction that many people are against censorship in defense of DRM, and are for censorship targeted at keeping droves of hateful comments out.
> Users won't allow for (use) decentralized platforms until there is a good way to censor them. Once that happens, what would be the point of switching.
You could imagine a world where there's multiple apps that access the same decentralized platform, where the censoring happens at the application level. So if your favorite community gets banned in one app, if you want, you could switch to a different app. Not a perfect example, but it would be like how if Google Chrome decided to block somerandomcommunityexample.com you could just switch to Firefox.
In the olden days (when NNTP was a more popular protocol), almost anyone could post almost anything to almost any group. There was moderation, but mostly in more focused groups or announcement-centric groups where replies were not expected. To moderate, you, yourself, added people and subjects to your own kill file. This meant that the platform was mostly free of censorship, but the participants could choose to engage or not with trolls or charged topics. If they chose to disengage, they simply wouldn't see it. Like going on /. and setting a filter level of 5 for viewable comments.
I like it! Every community could have their own "domain" and you could choose, at any time, which ones to visit and which to ignore and there would be a search engine to help find new communities for you.
(All jokes aside, I really love your idea of having different apps act like lenses or filters which give you different views of the same underlying ecosystem. That's the kind of conceptual novelty that's in short supply right now.)
The issue right now is that most content is presented over and communication conducted over HTTP interfaces without clear APIs. This makes writing independent applications to access this content or communicate via these channels challenging (though not at all impossible).
What would be really great is to go back to communicating via open protocols (and I don't mean a bespoke protocol over the open protocol that is HTTP). This lets people use whatever tools they want to participate. Like we have with email, Usenet and IRC.
EDIT: I initially wrote about content presentation over HTTP, that wasn't what I meant so I modified it. Specifically I'm talking about forums (like this one, Reddit, or any of the other popular gathering grounds) that are interfaced with via HTTP. They've taken over a large chunk of our person-to-person communication. Simple sites (like this one) are easy to interact with via a custom application. But Reddit, Facebook, and others are harder to use via anything but their primary site or their own application.
Wouldn't each community have their own userbase? So brigaders would need to make new accounts to execute the attack. Maybe a hill/gate could be introduced for new accounts to rate-limit the influx?
Indeed. The average user, especially women, does not enjoy having their boundaries pushed by an escalation of shocking (but not illegal!) and pornographic (but not illegal!) images, which you will get if you don't have moderation, and even a bit if you do. As proven by Slashdot twenty years ago.
Oh, and the plain spam. C1al1s spammers can fill your entire board if you let them.
It consistently amazes me that people deny the possibility that women enjoy pornography. On the contrary, a large amount, possibly even the majority, of pornography on reddit is posted and created by women. Some of them do so to make money, but a lot do it simply because they enjoy it.
Many women enjoy (for lack of a better word) gore, horror, and shock content too.
> does not enjoy having their boundaries pushed
Again to the contrary, the majority of people, especially young people, actively seek to have their boundaries pushed to one degree or another.
Logged in just to thank you for your comment (which is 100% correct). So few people understand the role & importance of consent and your comment is appreciated.
Facebook and Reddit are successful because it allows for the users to be social with people they know/recognize.
Spam removal is the biggest element of reddit and FB. Unwanted content detracts from the original goal. (Also moderating in it's self does kill a community if done badly)
> Same with Reddit. Add up all the "moderation" time spent removing negative or controversial posts and I bet much more time is spent on content compared to programming the site.
Well, but there is easy solution to this. Just do it in the exact same way the reddit does it, which is to have individual fiafdom communities that have self appointed moderators in charge of their own communities.
So, if a user doesn't like a certain community, with a certain moderation policy, they can stop reading that one, and instead go to a different community with a better policy.
Reddit particularly used to be a free speech platform where anything could go and then used network effects to gain dominance. Now that they have dominance they now implement censorship of right wing views comments. This is true for Facebooks deboosting capabilities.
Reddit removed The_Donald from showing up in All, changed their search algorithm, and changed the number of active users showing up on T_D (they screwed up and you could see the true number on their ad buy portal).
Those were all 100% admin actions to censor, not moderator actions.
I'm not seeing "school vouchers" or "individual responsibility", classical pillars of Conservative values, being censored.
I am seeing a ton of censoring of racist and hateful comments, both openly so and dog whistles. So unless you're claiming that right-wing values are inherently racist or hateful...
You aren't seeing that content censored, because that content has been censored, and its posters vilified so completely, for so long, that it has disappeared.
There are virtually zero republicans or conservatives on any social media site -- they know they aren't welcome, so they don't engage very much.
You don't see them being censored because, at this point, they self-censor.
Who wants to be doxxed and have their employer harassed into firing them just for trying to have a calm conversation with people who want to murder them anyway
Those platforms don't lack on identitarian division and push of extremist views
There might be a slight point that those platforms end up being more of a right wing echo-chamber more than a left-wing one because of some factors. But the bias is on what's in there, not on the platform
That being said, nothing was lost of value with the shutting down of T_D (ok, maybe it would be a prime source of information on manipulative state actors, but they can work on what they have already)
>Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use.
You kind of can, though. Sure, group X hates group Y and wants the admins to ban them. Group Y hates group X and wants the admins to ban them. The smart play would have been to be neutral and set out an explicit set of rules everyone has to follow.
Reddit instead did it the worst possible way imaginable. They laid out no clear rules, banned thousands of subs for vague "hate" reasons that you can't define, much less verify, and drastically reduced the scale and appeal of their site.
If you think group X will now be happy and stop complaining now that group Y has been banned, I think that's naive. The admins will still be pressured, but the goalposts will just be moved to ever more extremes until Reddit's such a niche echo-chamber that it appeals to too few people to remain financially viable.
Social media companies should not be in this position where they are the arbiter of what is offensive/explicit/hate speech vs acceptable free speech. Despite what they state, they will ALWAYS make the decision that generates more profits or power.
There really needs to be effective legislation given the importance of free speech for democracy. Unfortunately government agencies are so politically charged that I trust them with enforcement even less than social media companies.
Why does the narrative have to be about "caving" to someone instead of weighing principles against each other and taking the action which protects what's most important?
I don't think the "caving" framing was about how the decision maker thinks about it, more about how one side or another sees it as "caving".
Life is full of dilemmas like that where it's not possible to make everyone happy, but content moderation is full of dilemmas where, no matter what you choose, a few very unhappy ones will hound you to the ends of the earth.
It is, but it's also a cost for not removing hate, and also just for having a slightly different opinion on what constitutes hate than some of your users. When you have a billion users, there's going to be a lot of them that disagree with you on things.
Yes and reasonable people understand this and don't need censorship. Who would hate a platform for not removing people for just honestly disagreeing and talking? Inciting violence and cheating the system is a different story and the obvious edge of free speech
The problem is "honest disagreement and talking" isn't. One person's honest disagreement is inciting violence, and with coded signals and dogwhistles, it's not a subject that everyone will agree on. Things that are clearly on one side or there other of the line aren't in question. It's more subtle stuff that can be argued either way, eg "When the looting starts, the shooting starts", where it gets more contentious.
Pretending it's all just honest disagreement is being naive.
> Who would hate a platform for not removing people for just honestly disagreeing and talking?
A lot of people. And if your goal is quantity, not quality, those people are important, because they are who the investors give you money to build a site for.
> could have more federated and decentralized platforms
I would absolutely not going to a platform with no moderation. The quality of the content will be abysmal.
Honestly, r/D or something like that should just go to host its own website/forum, it shouldn't be Reddit's problem to begin with. Their presence brings toxic attention/traffic that is hard to monetize anyway
Granted I haven't been there in years but the content on the chans isn't much worse than Reddit once you've been there long enough that your brain stops registering the "nig" prefix and "fag" postfix they slap on every other word. Any place that is open to cross-polination from internet riff-raff from other niches is going to devolve toward a very low lowest common denominator (which is why HN is mostly unscathed).
The best solution is not to cave to anyone. It's to come out, say what you think is best, then tell anyone who disagrees to either take it or leave the platform.
If enough companies, groups and individuals do that, this sort of pressure will stop, since people will learn it doesn't work. Most people won't stop using a platform over this stuff anyway.
In order to do that you have to go the Silk Road route, and try to host the site untraceably, paying for the server in Bitcoin, with the server hosted in a country with a no-extradition policy but has fast Internet. Otherwise for the platform to exist on the "regular" Internet, with servers and server admin living in a country with laws, the platform has to start policing content - banning the sale of drugs, weapons, and murder-for-hire, along with censoring other material - porn, gore, child pornography, copyright infringing material, files that are covered under ITAR.
The Internet is rife with censorship. It just offends our first amendment sensibilities to call it that for some very specific categories.
I wish it were that easy, but the things that keep people from shouting extremely distasteful but legal speech on every street corner of busy intersections don't really work for the internet, at least not yet. I suspect the only way to get a truly free and open honest platforms, is by removing anonymity and forcing users to categorize/tag their speech and then use punitive measures if they don't tag correctly.
Say you have a native feature where anonymous users or anyone will not see (by default) certain types of content by tags. The community might vote on which tags to require users to "opt in" to view. The only way to be banned might be, assuming legal speech in the first place, would be if someone posts content that fits within a community agreed upon tag, but the user fails to tag it.
I haven't given this a ton of thought, but I would love to see something like this tried.
I run a video game clan with a fairly active discord channel -- the stance I've taken is: there are no rules beyond:
1. nothing illegal (includes cheating at games)
2. no racism / homophobia / transphobia
3. no harassing other members
4. everyone has different beliefs and come from different parts of the world -- if you are offended, ask the offender to stop, otherwise see a mod
so far there are around 50 people in the chat and almost no issues even though we have members who are rep/dem/other, religions ranging from Christian to Satanist, and we regularly post political and religious memes and such.
I don't know how but thus far we've had no real issues.
The how is simple - 50 people on a semi-private system is a totally different league than Reddit, with millions of users and public. Similar to your 4-rules stance, Reddit has Reddiquette and Content Policy and for the most part, people obey the policy. It's at the fringes where there are problems. It's not the one Satanist that's the issue, it's when there are large groups of members in the Church of Satan who don't get along with members of the Satanic Temple who don't get along with fringe Scientologists. (Because mainstream Scientology wasn't kooky enough for them.) And then trying to force them to split a pie that's not big enough for everyone to have a slice.
50 people is 48 more members than are in my video game clan, so I can admire the community building. The problem space changes drastically when scaling up though.
The one Satanist(cos) is me, so that's definitely not the problem ;)
edit: I agree that scaling might end up being an issue. Some other clans are run with much stricter rules and it seems to work well for them (one I know of is run like a paramilitary organization and has thousands of members). I wanted to experiment by going in the opposite direction and letting people be who they are and just cut loose at the end of the day.
That's not illegal. It's just not permissible on the services that run the games. Also, it used to be a thing in video gaming. (Game genie) For some reason, we've given up to video game companies who try to dictate how people should enjoy a product that they purchase.
It's not about game companies. The companies actually don't care that much, they have sold the game, and spent our money already. If they ever react is just because of the pressure from gamers.
Also, it is not about cheating in your single player game. No one really cares about that. Want to enable god mode and insta-kill every baddie? Go for it.
Cheaters in online competitions simply ruin the game for other players. Cheaters destroy online gaming communities.
So of course, in online gaming communities, cheating is seen as one of the worst offences someone can commit.
It might not be illegal by laws of the land, but its illegal in our world and we will instantly kick + permanently ban any member who is caught cheating. We take it as seriously as any illegal activity (as defined by law of the land).
In a small group your social relationship with every other person matters, as you're going to be seeing them again, and you're also more familiar with them as a person. It's kind of like being rude to someone living in a small town vs a city. In the town being rude to someone might follow you for years, whereas you'll probably never see someone you're rude to in a city ever again.
> I don't know how but thus far we've had no real issues.
Because you only have 50 users, which is nothing. It’s the same reason communism is such an appealing idea, in very small communities it works but doesn’t scale up to nation-sized ones.
fifty is exactly 50 more than nothing, but I understand the point you are attempting to make.
Anyway, we'll keep doing our thing. Like I tell everyone, we're 50% video games, 50% 4chan. If you can't deal with it, you don't have to play with us.
edit: also to clarify, we're gamers, not "users". its a gaming collective, these are not my customers. Its very strange for me to see this group referred to as "users".
> Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use.
While this is probably true in most cases, given the Reddit CEO's history with the_donald[1], this doesn't seem like it applies in this particular case.
The_Donald was censored and taken over by reddit moderators for "threats made against police". It was laughable considering the extraordinarily explicit explicit threats made against the police in other more popular reddit forums. Equal rules were not applied.
If reddit was consistent in their application of rules, it would be nice. But we all know that is not the case. Some are more equal than others.
It’s funny, what I see is not politics but simple market effects. The truth is that most people value some level of moderation. Surprise! A cesspool of trolls does not provide for an inviting community.
I find it hilarious that we have congresspeople whining about being “censored” on the very platform they claim is censoring them. I would think the first step of a competent censor would be to censor complaints of censorship itself.
Eh, I'm not so sure about that. If you want to censor and you don't have an ironclad mandate to go nuts, you need veneer of plausible deniability. "How are we censoring people? If we were censoring, would our first step be to censor complaints of censorship itself?"
(Not saying that's what's happening, just saying I disagree with the argument here)
If you make enemies regardless of what position you take, you are free to take your own position without guilt or additional consequence. Moderators should take positions based on what they personally believe moderation should be (or those deciding the rules for moderators should do so). Just because their position may align with the interests of a particular group does not mean they are caving to that group.
There is a right way to do this which minimizes the issues, but it's counter-intuitive: reflect the negative aspects of The_Donald.
It's called "closed loop hypocrisy" and the theory is that all negativity or opposition is inherently hypocritical (given we are all very similar in the end). But being hypocritical does not mean opposition is bad, if anything the issue is long loop hypocrisy where someone pretends to be righteous when really it's just hypocrisy with extra steps.
Most people solve problems with long loop hypocrisy and those who support them can easily choose to overlook the hypocrisy by focusing on the convoluted steps and rhetoric in between. Meanwhile, it's obvious to those being attacked just how hypocritical they are.
In contrast, closed loop hypocrisy is about applying the form of negativity to itself. It seems kind of dumb, but that's the point: to show how dumb X form of negativity is directly to X form of negativity.
It's a form of inception and it's hard to pull off, but there is a better way.
I have some hazy concepts around it. I suspect very humble inception.
Something like having the other person think they're better than you for having less of their flaws than you do. Sort of a reverse psychology type of thing, but with more potential for doing harm.
To be able to do it, one would have to first heal their ego I think. Be able to look like a jackass and not let it get to their head.
There's a metaphysical "law" that holds that when there's some quality in the other person that ticks you off especially, if you search yourself you'll find that it's a quality you also have, don't like about yourself, and are unaware of.
the only reason they are centralized at all is to make a profit, so it’s the profit motive which is causing them to hoover up and own all this content and thereby being vulnerable to the risk
The fundamental problem here is that people discover things that make them angry. Platforms need to figure out how to prevent that, how to let open-minded people discover others who think differently, while keeping crybullies in a comfortable bubble.
For reddit, part of the problem is that everyone who isn't logged in sees the same frontpage, which means they see posts from these controversial subreddits and get angry. They should make it possible to subscribe to or block subreddits without making an account.
I think a lack of geographical diversity is coming back to bite tech companies. For better or for worse conservatives believe they are not fairly treated by tech companies. The fact that most US tech companies are on the coasts which happen to be fairly liberal further feeds into this us-vs-them tribal arguments. Curbing divisiveness and helping bring people together has never been more important, I hope we find a way out of the current quagmire collectively as a society.
The whole cancelling of the opposition is the reason why those who do it, become their own echo-chamber and will continue to find every. single. thought-criminal. and suffocate them in livelihood, privacy and financial healthiness.
Twitter has been the ground digital war of the liberal-left and (some of the far-left) over the conservative right and (some of the actual far-right) and the right-wingers retreated to their own chambers with the former have Twitter under its control. As soon as 'the right' we're told to 'create their own platform' which they have done many times, cancellation was always the goal from those from the left.
Having echo-chambers creates one-sided discussions but unfortunately they are left with no choice given that cancellation is inevitable where-ever they go. If both sides are yelling, screeching and howling at each other they're both not listening to one another which is nothing like a reasonable debate.
>>I believe that different communities might have different definitions of "toxicity"
Sure. The problem is that despite the decentralized nature of those communities, they still don't exist in a vacuum. Their various beliefs and behaviors (that the community itself may not consider toxic) inevitably leak out and cause problems for society at large.
The incel community, for example, worships Elliott Rodgers, the guy who went on an insane shooting rampage because sorority girls wouldn't have sex with him. How long until another Rodgers appears? Why should we allow such breeding grounds to exist?
Some leftist communities worship Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and others, whose actions led to murder of tens of millions of people. Why should we allow any of them to exist?
Why should platform owners decide what's right and what's wrong? If something is legal then why should we censor it just because it may seem hateful to someone, or somebody feels offended? So what if a post offends somebody? They can deal with it like an adult. Ignore the trolls, and discuss if there is a discussion, offending or not.
If people want a safe private place with no intruders, then they can create a closed/invite-only group and moderate it themselves.
>There is a certain amount of irony here, due to this comment's presence on as heavily moderated a forum as this.
The difference is that on HN the political content (so far) remains contained to a few articles every now and then, plus you can still read 'flagged' comments. Even if I have a strong political opinion I prefer HN in this curated way.
On Reddit on the other hand every major subreddit gets politicized eventually (/r/pics, /r/news), on-topic discussions being derailed to shout about Trump, calling people "Nazis" and the mods will rather ban or delete the posts that call the activists out or which cite 'inconvenient' facts. Complete threads get nuked in the most intransparent ways which can be seen using third-party tools like https://snew.notabug.io
Inside the major subreddit only one side (the 'Left' side) of the political spectrum is allowed to voice their opinions even if those were off-topic in the first place.
The title should be updated, as T_D was just one of a large number of subs banned today; even then, it has been largely irrelevant since the admins' earlier decision to quarantine it and impose other restrictions.
Other larger banned subs include /r/GenderCritical (anti-Trans) and /r/ConsumeProduct which was ostensibly for criticism of consumerism and product promotion, but hid a large strain of antisemitism below the surface in a similar though less-direct fashion to previously banned /r/clownworld (barely-veiled antisemitic and racist cartoons/commentary).
Also banned is /r/chapotraphouse, notably the biggest (only?) left-leaning sub on the list. Its users were known to be relatively cantankerous and tended to kick off a lot of brigading on Twitter and such; though some will say its banning was a "both sides" maneuver from the management.
In my own opinion this was a long time coming, and Reddit has long since shown that the original hands-off model is woefully inadequate in the face of communities that are willing to expend the effort to argue continuously in bad faith, organize to influence and control opinion in other communities, and attack the platform itself in their campaigns for hateful speech. Just ask /r/BlackLadies if you think these users "stay in their containment areas". Hopefully Reddit is turning the page to better empower its communities to protect their users and keep hate off the platform.
My perusal of Chapo Trap House was a lot of people un-ironically wishing that gulags came back and certain people were thrown into them. Just because communists did them, doesn’t mean you aren’t advocating for concentration camps, left-wing or not.
Way back when r/the_donald just started when his campaign began, many people including me thought it was an ironic subreddit and treated it as such. Then suddenly Trump gained momentum and the subreddit turned out to be for real.
That's definitely also my impression. The only point against that theory is the moderation. I don't think someone who started that as a joke would let it become what it was at the end. unless maybe someone related to the Trump campaign bought those accounts of course.
a number of subreddits like r/ConsumeProduct were taken over by the hate mongers from the_donald. You would have post brigaded to the front page that had absolutely nothing to do with consumerism or product promotion
I should be the prime target for a community sarcastically titled “consume product” as I hate spending money wastefully and enjoy getting good mileage out of anything I buy. Instead I learned how to block subreddits on my Reddit app of choice because the content had absolutely nothing to do with criticizing wastefulness. I could never quite put my finger on what the subreddit was designed for (I never subscribed, I only interacted with it when it hit /r/all) but I knew it wasn’t a criticism of wasteful consumerism.
Social media has a trolling/brigading/hive mind problem in general across all platforms and I would add solving this problem to Paul Graham’s list of “frighteningly ambitious” ideas.
Can you link to an example? Oh right...it's all deleted, so we'll have to take your word...and your definition of whatever you consider "hate"...which has no definition...
Sadly current discourse does equate those two things. Being gender critical ("gender is fake and a tool of patriarchal oppression") is equated with erasing & attacking trans people - politically these two parties do seem to be at odds.
Is discourse regarding trans-gender really necessary though? It seems something a bunch of spoiled elitist bigots would discuss as their way to express distaste for plebs and pretends it's some sort of philosophical debate.
Someone's interpretation of their own sexuality or gender affects no one but themselves. You can discuss it over at /r/philosophy if your intentions are truly analytical.
> Someone's interpretation of their own sexuality or gender affects no one but themselves.
I don't feel you've really followed the debate. Some trans rights activists are demanding that they be legally defined as the sex they 'identify' with. This equates to biological men being housed in female prisons, biological men competing in women's sporting events, etc etc. It's an attack on women's spaces and the very meaning of what it is to be a woman and what women's experiences entail.
This is just a short summary but the idea that they are affecting 'no one but themselves' is way off base.
> Someone's interpretation of their own sexuality or gender affects no one but themselves.
This section was already covered by another user, but I'd like to provide an example too:
So, you fall in love with someone, and marry them. You have children with them and you have a nice family. Everything is going great until one day ... they confess to you that they have always felt like they were the opposite gender. This was not disclosed to you before you said your vows.
You want to support them because you love them so you encourage them to treat their dysphoria. You think it will be fine.
But then it turns out that when they begin to transition hormonally, you're no longer attracted to them. This is no fault of your own, sexuality is what it is, but you kinda feel like the person you were in love with has died. Your marriage falls apart. You're hurt. You feel vaguely betrayed even though you weren't really.
Whenever you try to talk to someone about what happened, just to vent, they all take your ex-spouse's side.
This is the content that was in a lot of the posts on GenderCritical. People who were hurting who wanted a place to vent about something a SPECIFIC person in their life did without automatically being labeled transphobic for working through their feelings.
Additionally, all the posters there were cis women. Men and trans women were asked to go somewhere else. Occasionally they would make exceptions and allow trans men to post, but for the most part it was cis women.
People who don't know better think of GenderCritical as aligned with the alt-right, but basically they are a despised part of the left. They would vote in the interest of women, being feminists, which meant NOT voting with the alt-right.
One of the main reasons they asked men to go elsewhere was because more often than not, those posters WOULD be aligned with the alt-right, and they would not have the best interests of women in mind when discussing things. Alt-right men would just see a subreddit that seemed to be for bashing trans people and be like "Sweet! This is my new home." and all the radical feminists would be like "nuh uh, out."
Source: I starting doing a deep dive into this community about a year ago to attempt to understand them.
I'll go ahead and say it's probably such an extremely rare occurrence that I highly doubt some sort of forum is required here.
Why an exclusive community about this subject necessary? This topic is not prohibited on /r/offmychest or any other "venting" subreddit. To me it seems like community of common hate and that's just awfully unnecessary.
I'm pretty certain posts of "my spouse turned out trans an left me" would never be removed from any platform.
There's so little value here that negatives outweigh the positives by an absurd margin.
/r/ConsumeProduct was antisemtic? I never saw that in the posts of theirs that made the front page. It was always memes about over-consumption, they might make fun of disposable make-up wipes for example ("And when you're done, just throw it away!" cue gallery yelling in a robotic voice: CONSUME PRODUCT).
Genuinely curious what the link to antisemitism is. Is the thought that consumerism = big business, and big business = "the jews"?
Edit: I made this comment early in the thread, before others started to weigh in on why this subreddit was banned. I'm willing to engage in a discussion if you reply instead of downvote.
I don't know how common it was, but I found this in the first comment section I looked:
> Could it be the Chosenbergs? Although a small group, they seem to control the majority of US record labels, as well as the news outlets, the pharmaceutical companies, the bank institutions, the pornography industry, the entertainment industry, ect.
(9 points, replying to "I wonder who runs these record labels?" which was setting up that reply)
Comment sections always have some garbage in them. At least there's a report button that does something.
I visit a number of conservative and libertarian discussion forums and the "blame the jews" conspiracy has completely lost its steam. Don't get me wrong I can see how it's offensive and unwelcoming to jewish people but I just don't see the same level of commitment to the idea that some secret cabal of jews run the world or run America as I used to, just random remarks.
On the other hand it could be these are the same people who were previously writing theses on the matter and they've actually been effectively silenced and only drop hints at the idea anymore.
I guess this is the risk of lurking the front page nowadays; Glancing at a subreddit's memes and never reading their comments apparently put me in the antisemtic camp.
It doesnt surprise me that the antisemitic stuff didnt make it to the front page, but for the record there was a LOT of it in the top posts of the subreddits. Caricatures in the posts, conspiracies in the comments. They also really focused on vasectomies, which strangely has become a strong signal for alt right presence in a community.
Yet r/stupidpol has (so far) managed to survive, which was the original Chapo Trap House podcast subreddit.
edit/ There are quite a few actually disgusting subs that have managed to evade this ban, in addition to a few which I kind of expected to see banned that survived. There are also quite a few which are basically worse versions of a subreddit that was in the banwave which leads me to conclude that the Reddit admins simply don't know that they exist.
/r/stupidpol should absolutely be banned if they're banning subreddits. It's everything bad that people thought the Chapo subreddit was, plus a ton of bigotry and genocide apologia.
>In my own opinion this was a long time coming, and Reddit has long since shown that the original hands-off model is woefully inadequate in the face of communities that are willing to expend the effort to argue continuously in bad faith, organize to influence and control opinion in other communities, and attack the platform itself in their campaigns for hateful speech. Just ask /r/BlackLadies if you think these users "stay in their containment areas". Hopefully Reddit is turning the page to better empower its communities to protect their users and keep hate off the platform.
All this will do is push these folks out to different platforms where they will organize brigading and bad faith participation in the dark. There are gobs of matrix/discord/irc rooms where people organize the manipulation of social media, and this move just removed visibility of it from reddit.
IMO it's partially a discoverability issue. Hate groups target young/vulnerable people, and start off with subtle/ironic hate and then groom people into more serious hate. If you read leaked chat transcripts, and even KKK manuals, they discuss this specifically as a tactic. By moving this stuff off of reddit, it makes it harder for those people to find it, because they'd have to go looking for it. It doesn't solve the problem of hate in society, but it helps.
The other thing is that reddit is inherently multi-topic. You can't host hate groups and then quarantine them from non-hate groups. So what you get is a bunch of people who showed up for the hate groups also commenting hateful things in the non-hate groups. This creates problems for people who wish to have a hate-free experience to talk about their gardening projects or video games.
People always say this, but it kind of seems like superstition to me — I haven't seen much evidence to support it. After the last wave of subreddit bans, it was "Well, obviously they'll all just go to Voat." But the corresponding Voat communities were anemic, and most died out, and now Voat itself isn't even around anymore.
Will some people move to an alternative venue? Almost certainly. Will most people do that, and will the alternative venue continue growing like the old one did? I'm pretty skeptical. The reason so many communities are on Reddit is because it's relatively easy to maintain and grow a community there. By denying them that tool, you make it harder for them to do that.
I'm sure most people here who are old enough can think of some old forum they used to love that isn't around anymore. When that one died out, it wasn't simply a matter of everyone going to another one and everything was the same. It works the same way for negative things as it does for positive ones.
>There are gobs of matrix/discord/irc rooms where people organize the manipulation of social media, and this move just removed visibility of it from reddit.
True but then it's not Reddit's problem. Reddit can't solve every ill, but it can cover its own ass.
So if we assume you are right then those users are going to behave like arseholes in either case, better they behave like arseholes off reddit is likely reddit's point of view - not least for PR/legal issues.
Let’s try the opposite argument then: let’s give these fringe groups more prominent placement in the Reddit ecosystem. Surely it’s better to give them more of a voice so we can know what they have to say, than letting them put in the effort to make their voices heard, right? Maybe we should donate money to these groups to help them congregate in one place so we can easier keep an eye on them too.
You don’t sell walkie talkies to Nazis hoping that they will talk themselves out of being Nazis. You take away their voice until the bad idea dies down. Now, if you want to argue that some of these things are good ideas, I am all ears on how you’d want to justify racism, sexism, and xenophobia as valuable to our society. Unless you can successfully do that, your point isn’t valid.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that removing visibility into their motivations, by pushing the bulk of their activity in their insular communities offsite, allows them to more easily blend in and use less extreme language to push their disgusting viewpoints and manipulate conversations onsite.
Essentially it reduces the ability to detect bad actors, is what I'm saying.
No, I understand: it's the idea that keeping them in the spotlight means we can keep tabs on them easier. I can see the appeal of that solution, but here's the problem: some people will legitimately go to /r/The_Donald to figure out what these people are thinking. Researchers, political operatives, etc. might find this very convenient. But the other effect this has is that (a) it gives them legitimacy (look! One of the larger subreddits on Reddit is an alt right haven!), and (b) most people aren't critical thinkers. They will see a political meme that mildly aligns with their beliefs, chuckle, move on. Until they see another, and another. Eventually, they'll notice a pattern: these memes are coming from TD, so they subscribe. Next thing you know, they are only getting their "news" from the TD memes, and suddenly they live in a political thought bubble getting further indoctrinated. That's what will happen with 99.9% of the people who end up on a subreddit like The_Donald, whether you like it or not. So in my estimation, the benefit of keeping TD around (easy visibility into the thought process of these individuals) is greatly outweighed by the drawbacks (providing them with easy means of recruitment and indoctrination).
Also, please keep in mind that for fringe groups like these Reddit is not their primary form of communication. That is, the community leaders don't just PM each other on Reddit or communicate via posts and comments. If there is any kind of organized effort here to effect real world change, it is coordinated by private chat, often times with assistance of anonymizing networks like Tor. Reddit is where people come into this world, but it's only floor 1 of the a vast underground bunker (for the communities where these things exist). Take 4chan as another internet dumpster fire. Anonymous periodically puts on their own campaigns like pridefall which can absolutely create real world problems. But they don't communicate through memes. When stuff starts working on that level, they are coordinating these things via better channels and that's happening today. If 4chan was to disappear, I firmly believe that core group would still be in touch and looking to set up another dumpster fire on another social media site, be it a private Facebook group, a Twitter community, a Discord server, or something else. But I'd rather they spend their time chasing their tail trying to get back to having external visibility than to have them do it in the open.
Also, they already have the opportunity to act more covertly, and they do. I am getting pretty good at spotting bad actors, but I'm sure I miss more. Some are pretty clever in their online interactions. Kicking them off Reddit doesn't give them any better tools to do this. They already can and already are doing this today.
If you want further proof of this, consider why the members of the KKK wear hoods. Could they do what they do in the open? Maybe. But because they are your neighbors, your politicians, your police officers, and your friends, they need a level of anonymity. Take that away and you make it harder for them to do what they do. Reddit provides the means for that open yet semi-anonymous MO. Taking it away doesn't mean they change their beliefs, but it makes it harder for them to do what they do.
I'm not sure why you're getting downvotes, because this is spot-on. Anonymous paper-folding image boards and other places like that are already celebrating the arrival of newcomers. It's like sending a petty offender to prison, and instead of getting reformed, they just get a lot more hardcore.
I get it that Reddit doesn't want extremism on its site, and I don't have an opinion either way on the bans. But I think it's naive to assume that people won't just hop to another, possibly more extreme, platform.
You are missing the point. Organizing, coordinating, recruiting, all these activities have costs associated with them. Costs like time spent on them, time spent finding tools to use for the job, etc. Make a racist subreddit go away and the N people who were a part of it won’t stop being racist. But it will be harder for them to find another platform to recruit and to some degree harder to find ways to coordinate. Now time that could have been spent indoctrinating new recruits can is being spent on less productive tasks, slowing the whole community down. Will it stop racism or even the racist group from doing what they do? Of course not. Will it slow them down, yes absolutely.
If a bunch of assholes showed up to your front lawn and started doing asshole things, do you kick them out knowing that they might go to your neighbor’s lawn? Or do you keep them on yours to protect your neighbor? I guarantee you that you’ll kick them out and then likely help your neighbor kick them out too, not shelter them and help them do the asshole things by providing your lawn as a platform. How is this different?
Whether you agree with the move or not, it's funny how Reddit's stance has changed over time. Under the old ownership, 2012:
"At reddit we care deeply about not imposing ours or anyone elses’ opinions on how people use the reddit platform. We are adamant about not limiting the ability to use the reddit platform even when we do not ourselves agree with or condone a specific use. We have very few rules here on reddit; no spamming, no cheating, no personal info, nothing illegal, and no interfering the site's functions."
That was effectively a challenge: how bad can you be without explicitly violating the rules?
(I call this "I'm not touching you Fascism", after the popular children's pastime. The goal is to enrage people without ever crossing anything that might be considered a clear line. Most systems evolve a meta-rule somewhere that "pushing the boundaries of the rules is itself against the rules". At the very least "ban evasion" is itself bannable.)
As someone who's moderated a community, this is exactly what things feel like. Especially given that our community has an explicit focus on freedom of expression (and what a thorn in our side that's ended up being)
We've adopted pretty vague rules as a result, with a lot of room for interpretation, and rather than changing the rules often we've just updated our interpretations and communicated them with the community.
It's been a slow boil. But things are different now than they were years ago. Not just because the community has grown but (at least from my perspective) because the tone of the internet seems to have shifted slightly.
We at least are fortunate to have the capability to build tools to identify behavior that might be an issue even without taking automated action. But "I'm not touching you" behavior is sometimes hard to catch when people avoid certain key words, at least until confronted. It's a pain, really.
> because the tone of the internet seems to have shifted slightly.
Over the time I've used it (94 to 2020) it's shifted radically, it used to be kooky, niche, fun or just weird (and it is still that on the edges) but by and large rarely mean/cruel, the main sites are just a torrent of bile spouted by morons venting their spleen at the universe.
Comment sections on any news article, youtube videos - pretty much everywhere outside of heavily moderated forums and the like are vile.
It's one of the reasons I visit a few heavily moderated subject specific sub-reddits, this place and IRC and ignore literally everything else (I have comment sections nuked in ublock origin).
I respect anyone who voluntarily wades through that crap honestly.
From this point of view I would almost prefer sites to adopt just overall stricter rules, strictly moderating both tone and "off-topic" content tuned to each individual forum.
I think that a lot of communities had a passion for cultivating a freedom of expression, but actually had a lot of unspoken/unrealized rules in mind.
In my opinion a lot of communities would gain a lot by a flashing banner "We decide what content we want on our platform and we will take arbitrary action to protect our choices". In practice is what social media companies are doing now even if they cannot state it as such (in part for legal reasons and in part for marketing reasons)
Rather like the serious end of anarchism, recognising that the price of freedom is taking responsibility for yourself. And it breaks down with scaling in the same way.
Biggest difference I have seen is a change from random trolls (often who were easy to identify and proud of who what/they were) to larger, organized campaigns. Even if the campaign isn't running on your forum, people are reading Facebook or whatever and this causes many people to start spouting similar stuff they have seen. And even here, the comments often get close to looking like astro-turfing. I barely read the comments anymore, usually only a quick glance to see if there are more links relevant to the topic.
But the current rules Reddit are still an invitation to "I'm not touching you Fascism". Fascists haven't gone away. They still are around and they still think fascist things, they've just metastasized into a subtler form of cancer. The only difference now is that we can't confront fascism with the truth any more.
Ironically, by using the tools of the fascist against them we've implicitly admitted that the fascist is right. When we censor, we're saying that our ideas should be determined by who has the power to enforce censorship, not by compassion and truth.
> The only difference now is that we can't confront fascism with the truth any more.
How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been? Especially on the web? My impression is that fascist/racist ideas aren't spread in open debates where the truth matters, but indirectly: through deniable memes and dog whistles initially, then slowly, as people's innate defenses are lowered, through many stages of more and more open exposition.
> Ironically, by using the tools of the fascist against them we've implicitly admitted that the fascist is right. When we censor, we're saying that our ideas should be determined by who has the power to enforce censorship, not by compassion and truth.
I think you're conflating censorship with exclusion, which every functioning social group needs to engage in to some degree.
Also, comparisons at very abstract levels aren't very enlightening in this case. You really have to get into the details to make a true comparison.
> How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been?
When white people were afraid of black violence, Martin Luther King showed them black people peacefully hand in hand with ministers in their Sunday best, walking toward Selma and remaining nonviolent even as they were met with violence.
When straight people saw gay people as dangerous deviants, Harvey Milk showed them gay people in their families, jobs, and neighborhoods, behaving like the normal people they are. I personally grew up in a church that taught homophobia--my own opinions were fundamentally changed by one of my friends coming out in high school.
Ask yourself your own question: when has censorship ever been effective?[1] I'd argue that, among other things the election of Trump is partly a backlash against attempts to control speech by the left. It's no mistake that a big part of the pro-Trump narrative was just that he "spoke his mind".
[1] Whenever I ask this question, people always respond by pointing to one study which showed banning a few hate subreddits decreased hate speech on Reddit, so I'll preemptively respond to that by saying that there's absolutely no evidence that bigots on Reddit didn't simply move to Voat at that time.
It is worth noting that MLK was not popular in his time:
> Back in the 1960s, when King was actually leading protests, just 36 percent of white Americans thought he was helping “the Negro cause of civil rights,” according to historical polling data compiled by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. In a 1966 Gallup poll, more than 60 percent of the public rated King more negatively than positively.
> After King was assassinated, two-thirds of Americans said their strongest reaction to his death had been sadness, anger, shame or fear, another survey found. Another 31 percent, however, said they “felt he brought it on himself.”
Harvey Milk was also not necessarily popular amongst Americans, and a few years after his death we would have total mainstream paranoia about AIDS. The end of the US's majority disapproval of gay marriage only came about in 2010. [1]
Part of what makes authoritarian behavior so dangerous is that they don't need a majority to cause a lot of damage, just a very sizable group. You want to stamp it out quickly before a lot of damage is done, and "fighting fascism with the truth" generally takes time on a generational scale.
It is worth noting that the election before Hitler was made chancellor, the Nazis actually lost 14% of their seats in the Reichstag, yet they were still powerful enough to eventually come to power.
You're playing very fast and loose with terminology here. Fascism is a form of authoritarianism, but not all authoritarianism is fascism. Censorship is authoritarian. We were talking about fascists before you joined the conversation, but if you're going to swap the terms here and start worrying about authoritarianism, neither side is innocent there, and taking a "stamp it out quickly" stance is inherently an authoritarian position, not an anti-authoritarian position.
> It is worth noting that the election before Hitler was made chancellor, the Nazis actually lost 14% of their seats in the Reichstag, yet they were still powerful enough to eventually come to power.
Yes, but that's a fairly useless fact if you don't have any explanation for why that happened.
Those were IRL things that happened before people even had computers in their homes. We're talking about modern-day web forums.
How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been, when the fascist is not being upfront about it, but rather posting hundreds of subtly racist memes and dog whistles to reddit?
> Those were IRL things that happened before people had computers in their homes. We're talking about modern-day web forums.
The internet is an IRL thing, and these things also happened before electric cars. Unless you have some reason to think people's reaction to the truth is somehow fundamentally different on the internet than on TV or newspaper, I really don't see what your point is.
> How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been, when the fascist is not being upfront about it, but rather posting hundreds of subtly racist memes and dog whistles to reddit?
Is there a reason you can't post memes with the truth? Anti-racist memes work just fine. In a similar vein, infographics have been extremely effective. The internet is one of the best tools for spreading the truth in existence.
Subtly racist memes and dog whistles are created by censorship. If a person believed "black people are criminals" without censorship, they wouldn't bother with dog whistles, they would just say, "black people are criminals". How effective do you really think censorship is if the entire point of subtlety and dog whistles is to get around censorship? And if someone says "Black people are criminals", I can respond with, "While black people are convicted of crimes at a higher per-capita rate than white people, this is a result of poverty: black people and white people at similar income levels commit similar numbers of crimes."
What do you do when someone posts a subtly racist meme that hints that black people commit more crimes? Censor harder? The solution you're proposing takes us to a place where racists just agree on what codewords mean what in their own private spaces, say whatever they want in public using their secret codewords, and call us crazy if we figure it out and censor them.
> The internet is an IRL thing, and these things also happened before electric cars. Unless you have some reason to think people's reaction to the truth is somehow fundamentally different on the internet than on TV or newspaper, I really don't see what your point is.
The internet is a fundamentally different communications mechanism than TV or newspapers. Reasoning about internet forum social dynamics using pre-computer examples, is like reasoning about modern infantry tactics citing victories from ancient Greek history. A hoplite phalanx would be annihilated by a WWII German infantry battalion.
> Subtly racist memes and dog whistles are created by censorship. If a person believed "black people are criminals" without censorship, they would just, "black people are criminals". How effective do you really think censorship is if the entire point of subtlety and dog whistles is to get around censorship?
Sorry, no. You're conflating censorship with exclusion again. "Censorship" didn't create those things; they were created by the widespread rejection and condemnation of the underlying racist ideas and the racist people who hold them. Earnest, up-front advocacy of racism isn't going to be effective in a population that's been primed to identify and reject it, so racists setup recruiting funnels with obscured entrances to spread their ideology by radicalizing people more slowly. That situation won't change, and the racists won't abandon their subtly racist memes and dog whistles, unless racism becomes respectable in polite company, which would be much worse than what we have now.
2. How does your censorship plan deal with subtle racism and dog whistles?
And I'll add a question I haven't asked yet:
3. How do populations become and stay primed against open and earnest fascism/antisemitism/racism/etc. in your censorship plan?
I don't think you have a leg to stand on if you can't answer these questions.
The reason I'm asking the third question: I hear your point that I'm talking about exclusion rather than censorship, and I agree that racism becoming respectable in polite company would be much worse than what we have now. But I think you have to realize that the way we got to a point where racism isn't respectable in polite company is repeated, persistent confrontation of racism with the truth. The reason you and I know that black people aren't criminals, is that we both know the more nuanced truth. I know I didn't come up with that truth myself--I heard it from someone else, and I heard it in the context of confronting the racist trope that black people are criminals. I get the temptation to use censorship as a shortcut to remove subtle racism, but by doing that we're giving up something even more fundamental: the very debate that made racism not respectable in the first place.
And make no mistake: racism isn't respectable in polite company in our little internet bubbles full of tech and startup people, but racism is absolutely respectable in many communities in our country and the world. If we're going to make racism not respectable in those places, censorship isn't going to work. We're going to have to have conversations that make that happen. If we let those conversations happen in public spaces, we can have those conversations in spaces that are friendly to us. But if we censor those conversations, then we just push those communities out, and then our only option is to go into those communities to have those conversations, which is much more difficult. And to be clear: censorship won't work in those communities, because we don't have the power to censor there.
> 2. How does your censorship plan deal with subtle racism and dog whistles?
> ...I don't think you have a leg to stand on if you can't answer these questions.
How can I answer them directly, when I think they're based misunderstandings? For instance, I don't classify many of the things you seem to be talking about as "censorship" (e.g. banning /r/The_Donald from reddit) despite your persistent use of that term, nor have I offered up any "plans" of any kind, let alone "[my] censorship plan."
> 3. How do populations become and stay primed against open and earnest fascism/antisemitism/racism/etc....
Education coupled with regular refreshers/responses as needed. If you want to teach kids anti-Nazism, it's not like you have to first invite an open and earnest Nazi to school to lecture the kids in class about how the Jews are subhuman and corrupt everything, etc. The anti-Nazi lesson can be taught directly.
I'll try to rephrase my first two questions to address your semantic concerns:
1. When has a silencing action similar to the banning of /r/The_Donald been effective in reducing bigotry and/or fascism?
2. Your criticism of free speech is that it allows people to post subtly racist memes and dog whistles, but you haven't presented an alternative. How do you plan to deal with subtle racism and dog whistles?
I'm putting in an effort to use terminology that's amenable to you, so please put in an effort to understand my questions and answer them, rather than objecting to semantics.
> > 3. How do populations become and stay primed against open and earnest fascism/antisemitism/racism/etc....
> Education coupled with regular refreshers/responses as needed. If you want to teach kids anti-Nazism, it's not like you have to first invite an open and earnest Nazi to school to lecture the kids in class about how the Jews are subhuman and corrupt everything, etc. The anti-Nazi lesson can be taught directly.
Let's be clear: no one is proposing we bring earnest and open Nazis into schools. We're both on the same side: we both want to stop Nazis. So let's keep this on topic and avoid straw man arguments.
The anti-Nazi lesson can be taught directly, but in that teaching, you have to teach people the Nazi ideology, otherwise they don't know what they're actually against. And you need to keep that up-to-date, otherwise people are defended against what Nazis were saying 10 years ago. Nazism changes and adapts and we have to adapt to fight it. And if we're constantly paying attention to and responding to what Nazis are saying now, that starts to look suspiciously like just having an uncensored conversation.
If we don't do this, we run the risk of creating a generation of anti-fascists who can't recognize fascism if it doesn't have a swastika on it. This is already a problem: check out Dianne Feinstein, for example.
> How effective has "confronting fascism with the truth" ever been, when the fascist is not being upfront about it, but rather posting hundreds of subtly racist memes and dog whistles to reddit?
I don't feel like I did this question justice with my previous answer.
The most obvious example would be the George Floyd video, and in a larger sense, the extremely effective tool of filming police as they harass, plant evidence on, beat, and murder the people they're supposed to serve. In the current situation, I think the results of that video speak for themselves.
In response to the pervasive narrative that focuses on looters and not on cops murdering black people (I linked to five minutes in, but the whole thing is worth a watch): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWE8k5EUonE&t=5m0s This tends to be persuasive in my experience.
This doesn't address racism because it's a white guy, but I find it's effective in getting people to take the complete lack of police accountability more seriously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc That officer (Philip Brailsford) was acquitted in a trial where the prosecutor moved to strike the video from evidence, and then the officer was rehired by Mesa Police briefly, before being given early medical retirement based on a claim of PTSD from the murder, earning him a $2500/mo pension.
Watch any of those videos that you haven't seen, and see how that feels, and realize that that's how they make people who were on the fence about these issues feel.
Share it around. The world needs to know that Philip Brailsford is a murderer, and Mesa PD and Maricopa County DA think murder is okay if it's done by a cop.
You can't confront fascism with the truth, because they've no interest in playing that game and will laugh in your face. There is no statement you can present that will trigger a Damascene conversion.
2. Having a combative character; aggressive, especially in the service of a cause: a militant political activist.
It seems to apply quite well to some of those SJW types who caused people to quit or get fired, and physically threatened them at the same time (e.g. see Bret Weinstein).
Yeah they just control about every university. I'd argue it's even worse to have fanatics control what's supposed to be the most liberal places than to have a clown and moron for a president.
Donald Trump was a democrat for most of his life. The basic tenants of secure borders + protecting american jobs was basically the Democrat platform for most of its existence.
The issue of uncontrolled immigration used to be common ground for the left and the right. For a long time even Bernie opposed it on the grounds that large numbers of low-skilled immigrants were driving driving down wages for the poorest Americans[0].
IDK, the internet of that era was a pretty toxic place. Sexism and racism were rampant, such that many people I know IRL simply refused to participate in most internet spaces (including HN). This gave the impression that those viewpoints were mainstream, but that was never the case. I don't think losing out on so many voices of people who don't want to be around that stuff is worth it.
That's not what happened. T_D was hardly the only subreddit that disabled upvotes with CSS (which prevents you from clicking the button on the old.reddit desktop version.. nothing else).
Furthermore, most of Reddit's traffic is mobile, where CSS has no functionality.
I don't really expect people's opinions/beliefs to stay constant when presented with new facts. People are horrible on the internet and there needs to be moderation. It's evidenced time and time again. The consequences of not doing this weren't obvious then (maybe, I wasn't really on reddit then), but they are obvious now.
Perhaps they are consistent in only acting based on convenience, and they might finally have reached the inflection point where doing all this was the easiest, laziest thing they could do.
I spent years on that subreddit and never once saw somebody that identified as a Nazi calling for the deaths of Jewish people. I bet you can't find any such examples. Your viewpoints of the world are based on hearsay and propaganda, not facts and logic.
Which subreddit? /r/the_donald? I was talking about the site in general, which did have explicit hate subreddits, which Reddit started struggling to grapple with back in 2015. I do find it kinda funny though that you saw an accusation of antisemitism and immediately started defending /r/the_donald.
It is worth noting that I did see explicit and implicit (((antisemitism) on /r/the_donald, but also, no examples are possible anymore, as the subreddit is gone /shrug
Perhaps not literally, however the subreddits namesake literally retweeted a video of someone exclaiming 'white power'. Most people who are not facists and are not nazis wouldnt exclaim something like this and would not support someone who retweets such things.
Reddit was a smaller community back then, and just like the article implies, smaller communities are easier to manage and of generally higher quality overall
Living under this rule would enable reddit to survive and adapt far longer in a democratic republic. This philosophy and the sub-reddits were reddit's strength. If anyone didn't like what reddit currently had, anyone could form their own sub-reddit. That's over. I can't put all the blame on reddit leadership when SESTA and FOSTA exist as laws.
The bad content isn't going to go away. It's just going somewhere else. imo this is the start of a diaspora The only question is where will everyone go?
Makes sense to me; the Reddit folks have learned from their experience. Maximalist free speech policies have failed all over the Internet, the only places that adhere to them are Nazi cesspools like Gab.
The Donald would have been deleted under the old leadership too...
They got in hot water not for supporting Trump (there are plenty of pro-Trump subreddits) but actively breaking the most basic rules of Reddit, maybe you should actually look at their history.
Spamming the same images to the subreddit, interfering with other subreddits, trying to out whistleblowers in federal cases, gaming the content discovery system with sticky posts.
I'm tired of this narrative that The Donald was banned for censorship reasons, they were banned for being a virus that was infecting Reddit.
They could have been supporting the Dalai Lama and their behavior would have been against the basic expectations of Reddit, and that's exactly why they were quarantined/banned
In true fashion of people trying to push a made up point, every reply is nitpicking over which one of their many incredible misbehaviors was the deal breaker, from doxxing people to brigading other subreddits, instead of actually providing a rebuttal
It doesn't matter which one broke the camels back, anyone who can read their history of behavior and pretend Reddit didn't have a reason to take action, even by those 2012 rules, is in denial.
It was initially quarantined for "threats of violence against police", but they seem to have changed their narrative since, you know, everyone else started doing it: https://i.redd.it/s2pdnningy451.png
Are we going to pretend everything in that history section is wrong and they were only quarantined for anti-police comments?
There are literally dozens of crisis that the subreddit spawned, literally any of which would have been explained it. The fact we can actually go back on forth on which one of the many many many straws broke the camels back says it all.
You also seem to want to go so far as to imply the only reason other subreddit get away with anti-police sentiment is some kind of hypocritical favortism?
Another fun factoid about The_Donald's love of free speech is that they immediately and permanently banned anyone who disagreed with anything said on that sub. Good riddance
Are going to pretend everything in that history section is wrong and they were only quarantined for anti-police comments?
There are literally dozens of crises that the subreddit spawned, literally any of which would have been explained it. The fact we can actually go back on forth on which one of the many many many straws broke the camels back says it all.
You also seem to want to go so far as to imply the only reason other subreddit get away with anti-police sentiment is some kind of hypocritical favortism?
> Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families.
> While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.
The majority based on what? An individual state? The US? The west? The world?
Men are the minority in many countries but the majority world wide. White people are the majority in the west but a minority world wide.
Does that mean people can attack white people with impunity, even though they're a global minority? Can I crap on women to my hearts content because they are a majority in the UK? Can people in California shit all over Hispanics because they're the majority in that State?
Will they assess a users state/country/continent of origin before deciding whether or not they're being hateful towards a specific group?
We are watching Reddit die. Aaron Swartz, the cofounder of Reddit warned about this a decade ago.
>the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority
Wow. Like, holy shit wow. So racism and hate is ok with Reddit but only as long as it's directed at "the majority"?
What the hell is the "majority"? I'm white. Yet I live in a city where blacks are the majority. Am I still the majority, meaning it's ok to harass me and send me hateful racist insults on Reddit, or would Reddit grant me honorary minority status? This is legit sickening.
Don't think in terms of minorities and majorities. Here's a quick simple list: hating on men, white people, Christians, heterosexuals and conservatives is fine. Everything else is hate speech.
Kind of funny how HN is downvoting you even though they all know this is the truth. People are so drunk on lies and political correctness that they can't even think straight.
Reddit just boarded the one-way express to crazy town. How can that policy possibly be enforced? Even if they do decide on some workable definition of what "majority groups" are, and how to prove which group you are in, I can't figure out what "actual and perceived race" means. So if someone makes an offensive comment to me because they think I am of a certain race, but it turns out I am not, it's still racism?
The trick was getting the identity-based discrimination into the rules. It seems Reddit overestimated the number of people who fully agree with the modern definitions of identity based on perceived oppression.
This really is the key point. Posts which on Twitter or Facebook would be deemed as hate are allowed now on Reddit. They were not before.
Indeed in most EU countries, Reddit steps over the line into hate speech by allowing it against certain groups. There is an important caveat as it still would not allow violence, harassment or bullying.
I am actually shocked at how little thought went into this policy. For example in UK, women are majority. This policy now allows someone to say "I hate women". Everyone except Americas and Europe can now say "we hate people of color". This is such a short sighted policy that I can't believe it's not a joke.
Even the CHAZ sub is still up which is literally doing illegal stuff with 5 shootings and 3 dead within 2 weeks. Also all the porn, rape, incest subs are allowed.
Is there another link? I just checked that page and did not see anything such as the line about "the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority"
I supposed they might have changed it, which would be good to hear, since that wording is obviously misguided
Seems like they removed it but the rules are written so vague that they will just interpret it however they like. They don't even follow their own rules.
I'm confused by the article. My understanding was that reddit replaced the moderators of /r/The_Donald months ago after initially making in quarantined.
The Wikipedia article seems to agree with my understanding:
> In February 26, 2020, Reddit administrators removed a number of r/The_Donald moderators "that were approving, stickying, and generally supporting content in this subreddit that breaks [Reddit's] content policy" and called the remaining moderators to choose new ones from a list of Reddit-approved individuals.[77] About the same time, Reddit placed r/The_Donald in "Restricted mode", removing the ability to create new posts from most of its users. Since then, the subreddit's community has moved to thedonald.win, an independently hosted site based on Reddit's old user interface.
Which all sounds fine to me, but the article's quote "We’re not the ones who shut down the community. The moderators are the ones who shut down that community." seems disingenuous to me.
What's wrong with just saying that it's their platform and they have the right to set the rules?
Yeah, the ban of T_D is only symbolic; it has been dead for months. I think the real news here is the ban of /r/ChapoTrapHouse, (arguably) the most active leftist subreddit there was.
ChapoTrapHouse has been laughing for months about their incoming ban, though. They knew it was coming and they've been preparing for it by migrating to other subs, moving to Discord, etc... T_D users are probably doing the exact same.
I posted on cth periodically and while I think it was banned largely so the admins could claim "balance" I don't care at all. Nothing serious happened there, the daily chat threads were fun, but it was clearly eventually going to be banned and I knew that and didn't get invested.
+1 to this. Chapo wasn't bad at all, in terms of breaking actual rules. I saw people on the announcement thread claiming it was full of tankies, and that was reason enough to ban it, but it really wasn't. You wouldn't get very far on Chapo by unironically talking about what a great man Stalin or Mao was -- though, guillotine jokes, including applying them to the necks of landlords, would certainly get you upvotes.
I never saw any actual brigading on the sub itself. Others talk about "organizing brigades through Twitter," and I think it's kind of BS to punish people for that. Reddit doesn't get to police Twitter, and vice versa.
Never saw any actual advocacy of violence against any specific person, either. Sure, there were "kill the landlords" type jokes and memes, but the closest I think I ever saw it get to actual incitement of violence was stuff like "Kissinger needs to fucking die already," or "I would prefer that Trump exit the White House feet first, in a box." You can call that whatever you like, but it's certainly not advocating violence against anyone.
Meanwhile, there's literally a Stalin meme on the front page of r/fullcommunism that says "death to capitalism." Then, there's r/latestagecapitalism, which is a toxic shithole of a sub where you literally can't say "that idea is crazy and will never work because $REASONS," because they have a blacklist of words that are "slurs" of one sort of another that they don't publish, and which will get your post removed if you try and use them.
/r/fullcommunism is also quarantined though. I'm honestly a little surprised it didn't get banned in this wave. And late stage capitalism has had a bunch of mod coups and stuff over the years that have negatively affected the quality of the sub.
>The mods, not the admins, made it so that only a shortlist of approved users could post content in the subreddit.
Admins banned virtually all the mods, without warning or explanation, so the remaining mod(s) had no choice but to lock the sub.
One of the tricks leftist groups like to do is they'll brigade right-leaning subs, post a ton of "offensive" content, then before the mods can remove it, they'll screenshot it, post it up on a blog, and then alert the admins to trick them into banning the sub. That's how they got the sub quarantined.
With only one or two mods left, they couldn't properly police the sub anymore, which had close to a million subscribers and tens of thousands of active posters at any given hour. Put yourself in their shoes. If it was the choice between accept random unknown (but admin approved) users as moderators, or lock the sub, what would you do?
Of course you'd lock the sub. It was just an attempt at a soft-takeover. Better it be outright banned than lobotomized by replacing its mods with Reddit users who likely hate Trump.
Confusion caused by attempting to sort human beliefs in a one-dimensional space strikes again! To be clear I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with you or the parent poster, just commenting on the ambiguity.
TERFs falling out of favour with the "actual leftist subs" is also a relatively new thing... they used to be strongly TERF apologist at the very least, if not actively and heavily promoting them in the case of several of the more feminist-aligned ones. Think last few years. This isn't just a Reddit thing either; questioning their ties to the UK's main left-wing political party (which has actually influenced our laws for the worse) used to be way outside the range of acceptable leftism, but has suddenly become a controversial hot topic in the last few months.
As a trans person myself. All that subreddit did was target hate towards trans people. Anyone care to elaborate on what else they did with actual proof?
Seems a bit strange that you'd simultaneously ask for proof and expect others to accept your premise as fact without also providing something more substantive than "I'm X so therefore I'm an authority on Y"
T_D wasn't banned because it was inactive. spez's post says, "All communities on Reddit must abide by our content policy in good faith. We banned r/The_Donald because it has not done so, despite every opportunity." They weren't banned for political ideology, they were banned for doxxing, fear mongering, and generally being a community full of toxic posts. That's the reason it was banned, and good riddance.
That was the reason stated, which is not the same as it being the actual reason. This is the strategy being imposed against conservative voices at large.
This is a strategy imposed against racism and violence. If conservative voices include a lot of racism, then, yes, I guess they should stop being racists.
The "everyone I don't like is a racist" debate strategy isn't a good look, but "every conservative is racist" is just pathetic.
There was literally zero racist activity on The_Donald. The mods were very transparent and showed EVERY ACTION once they hit quarantine (to show they didn't deserve to be quarantined). The only racist posts came from new accounts / people who had never posted in The_Donald that were immediately removed by mods.
Maybe turnabout is fair play. After all, one of the main tactics of conservatives is to underfund or defund programs, then point at them and say "look, it doesn't work!" to try and get them shut down.
> It's annoying to be persecuted based on political ideology.
At this point been pro-Trump isn't really an ideology, it's a cult in all but name.
I've got conservative friends (UK style conservatism), I disagree with them but I can respect their beliefs because I can see how through a different lens I could hold their views, for the pro-Trump folks that lens just gets further and further away.
At this point I'm not sure what Trump could actually do that would surprise me - I mean I'm old enough to remember people mocking Bush for doing/saying the odd dumb thing but Trump went full-idiocracy inside 4 years.
> What's wrong with just saying that it's their platform and they have the right to set the rules?
1) They don't want to alienate people who care about free speech.
2) A lot of people liked reddit because it was user-driven, and don't like it when the content they see is selected by admins and mods. They want to keep the illusion of being user-driven as long as they can.
Fully agreed. I think people get up in arms over "but they have the rights to do it", making it look like those opposing decisions of admins believe that admins don't have those rights.
Admins own the platform and they totally have the right to set whatever rules they want. No one is debating that. The thing that people point out is that despite admins having those rights, they might be exercising those rights in a way that people disagree with (for whatever reasons), which might ultimately lead to the demise of that platform.
I, personally, find your reasons against the ham-fisted approach they have been taking to be very compelling. While r/The_Donald ban was probably warranted, and I have nothing against that ban, the overall vibe of reddit definitely feels like it has changed over the past 10 years. It feels like it went from "user-driven content under the umbrella of basic global reddit rules" to "heavily-directed content that admins seem to approve of or content that they cannot justify getting rid of just yet (but probably will soon enough)".
There is waaaaay too much content generated on Reddit for the admins to approve or curate. And the success of Reddit is in user-driven communities and content. Admins do not want to be in the business of content curation. Reddit is updating its content policy.
Admins tell the moderators how to act, and remove mods when they don't comply. Most content is effectively invisible unless it's heavily upvoted, so mods only really need to act on a small subset of posts. Some subreddits are moderated pretty heavily, while others remain mostly user-driven.
Let's give them user driven reddit then. Open the floodgates, remove all filters and moderators and bans and locks. Turn off the firewall. Let them see reality.
The_Donald was neutered a long time ago. The real story is the 200 other subs getting shut down and Reddit essentially saying the wild west days on their site are actually over now. Several publications have focused on The_Donald at least in the headline because I assume it makes for a sexier, more political story than about a website cracking down on moderation.
You're right. The_Donald has been dead for months due to the above-mentioned restrictions on submissions, moderator removal, and moving to a different site.
If they're getting banned now it's for something that was done months ago.
I think it’s worth mentioning the Reddit reason for initial quarantine was “anti police” comments.
MediaMatters / ShareBlue wrote an article about how anti police the sub was referencing two downvoted but not deleted comments. The entire sub was always pro law and order.
Reddit put very heavy limits on the sub for that.
Which is pretty damn funny to me - because right now on every single popular sub there are “all cops are bastards”, “kill all police”, “the only good cop is a dead cop” in any thread that even sort of tangentially references police.
I don’t care much either way. But the massive hypocrisy is there. No one has the balls to say “we just don’t want this on our platform”.
A couple months after the quarantine, Reddit admins changed the reason on the disclaimer before entering from “anti police comments” to “rule breaking”.
It shows me the weak moral character of the people in charge... and why I don’t want these people getting to decide what is right and wrong.
You know mediamatters wrote that article before Reddit took action right? Reddit used that article as the justification for something they clearly wanted.
It was the Oregon GOP rep that said [If you send the police to get us, send bachelors].
I think it’s a little more complicated than you make it out to be.
It’s a larger discussion of what can mods with a large subreddit be responsible for. Is it reasonable to assume that in a sub that is typically pro police that some users that posted comments get the sub shut down? If that is the standard, can we prove mediamatters didn’t make those posts to point to for effect?
Maybe you are right; but mediamatters is BEYOND extreme bias so let’s not use them as an authority, and there is clearly hypocrisy at Reddit if threats against police “were” a problem.
>About the same time, Reddit placed r/The_Donald in "Restricted mode", removing the ability to create new posts from most of its users.
I think this is wrong, IIRC it was the mods who chose to do that, not Reddit admins. The mods wouldn't choose other mods even though the rules made sense, like having a certain karma threshold in t_d etc.
No, those mods weren't put in place by Reddit, they were hired a while ago by the top mods, some of who got banned thus making those the top mods. Reddit admins added zero mods to the t_d.
No. The lower level mods were forced in by the Reddit admin a while back. There were warnings about these sock mods long ago. The subsequent banning of the top mods effectively put these sock mods in control.
That link doesn't say anything about hiring, and doesn't have any evidence on the top mods paid to "hired" the lower level mods. As for the sleeper mods being added by force, there were definitely warnings about them before, but then the whole sub is wiped out now. Very convenient to get rid of all the evidence.
Since the donald moderators removed the new moderators that Reddit added (that was selected from and voting on in the donald subreddit), it was clear the moderators weren't interested in rescuing their subreddit to Reddit's standards.
I think Reddit is trying to avoid appearing capricious when it banned subreddits. Reddit users do want a rythme or reason to Reddit admins actions, otherwise, there'd be further user discontent.
> What's wrong with just saying that it's their platform and they have the right to set the rules?
That would be a major shift in strategy for the site. It has always been billed a freewheeling place that belonged to the users, with the company that owns it being something of a benevolent overlord that keeps the lights on. That is what attracts users and content.
But of course that version of the web is dead. Any website that relies on advertisers for revenue will necessarily be limited in its tolerance for controversy.
In the end, though, I doubt it matters too much for the site’s revenue. Reddit has been dying for years according to many of the posters and yet it sees growth YoY.
>What's wrong with just saying that it's their platform and they have the right to set the rules?
Because the admins still need people to believe they're the "good guys". And we all know the good guys don't censor people. That's what evil fascist governments do.
I would routinely visit the_donald. It was definitely a ruckus pro-Trump circle jerk, but it was hardly racist or abusive. It was mostly just silly pro-Trump memes. There's far more black Trump supporters than most people realize. The media does everything they can to hide them, so a lot of people would love to post photos of them with funny captions like "Oh look, another white supremacist Trump supporter!"
The admins couldn't have that, but they couldn't outright ban them without appearing draconian. So they instead tried just banning most of the mods, hoping the remaining mod would agree to the admin's terms of appointing only admin-approved puppet mods. Of course, the mod balked at that and just locked the sub and forwarded everyone to thedonald.win, the backup site.
So the admins ended up with the worst of both worlds. They still looked like the bad guys who shut down a sub on a whim, but now there's still a huge trove of funny non-racist pro-Trump memes sitting on their site for any Google searcher to stumble upon, which will only reinforce just how draconian the admins have become. By banning the sub outright, all that content gets deleted and hidden from search engines, so now when they vaguely label it "hate", you can't refute it.
Orwell nailed it. We've always been at war with ~~Eastasia~~ Eurasia.
It looks like it is no longer possible to make a comment containing "thedonald.win" on Reddit. To be clear: Reddit isn't just censoring links to that site, it's censoring mentioning it.
This appears to be a new change as it was retroactively applied to comments from a few days ago.
I always wondered what the actual population of that sub was, I felt like I saw some strange patterns where whole hordes of users would appear, disappear, mob another sub and so on. It felt like a very non organic community in many ways.
The issues surroundings that sub weren't just some folks who had a sub to talk to each other, they were very busy mobbing / taking over other subs and etc.
Like most of those subs that leaned right it seemed like a front for sort of a rabbit hole of fear, hate, open bigotry, and blatent calls for violence / division and etc.
> I felt like I saw some strange patterns where whole hordes of users would appear, disappear, mob another sub and so on. It felt like a very non organic community in many ways.
Wouldn't that match the claims that it was largely just full of bots?
I think so. It certainly seed that way, the waves of new accounts was noticeable at times.
Even better when the more interactive new users would show up with strange language patterns / reading comprehensions patterns too would show up alongside them.... usually posting the same links some other 'users' posted months ago, those dissapeared a while back, but they were around for a while.
Reddit Admins posted this[0] list which had r/td at less than 8k daily active users before being shut down. I imagine that’s an order of magnitude below its peak.
https:// thedonald . win will probably get more new users after this, because many of the news articles talking about the ban are linking to them (either directly or indirectly)
"Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families.
While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate."
Reddit really had a good run as an interesting site, but it's really angling for a FB style consumer ad experience now. I think the final blow will be when they go after porn like tumblr did, then it will die forever. Too bad the alternatives are pretty extremist. I think Dread is really the best one because people who want to buy drugs on the internet aren't there completely for the politics.
Hobby specific communities were a big attraction point to reddit, but even those have devolved into heavy censorship. There isnt really a good draw to the site anymore.
IMO the 'heavy censorship' is the only thing keeping hobby communities going well. Without that moderation, you'd be trying to learn about something fun like knitting but you'd see a bunch of hateful content, like racist MAGA stuff instead of knitting for example.
Having the moderation get stronger is the only way to save hobby subreddits IMO.
The knitting community is particularly vulnerable to this kind of entryism, as is any other hobby that's seen as traditionally female. Sewing, cooking, etc.
A lot of these groups are getting infiltrated by 'tradwives', a strain of anti-feminist, white nationalist women. They'll join these groups and gladly talk everyone's ear off about how knitting and the like are the only hobbies decent women should be engaged in and how they plan to have as many children as possible to outbreed POC. And that means that any knitting community has to either ban trads on sight or be taken over by them, with no in-between.
I agree that it doesn't necessarily always devolve into hate speech but, anecdotally, every community I've seen without heavy moderation eventually devolves into low effort meme posts, and sometimes hateful content. For example, r/gaming vs r/games. The pattern repeats itself all over reddit.
If a community widely upvotes low effort memes then that’s what the community wants to see. The people have spoken! Why do you think you know what’s better for them?
“Hate speech” is a buzzword that doesn’t mean anything. What is hate speech? No one knows.
All unmoderated communities upvote easy to consume content. That's how group dynamics work. You either have to limit who can enter the community at all (which is what HN tacitly does), or what can be posted.
Are you suggesting that if I start a community called "pics_of_cute_cats" and a bunch of people come in and start posting military insignia, that's what the community wants?
Because it's certainly not what I, a member of pics_of_cute_cats want.
This is false. The piece of the machine that really decides is reddit's algorithm and how people consume content. It also doesn't take into account how communities can drastically change in an instant if a post gets brigaded. Suddenly it's not "your community" that's voting and deciding.
What happens is the most easily digestible content that appeals to the most people gets upvoted the most. Saying "the community decides" is at best naive.
What do you mean, "wouldn't"? This isn't a hypothetical, this is the reality of today. And yes, it is a current problem.
> that’s the whole point of upvotes and downvotes.
No it's not. In fact the reddit rules / guidelines specifically state that is not what upvotes and downvotes are for. It's specifically called out for the moderators to deal with it through user reports, not through votes.
Plus, lots of downvotes does nothing to remove hateful content. The content is still there! Only the moderators can remove hateful content.
Isn't it funny how reddit ended up the opposite of what it was seemingly designed as? A system with a community policing vote process turned into a community that is one of, if not the, most top down moderated spaces on the Internet. Where the voting system turned into a supplementary group control system rather than a liberator.
I tried some of the alternatives. I figured if the people I don't like stay in their subgroups, I'm fine. But they don't. They invade every group. I don't want to see extremely racist posts in my "anti-bicyclist" group (for example). They'll take every post and make it about race.
It's called trolling. As long as you're feeding the trolls, they keep trolling.
Do other language forums have these race problems? Are English speaking sites being targeted by nefarious actors or botnets with racist remarks for some ulterior purpose? It seems to me that posting racist things on the internet may have been weaponized.
English has a context problem, in that you need to know a little bit about the person to truly understand their communications. Mix this with the Anglosphere's culture of humor and sarcasm, and I see how someone communicating anonymously can have their comments read in differing ways.
I have no love for the political ideology or behavior of this group but they weren't breaking any laws or even any more rules than other groups on reddit that still operate. They were just politically unviable.
Centralized corporate means to communicate (like, say, this one we're using) always go bad eventually. It's the natural lifecycle of online forums. Once money involved it's only a matter of time before the profit and drama-avoidance incentives of the corporation win over the wishes of the users. Reddit hasn't been usable since 2013.
We all know reddit leans a bit left, but the ban also included /r/chapotraphouse which is a leftist subreddit that was also notorious for rule breaking. Frankly, it seems reddit went out of its way to accommodate the_donald for a while now.
I wasn't making that claim at all. Reddit corp. politics aren't left or right. It's just whatever gets them the most ad money, personal information sale money, and the least bad press.
Do we? I think reddit 'leans a bit right' if anything. Especially in the city-level subreddits or country-level, or communities like that, there is (in my experience) a heavy-handed right-leaning attitude. I noticed this about 10 years ago and it has gotten much much more pronounced. The subreddit r/canada turned extreme-far-right about 10 years ago. Most of the cities I live in downvote left-leaning posts instantly.
I don't think reddit was ever left-leaning in the past and I don't think it is now, either. Sure, left-wing views are posted, sometimes upvoted and tolerated, but I do not think they are the majority.
I consider myself left-wing but feel unwelcome in most subreddits due to my opinions. I'll post anyway, but, it's not a left-leaning site at all IMO.
> Do we? I think reddit 'leans a bit right' if anything. Especially in the city-level subreddits or country-level, or communities like that, there is (in my experience) a heavy-handed right-leaning attitude.
Who subscribes to such subreddits? People who are invested in their city or their country, which is itself a right-wing attitude. Apart from that, people are more right-wing at the city-level. Many who would roll their eyes at someone talking about "national identity" or wearing a flag pin, talk about "neighborhood character" and wear "I ️ $city" t-shirts.
This has to be a joke. Either you are so 'left-wing' that you consider Obama, Biden, etc, as 'right-wing', or you are ignoring the vast majority of the site. 'left-wing' views are not 'tolerated', they are celebrated.
There are consistent 60k+ upvoted 'trump bad', 'obama good', 'republicans bad' posts from default subs. When's the last time you've seen anything 'right-leaning' on /r/all? I haven't seen anything since they blocked TD from appearing there.
I am not joking, and yes Obama and Biden are very clearly right-wing politicians. I have not seen a single actually left-wing policy out of either of them.
Also, please don't assume the people you're talking to online are 'joking' when they express their serious views. It's against HN guidelines to assume such bad faith in my answers.
> 'left-wing' views are not 'tolerated', they are celebrated.
Reddit is an American company, with a largely American user base. From an American perspective, it is a very left-leaning site.
Judging reddit from the point of view of a communist is not helpful. I'm sure there are people who view Trump as too left-wing, but that doesn't make it so.
I guess it depends on how you both define left wing. From the economic perspective, maybe not (except medical care for all, maybe); from the human-rights perspective (e.g. gender rights, race-related policies), the more popular subs are surely leaning to the left.
Before reddit banned TD, they had a sticky post documenting timeline of reddit’s assault and archived proofs of same behavior by other subs.
Specifically, initial quarantine was imposed in a response of an user’s comment saying something like “kill the cops”, which was deleted by TD moderators, but reddit quarantined TD anyway for “calls for violence”. TD has collected and archived links to similar comments in other subs like r/politics which didn’t lead to quarantine of those subs.
I've written about it elsewhere, so just a quick comment: The best thing is to get rid of all political zealots on a forum. The majority of users are not interested in the political opinions of these people (who usually defend fringe views), and political agitation in online forums is not needed or any way beneficial for democracy. It just annoys the vast majority of normal users.
I generally agree with everything you said. The phrase "politically unviable" has taken on a totally different meaning to me this year. I don't watch his show, but Tucker Carlson has the most watched cable news show at the moment, and yet somehow it's becoming politically unviable to advertise on his show. Who would have ever thought that ideas with a plurality of support/viewership would be politically unviable. We are living in clown world.
Tucker Carlson has a "plurality of support"? Less than 2% of Americans watch his show. Do you mean a pluraility of support from cable news viewers (a.k.a. poorly-educated boomers)?
Yeah this is odd. I didn’t spend much time there as it’s not a topic I particularly care about, but from what I saw it was mainly discussion around transgender and women’s rights from a perspective critical of TRAs, which is the standard view in the west from my admittedly limited understanding.
Some people would go there and read articles about gay women being attacked for choosing whom they took on as sexual partners. (I found it quite surprising and extremely rapey that anyone would consider it appropriate to be critical of anyone for choosing their consenting sexual partners however they like-- but it happens sometimes.)
Or read about people being displaced from scholarships because the top spots in track in their community were held by hormonally advantaged persons.
Or learn about cases where tomboyish young women were told that they were actually men because they were interested in science or sports.
Personally, I find it too easy to be extremely self righteous in ethical proclamations if I never even get exposed to the corner cases where there can be a truly difficult conflict of rights.
Now-- taking fringe events like the above examples and exaggerating them as some kind of endemic phenomena absolutely can fuel hate. It isn't always an easy line to walk.
Trans people were the subject of a great many, if not most of the posts on GC for the past few months I've paid attention to the sub. GC is a radical feminist hangout, as in SCUM Manifesto "men are the root of all evil and must be exterminated to liberate women"-flavor radical feminism, which lends itself to trans exclusion quite easily since you just have to view trans women as men for them to become evil fetishizers who want to become women for their own pleasure (this also allows them to pity trans men since they become women who were tricked into becoming a man for social reasons instead of acknowledging that gender dysphoria is real).
Trans stuff was certainly not the only thing they talked about, but it was the most common, and trans posts tended to have the most discussion.
are people expanding their perspective from encountering non mainstream content dangerous? it appears many view the subreddit as being awful. Is it possible that another could view awful content and derive positive value from it?
Hate is just a "word" used to express human emotion to another human. Someone can view "hate" differently because they've not experienced the emotion of another that has defined hate from their own personal unique life events.
In this world I've encountered people that truly hate others so very much. They wish what they hate didn't exist and they honestly believe the world would be better if it happened to become true. I have even felt that feeling in my life but from personal abuse I experienced from anti-lgbtq+ parents. I consider myself permanently disfigured because of being prevented medical treatment when young. So I have constant reminders with all the other abuse I lived from my parents.
In any case gendercritical specifically promoted slang for trans people. Slang that would at the same time be used to invalidate trans people as nothing but the sex they were born at birth and while justifying the belief that everyone should just accept we're all born without choice in this world without having any right to personally fix what we dislike. Countless trans people were harassed by posts created on that subreddit of misfortunate transgender people just dealing with the cards they've been dealt. The posts would have constant comments making fun of how they look so much as their birth sex and derogatory jokes towards the person's misfortunate circumstances.
Anyway I'm happy about the decision of Reddit. I go through life with realizing people don't have free will and we're just in a dysfunctional system that's constantly evolving to hopefully one day make it so people don't behave so cruel to one another.
There's a disconnect here I feel. If one chooses to refer to biological females as female, and biological males as male (and perhaps approach other situations ad hoc) then it seems you would say "this is trans hate" but the person practicing that behaviour doesn't [necessarily] hate the people they're referring to.
Indeed the person who uses biological identifiers seems often to be the hated person, a person who identified themselves as trans might hate them for not going along with that identity; but the person who is choosing how they personally identify others would in this situation often be labelled as committing hate-speech. IMO it's disagreement, not hate.
Compare the situation to that of the relatively few people who have a body dismorphia such that they believe themselves to be felines (cats) in a human body. They're no less sincere. But I'd still, without hate, refer to them as humans.
Those who disagree are surely entitled to take that position, regardless of whether someone else chooses to consider that hurtful, or do you disagree?
About time. However, this move was mostly symbolic. r/the_donald has been inactive for months without a single new post on it. AFAIK the community had already moved on to another site off reddit.
Much more significant IMO is that the ban also includes r/ChapoTrapHouse, which is a "left"-leaning subreddit accused of much of the same stuff r/the_donald was.
I haven't seen this mentioned in any stories but r/antifa is also banned. It could have come about as something else but I took a peak in it Thursday and it was there.
New rule change is essentially no hate subs except if it’s hate against a majority aka white people. As a minority I’m tired of defending white people from other white people and being shouted at by white people for doing so. I’ve tried for 6 years to push for equality for all and had the most insane rebuttals against that.
Yeah I feel you. The problem is that the majority of white people agree with you, and do not believe its okay to use hate against them. However, there is a minority of white people who think they can speak for their whole race and will attack anybody who doesn't fall in line.
Maybe its because I don't live in a city like Portland or LA, but I have never talked to a white person in real life one on one who agreed with the typical narrative on places like reddit of, "you can't be racist against white people". The more time I spend on reddit, the more I realize is that the people who comment are getting less and less human. Back 5 years ago, reddit actually felt human. Now it feels like it is just filled with either bots or seriously mentally ill people. I think its about time for me to stop going on that site entirely.
Oddest thing is that many groups deemed a majority are not if one looks at a global scale. It really seems the terms majority/minority are selectively defined as needed to target certain groups.
It's not even true on a per country level, for instance in Bahrain and UAE the majority of the population are south Asian people. It does not protect them from racism.
It's not uncommon around the world for racism and discrimination to be perpetuated by a small but powerful aristocracy.
All the more reason to drop any 'majority group' based logic and just ban targeted harassment and discrimination based on immutable characteristics in general.
If the rationale for banning is policy violations (doxxing, racism, vulgarity, calls for violence, etc), as long as the standards are consistently enforced I'm okay with it. Although my caveat is that racism is defined differently for different people. I
E., racism has to be directed towards a marginalized group vs derogatory statements based on racial characteristics.
This is my main problem with Twitter. The standards aren't consistently enforced. I've seen so many leftist blue checkmarks justifying violence that get a pass.
And on the racism front, Sarah Jeong comes to mind.
> Here I am old school just thinking the color of a mans skin should have no more significance than the color of his eyes...
I almost certain neither group on either side agrees with that. The people on the left will argue that color is important and is deeply connected to culture and through subconscious/ institutional racism. To pretend to be blind to race or think of it like any other physical characteristic would be to just put your head in the sand and pretend the world is all lollipops and gumballs.
The right will argue that race plays a factor in physical and mental characteristics through culture and possibly genetics. And that too ignore race entirely would be to go against the stats on things like average SAT, ACT, IQ, Crime Rate, etc.
I personally think that there is truth in a lot of what they both say, and ignoring race will not solve tension or conflict in the US. Its very naive to assume that race is skin deep and can be solved by simply pretending it doesn't exist. If it was that easy we would have solved it by now.
From a mainstream point of view (of let's say twitterverse) the left is the only one I have seen claim that race should be used in social policing.
The right would rather use race correlation those metrics to argue that the status quo is fair, not racist and just due to meritocracy.
Personally I think both are wrong as the status quo should be improved quite drastically, but also I believe that race-aware policies will ultimately slowdown progress and lead to push back.
The issue is more pronounced when applied to online communities. We have to assume there are individual members of any online community both breaking and following the rules. What is the threshold of rule breaking that triggers a blanket deactivation of an entire group?
The rights of social media companies are so vaguely defined now. Can they escape this crisis without anti-trust litigation or a Supreme Court ruling on the fundamental rights of companies when hosting content online?
There’s no winning this game. Soon they will be considered liable for anything they didn’t censor, especially from the extreme left, as they are making the appearance of support. I hope they’re paying Michael a massive amount of money to associate himself with this dumpster fire.
Bizarrely, the reason that there is even a discussion of making them liabile for user speech to begin with is because of prostitution, pedophiles, and terrorism.
I would hardly call those issues "extreme left". This change is actually from the conservative view point a lot of the time, especially as it comes to speech about sex. See cases against Backpage or Craigslist and prostitution.
Once a company is criminally liable for user speech, you're going to get this situation where it's easier to just ban speech that even approach the line. But I don't think anyone is going to say that a company should be willfully blind to pedophiles on their platform. So this is the world we get.
Legal liability. It does nothing to prevent them from being attacked in the press, for having their payment systems cut, or from being personally vilified.
Trump literally signed an executive order which was threatening social media companies to take on liability from anything their users posted. When that happens said companies will simply outright ban the subs that are causing problems, which are usually the far-right subs because they insist on making threats of violence and racism.
The 'extreme left' has little to no political power compared to the president telling companies to either obey him or risk having their site go down in flames.
To be fair, The_Donald was already shutdown for a while. Between quarantine that makes it not show up in feeds and the moderation team being replaced by Reddit’s, it wasn’t up and running anymore.
I remember how was Reddit 10 years ago... It was a very open and permissive place. Only very bad things were prohibited at that time (pedophilia, rape, murder, etc.).
It is now ran by people/corporations with a political agenda.
/r/movies had posters who literally and out in the open said they were employed by netflix to post netflix videos they said their manager thought reddit would like.
I avoided the place ever since then. That was about 4 years ago.
Since the 2016 election the left has been consolidating their vast cultural power by exiling opposing views that don't pass their ever-shifting purity tests.
It remains to be seen whether or not this will bury conservative thought or cause an underground resurgence.
Social media companies and "the left" are not the same. Although they surely have some overlap (just as social media companies and "the right" surely have some overlap), conflating them entirely with each other is simply false. We cannot assign political conspiracies to entire industries.
I don't think the claim is that social media is inherently leftist, but rather than leftists have mounted attacks on all social media companies that don't actively censor right-wing opinions (see current ad boycott targeted at Facebook). I think the success of these campaigns are extremely concerning and a reminder that peace and prosperity are not a given.
Companies should be accountable to their customers. When a large group of those customers collectively exercise their rights to let a company know the company's values don't align with those customers, that seems like a pretty reasonable demonstration of the market.
The modern conversation is about tribes not position/ideology. What people are calling left here is an amorphous blob of ever shifting positions. They are neither leftist nor liberal, it is essentially a distributed tribe linked together by shared a language and culture.
Left and liberal are both two very useful words, sadly they do not really describe any of the vocal demographics on social media
I don't know how many will see the comment but I was a member of the_donald sub and subsequently migrated to the new thedonald.win
There is a significant shift going on that people aren't realizing. The days of the "platform" being a monopoly over users is coming to an end. The cost of running a website, even a bandwidth heavy website is going lower. As major social networks and platforms crack down on controversial content, these communities don't vanish. They simply move to some other place. In the conservative community this idea of "censorship" is increasing to the point where it is becoming a serious movement. Many alternatives to mainstream media are actually gaining a decent userbase. Here is what is going on that I can see:
Twitter is replaced by parler
Youtube is replaced by bitchute
Reddit subs are replaced by thedonald.win (you can get your sub hosted by them now)
Twitch is replaced by dlive
Just to show you the growth of some of these platforms. Just look at the growth of thedonald.win. Apparently it is ranked at something like 1,250 for the USA by Alexa. That's staggering considering this website is only a few years old.
If you are a web entrepreneur, take note because there is a growing market for "conservative" or "censorship-free" social media now.
I have never heard of the other sites you mention, so I can't speak to their popularity. But as far as I can see this all seems very fringe for lack of a better word. There doesn't really seem to be a groundswell of movement towards alternate platforms because of censorship.
Calling bitchute fringe seems to be very kind. I just took a look at their front page and they are promoting videos about Holocaust denial and 2 of the first 10 videos are blatantly antisemitic.
Parker requires an account, which I'm not willing to make, but if it's similar to the last conservative Twitter alternative Gab, it's all just racist drivel with barely any 'normal' conversations.
While alternatives to the big corporate social media are obviously needed, they very often attract the most toxic members of society, which most sane people won't be comfortable associating with.
This is a purely symbolic move at this point. It was effectively shut down and has been completely inactive for something like four months, and by all accounts the competing site has been thriving.
It's high time Reddit and other social networks ban toxic users, and boy are those political zealots toxic. The problem with these people is that they don't realize that almost nobody cares about their fringe opinions.
For all that I'm concerned, if Reddit shadowbanned every user with a history of mostly political comments and posts, nothing of value would be lost. Political discussions online do not have any positive effects on anybody, neither on the people doing it nor on the poor bystanders who have to endure all these "campaigns" and the constant attempts to manipulate public opinion.
As a European, I'm particularly tired of the constant flow of politically-motivated garbage posts coming from the US. One reason why I'm mostly on HN is that political topics are usually flagged. Kudos to Reddit if they go the same path.
Do you all think Steve is ok? Like on a personal health level? The constant onslaught of "you're a nazi and racist" and being overwhelmingly hated by your user base must take a toll. How do CEOs in positions like this not burn out or avoid major stress-related health problems?
It's very sad how many leftist are cheering on the censorship.
Forcible silencing of opposing views is a central tenant of actual fascism (not the kind of "fascism" that kids on social media accuse people of just for disagreeing with them).
History repeats itself, it would seem. This is a modern day book burning.
If we look at history and the Left then censorship also goes hand in hand with it.
The common factor is authoritarianism. Zizek makes a difference in that the left always consider the offender as just brainwashed and potentially redeemable (hence, siberia work prisons) versus the right as irredeemable and non human (hence, death camps).
No it does not matter, and I struggle to understand why anyone would think it does. There's no other context where every criticism of a private company gets countered with the argument that that private company isn't violating the constitution.
It matters in that we should not lobby congress to make reddit unban certain subreddits.
However, that does not mean we should not criticize reddit for not standing up for freedom of speech. You can't make your whole website based around "open and honest discussion" then ban subreddits where open and honest discussion was happening, but in ways you didn't like.
To be fair the argument isn't really that TD was where "open and honest" discussion would happen, rather that reddit is politically biased anti-Trump in selectively detecting rule violations.
Reddit is not a US government entity, so the US constitutional right to free speech is generally not applicable to discussions of Reddit.
The exception is the case where a US government entity controls an account that is a mod of a subreddit, in which case they would be subject to the First Amendment when performing mod duties such as deleting user comments or banning users. This specific case would burden only that user and would not place any additional burden upon the non-government mods or upon Reddit itself or its admins.
The difference between 1984 and 2020 is censorship is committed by corporations instead of governments. Does this difference matter? All Americans have to participate in government, whether directly by voting and holding office or indirectly by simply living in America's society of laws and its enforcement. Using Reddit directly is done voluntarily.
I don't see it. Usually when the dystopia is overthrown, the survivors find themselves with the freedom to build what they want. Well, that's already the situation today. No one needs Reddit's permission to build what they want.
Spez is lying because The_Donald had been inactive for 4 months when the Reddit admins banned their top mods and they all left and built their own website thedonald.win
So Spez claiming TD has been continuing to post rule breaking content is literally a lie.
I wonder how they will fight against the other kind of systematic propaganda now but guess nothing will happen. Subs like /r/bestof became absolute shit
See the current top post there which is absolutely crazy but hey it fits the agenda.
Reddit is basically a Left-wing propaganda outlet at this point. The amount of clearly targeted sub-Reddits with the aim of radicalising their target group is staggering and would make even the most nefarious of insurgents blush at how open and obvious it is.
Have you used reddit at all within the past 10 years? Yeah, there's some smaller subreddits that have right-wing views, but every frontpage sub leans heavily left.
For example, the most common political debate right now isn't Biden vs. Trump, it's whether or not Biden is left-wing enough to deserve a vote.
From the perspective of someone from Europe this is a very valid question, cause Biden is right of the center, so not really what somehow who describes themselves as "leftist" usually votes for. Even Bernie Sanders, often seen as the start of socialism in America, is only a bit left of the center in typical political quadrants.
The problem is that US politics are very skewed to the right, so many there think clear right wing positions are on the left.
People are referring to social politics when they say reddit is left heavy, which is certainly true.
Yes, economic politics in America is more right leaning than most of Europe but even still I have a hard time believing reddit pushes towards the right more than the left in any regard besides smaller subs
I'm actually curious how conspiracy subs continually skate through these ban-waves. Even if you discount all of the dog whistles, you can find normal whistles scattered throughout the place: echoes and charts showing who in the media is Jewish are the two most common.
It's about time now to declare the "social media" experiment dead. We're basically learning that there is value in excluding. The all inclusive buffet only brings you down to a neutered lowest common denominator. You're not really going to get any real thought or discussion when you're conversation is monitored by outside moderators. It was doomed to fail anyway.
If you start posting substantive points arguing against socialism / big government you get warned. If you argue about the warning you get banned.
YC is not really any better and the main mod is a self-admitted (although he took it down now) far leftist.
One time I found all the UBI threads and every flagged / mod warned post was someone arguing against UBI (that’s apparent a flame war), but endless idealistic rambling about how great it would be was totally fine.
I feel obligated to once again plug https://ieddit.com/about/ -transparent mod/admin logs, anonymous posting, etcetcetc, but I honestly think it's been demonstrated that it's next to impossible to sustain any amount of serious interest in such alternatives (there is certainly no shortage of reddit-like sites).
The direction reddit has taken is absolutely abhorrent, but at this point it's hard to avoid adopting a fatalistic outlook on things. What else can be done?
Anybody in the upper echelons of reddit who is responsible for the direction the site has taken over the past few years should be absolutely disgusted with themselves. Was the hundreds of millions (billions?) in VC funding not enough? You were given an extremely important position of stewardship over the internet, and have utterly betrayed all of us.
So the rumors about today were right. But this should not be the headline - TD was shut down many many months ago, despite people clinging to technicalities that it was not the case.
Without getting into the weeds, I just don’t see why we accepted that the internet should be one giant message board. We seem to do this over and over with stuff like Reddit and Facebook, but once upon a time communities would be their own site with their own message board.
Because it is and always has been , from the start. Without this liberation of having a public , anonymous board, we 'd be so much poorer culturally. Reddit banning some stuff is a good thing - new venues will arise because people arent just going to stop talking.
This played out how many (myself included) speculated it would.
1. t_d would not be banned as long as it was moderately active (it's basically been dead for months)
2. If it goes, ChapoTrapHouse gets banned as well.
The big thing here is that Chapo served as a clearinghouse for the "dirtbag left" and was incredibly active. The expectation that it would be banned was increasing even before the anonymous warning over the weekend. It was common for users to get warnings/3 day bans for "posting violations of content/upvoting violated content" without specifying the specific post or rule that was alleged to have been violated.
It's clear that including Chapo was a weak, "both sides" move.
IMO this headline is too selective. They banned a whole group of subs, including /r/trapochaphouse, which is a left-wing subreddit. Only highlighting this one is needlessly simplistic and will mislead anyone reading it.
The majority of the time people's arguments get heated enough that a mod has to step in and tell someone to cool it, the topic is politics.
And the majority of the time the argument starts with obvious trolling/baiting, typically racist stuff.
Straight up racism is quickly spotted and flagged down, so the new technique is to go on a roundabout monologue and imply racism.
Reddit admins themselves sometimes step in to remove things as well, but it's rare. Mostly for illegal things they spot first, e.g. trying to buy/sell drugs.
By encouraging discussions from both ends of the political spectrum, perhaps? The discussions themselves cannot be neutral, but the environment can be.
events of r/askreddit offer possible insight, some months ago someone posted a question similar to "Trump voters that will not vote for Trump again, what was the last drop?" and it became a huge post, soon after the same question was posted again by only changing Trump to Biden (in true r/askreddit fashion where popular questions are milked to death). Only one of them was removed by moderators.
A political discussion forum can be neutral in allowing equal participation to different political position. People are not asking reddit userbase to be neutral in their voting, they are asking reddit moderators to be neutral in how they enforce policies/rules.
This final banning of /r/The_Donald is part of a concerted effort to eliminate any sense of normalcy for being pro-Trump. Even with no content for the past few months (after the mod removal), it stood out as a historical reference point to show thousands of people that supported Trump's 2016 campaign and presumably would continue to support him in 2020.
They had a choice to leave it up and locked, but instead chose to erase it from the Internet and that's no accident.
Weird. If anything I'd be more prone to believe that The_Donald was some kind of false-flag operation used to make trump supporters look bad. I'm really surprised to see someone say that it made trump support look normal.
As a counterpoint to that, there is really nothing “normal” about supporting Trump. He really is just as bad as his critics say.
This is the guy that retweeted a video of someone yelling white power in support. This is the guy who called COVID-19 the “Kung flu.” This is the guy that said there were “fine people on both sides” where one side was neo-Nazis. This is the guy that encouraged both police and rally-goers to get violent with the “wrong“ type of people.
Trump is deeply, unacceptably racist, and pro-violence, full stop. Trump is on the side of Christian white nationalism and there are plenty of people who voted for him who don’t even recognize it.
The fact that your typical upper middle class white suburban family with generally moderate views might have voted for this guy isn’t normal. They just can’t hear the dog whistles and have been, amazingly, convinced that that the alternative is worse.
Your post history indicates you're not exactly immune to making large sweeping claims against portions of the voting public either. You should take your own advice before criticizing others.
Apart from politics, one thing I hope that comes from this is the people learn to own their online identity instead of leasing it from social media companies.
For an individual, set up your email on your own domain. Even if you use some other service to host it for you, as long as you own the name, you can move it wherever you want.
If you host a community, have it on your own domain. Maybe initially it just redirects to a reddit subreddit, but your users should get in the habit of going to MyCommunity.tld instead of reddit.com/r/my_community
If you make videos for a living, have at a minimum a website that has a list of your videos and always tell your users that that is the canonical place to find your videos.
Own your online identity. Don’t lease it from a social media company.
Good. I wouldn't want these communities on my website either. And it's not about censorship, it's about not wanting to give shitty hateful trolls a platform and let them run wild on your site ruining it for everyone who chooses to remain civil.
"The rule does not protect people in the majority". Hmm... Aren't women in the majority here in the United States? According to Reddit, women are fair game.
This seems like a win for the trolls. I've cut Reddit out of my diet and I'm sure those communities were deserving of the ban, but targeting specific subreddits rather than properly enforcing whatever rule they were breaking to create a toxic atmosphere seems like the less good answer of the two.
Naming them grants them glory as martyrs, especially when the subreddit's name is a google-unique term that they can use to regroup and to attract supporters to their cause. It's already too late for the top 10, but that's no reason to give the rest a free boost.
Theoretically, I can see why that would be distressing as an end-user, but wearing my platform operator hat^, I can't think of any way to implement that doesn't result in either driving traffic to competing platforms, assisting rulebreakers in their inevitable quest to rouse a pitchfork mob against their own platform, and/or is interpreted to be saying that users are bad for having subscribed to banned content.
If you look at the posting history of people who post lots of politics or bigoted, many of them are really weird.
One very clear class of weird is people who only post 1-2 sentence posts. If you scroll down, they may post 10-100 posts per day and they are always some short unoriginal emotionally loaded statement of the world situation. If they are not banned the posting history can go on for years, with just endless stream of short sentences.
Discussing for them is just saying opinions. They take everything against them personally. If you try to engage them into discussion, they really can't.
I find it odd that there is no mention in parent article or in any comments that Reddit is a subsidiary of the Condé Nast media empire. Their ultimate profit goal doesn't align with users and relies on algos and top-down intervention to generate cash and clicks.
Partisanship doesn't contribute to this aim, so, how is their killing a discussion board newsworthy or surprising to anyone?
The internet remains a bastion of free speech. Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, remain privately managed companies with a duty to police their platforms. If /r/The_Donald contributors are upset - they can go almost anywhere else. Vitriol, hate, disinformation, etc... just doesn't need to be on public display.
The problem is that what hate is, is in the eye of the beholder. People can say Trump wanting to enforce rule of law is hate, I don't think so. People can say Trump wanting to enforce our borders is hate, and I don't think so. You have politically motivated people who think that anything that disagrees with their political viewpoints is hate, and justification to be memoryholed from the internet. I don't agree.
That's right. Who defines hate speech? Where do you draw the line? I guess as soon as one incites violence no matter what side of the political spectrum it is from, that is out of order.
Perhaps now that reddit is Chinese owned, they're trying to infiltrate to see how much they can get away with by medling around with external affairs in order to model them after their own internal policies.
>“It’s one of the founding principles of Reddit to foster [political] discussion,” Huffman said in the call with reporters.
Ironically, /r/The_Donald highlighted a key flaw in reddit's system: moderators.
Moderators in reddit's sub vary from being totally absent to all-controlling. /r/The_Donald's mods were at the very far end of the controlling spectrum. For example, back in the early days of the sub, before Trump was even elected, one of their posts showed up on /r/all (Anything highly voted on any subreddit can show up there). Somebody was gushing about "The Art of the Deal". I replied to them that they should check out some of Tony Schwartz's other books and was immediately banned from /r/The_Donald for life. The post in which I said this was removed. People went on gushing about the brilliance of Trump.
Moderators on reddit are not selected or paid. They "volunteer". They have absolute control over who posts and what is posted in their sub. There is zero transparency. Users can't see what moderators are doing. The end result is that a sub is as biased as it's moderators. The thing is, reddit subs are like communities. People who post in a sub regularly get upvotes for conforming to the sub's biases, downvotes for struggling against them, and see only what the moderators let them see. Pretty soon their views conform to those of the moderators. /r/The_Donald allowed some pretty crazy people to polarize a lot of other people who were probably a lot more balanced in their political views before Reddit came along.
For this reason, I no longer post in or read Reddit's political subs. Most subs seem better than /r/The_Donald, but you simply don't know what the mods are doing to shape your views. Personal experience has led me to believe /r/Canada also has some really bad moderators right now, and you can see the tone of that sub gradually changing over time. It's simply unacceptable to place this much trust in people who are totally anonymous.
So, where do I get my political news from? Newspapers. I read several sources distributed from left-centre to right-centre on mediabiasfactcheck.com's ratings. Dead tree media may have corporate biases and a host of other problems but, at least, you can begin to get a handle on who they are and what their biases are. Also, by removing the upvote system from the mix, you don't have meaningless internet points serving as both carrot and stick to make you subconsciously conform.
Bottom line, Reddit is for cat gifs and people smacking each other in the nuts. It is not a safe place to get your politics from.
I see reddit as a platform where everyone can shitpost whatever they want, and where every opinion will face criticisms. Banning right or left wing subreddits will make these people to leave to "safe harbour" where their extreme views won't be banned, but such portals will be pwoered by their extreme views and there will be no criticism or "quality control". Basically, extremists fuelling each other to do harm in real life, because there is no one to tell them "hey, this is too edgy" just like small terrorist groups start.
I wanted to see their viewpoint on at the time "the hot topic" and confirm my suspicions that I truly don't consider their viewpoint rational or valid. It's like they start from a conclusion and work backwards to excuse it.
> It's like they start from a conclusion and work backwards to excuse it.
Almost everything political is like this. What allows you to see the flaw clearly here is your bias is against theirs. It's harder to see this process when you align with the conclusion.
Come on, that subreddit was insane. We should attempt to understand and empathise with people we disagree with, but that doesn’t mean we abandon all intellectual standards. And frankly validating a space like that as a legitimate viewpoint for conservatism is an insult to conservatism and a kind of bigotry of low expectations.
> It's like they start from a conclusion and work backwards to excuse it.
Without getting into any of the politics, isn't this exactly what you said you did in the preceding sentence?
> I wanted to see their viewpoint on at the time "the hot topic" and confirm my suspicions that I truly don't consider their viewpoint rational or valid.
But generally these ideas are immediately discountable by reality. T_D was generally conspiracy theories or even if there is an attempt at some genuine political or economic discussion, its never fact based (or cherry picked/lie through ommision/or presenting a paper thats 50+ years old as if its true in light of new evidence). How can you even give those sorts of opinion credence? If those posts were made in good faith, then those people are ignorant, but that's just giving too much credit.
I love reading foxnews.com and some of my deeply conservative relatives' Facebook feeds, because they give a perspective I'd never see otherwise (even if I generally disagree). I'm on there daily, and I'd say I get just as much news from those sources as from others, like washingtonpost.com. I also sometimes go to some old school conservative blogs like nationalreview.com/corner/, as well as sites like Drudge and Breitbart to see what they think.
But /r/the_donald was just toxic. Even when I was in the mood to see more of that kind of content, I couldn't stand more than about 5 minutes of browsing that subreddit before closing the tab in frustration and disgust.
I really value information and learning how different people think and what's important to them, but it's really hard to do that on forums so I prefer just talking to ppl. Preferably in a non-campaign year to get a less emotional account. Plus it helps me have a more balanced perspective b/c I can put face(s) to different sides and that prevents me from saying things that I can't take back
Honest question: how do you manage to work your way through that stuff without feeling incredibly shitty afterwards? Because whenever I have tried to make sense of them it was genuinely unpleasant for me to "reason along" with people that unreasonable (I'd almost call it painful, but perhaps that's a bit too strong).
I would highly recommend "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion" by Jonathan Haidt. He's a left leaning psychologist, and it's basically a PHD level dive into how morality works at a psychological level, with quite a few dips into cultural anthropology. Once I understood how my own moral systems worked and how very different moral systems function, it helped me avoid these pitfalls of negative emotion blocking my empathy and understanding of other people.
I visited, shared my viewpoint and was promptly banned. Good for you to stay away (for your mental health) but seeing first-hand the sort of hate and bigotry posted daily was both shocking and informative.
I visited a couple of times but couldn't share my opinion an anything because it would have been in violation of the sub's rules. Basically any anti-Trump comments were a violation of the rules.
There's a bit of irony in an anti-free speech community eventually being shut down by the hosting platform.
The problem with T_D was that it mainly functioned as an echo chamber. And I don't mean that as a liberal person just disagreeing with their politics - they'd literally ban and delete _anything_ even slightly critical of Trump.
When you cross that point, it just becomes another channel for propaganda. No different than what you'd see in actual dictatorships.
But that kind of culture / behavior is not unique to T_D, every time someone posted anything remotely critical of Bernie on /politics, they'd get downvoted at the speed of light. Same with pro-Biden threads before Sanders threw in the towel.
But T_D is probably the worst offender. It just functions as pro-Trump worship, and "owning the libs" memes. Everything else will get you banned.
Checked it out, and promptly got banned. There was some discussion going on about how the liberal press criticized Trump for wanting to criminalize flag burning but didn't criticize Hillary Clinton for the same thing even though she had actually cosponsored legislation to do that when she was in Congress.
I had never actually heard of that, so looked up the bill to see what it proposed. I posted the summary from congress.gov in case anyone else was curious too:
> Flag Protection Act of 2005 - Amends the federal criminal code to revise provisions regarding desecration of the flag to prohibit: (1) destroying or damaging a U.S. flag with the primary purpose and intent to incite or produce imminent violence or a breach of the peace; (2) intentionally threatening or intimidating any person, or group of persons, by burning a U.S. flag; or (3) stealing or knowingly converting the use of a U.S. flag belonging to the United States, or belonging to another person on U.S. lands, and intentionally destroying or damaging that flag
I used to spend a lot of money on Reddit gold until few years ago when Reddit blocked any discussion about the gay club shooting at Pulse nightclub. The_Donald was the only sub which allowed discussion of it and seemed to be the only ones who could sympathize with the gay community on Reddit at that time.
Before that, I used to believe right wingers were a bunch of homophobes and what not but if that was the case, why would would they be the only one discussing and sympathizing with the families of the victims?
Why was the supposed homophobic and violent sub The_Donald the only ones which were allowing stickies for blood donations towards the shooting victims while the /r/news sub deleting any comment which talked about blood donations to the victims? PEOPLE LITERALLY DIED and for all the virtue signaling Reddit and the front page subs did, they didn't care about the victims?
This made me re-think about whether my side was the bad guys? Since I am a brown immigrant myself, I was always told right wingers hate me and other minorities. I had never looked deep enough. The Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting which killed 50 gays made me re-think. Why is the side which supposedly hates minorities the only one talking about blood donations to the victims?
This also made me question why was "/r/rightwingLGBT" banned? Are gays not allowed to be conservative?
Since then, I started browsing The_Donald more often and despite whatever media says, there can sometimes be tongue in cheek memes and comments on there but they are not evil people as media and Reddit makes them out to be. There's a huge community there with gays, hispanics, blacks and every minority group which media claims right wingers hate. When hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico 3 years ago, The_Donald was the only sub where people were sharing how a lot of the FEMA supplies were going missing. Everyone else was calling this a conspiracy theory but there were people literally sharing videos of garbage trucks and warehouses filled with perfectly well and brand new supplies. It was quite sinister. Then the truth finally came out earlier this year that they found 8 warehouses full of FEMA supplies which were rotting away and never given to the Puerto Rico people who were literally starving and dying. These are the types of incidents which have changed my mind since then that there's evil in media and many people who are actively willing to let people suffer and die if it makes right wingers look bad.
I might get downvoted for this comment but I hope few people pay attention to what's happening and dig a bit deeper than what media and big tech are telling them. I used to be a liberal - I am still a liberal on most things but I can no longer identify with the current left. It breaks my heart on what people have become.
This is my experience as well. I was fully liberal until election night. The veil was lifted watching CNN anchors react to their preferred candidate losing. I started digging and wound up at T_D. My experience there has been polar opposite of the perspective you hear claimed by many.
Yep. I recently went and watched one of the compilations of election night reporting and couldn't believe how blatant their bias was.
Funny thing is that I am still a liberal on most issues but how does anyone expect me to identify with the current left when they don't even want to allow posts and comments about blood donations to gay victims for political correctness reasons?
I was mostly OK with the previous restrictions on Mr. Trump, because they were directed at a person acting irresponsibily.
This, however, may cross a line for me. I'm not a Reddit user, but it's my understanding that this is a discussion group about a person. I'm less OK with restricting the discussions of topics.
It reminds me of something I heard in a forensics class years ago: Attack the problem, not the person.
There's a difference between hate speech occasionally being found in a subreddit and a subreddit existing principally as a platform for hate speech. the_donald was unambiguously the latter.
And the news traveled pretty quickly to so many different subreddits before the ban wave. All the subs that had a chance of getting banned were making posts warning about an upcoming ban, and I even saw a post in r/againsthatesubreddits like 6 hours before the banwave that was talking about the post on watchredditdie in a way that sounded like they knew it was true.
I highly doubt that all these mods just saw one post from a medium sized subreddit and started preparing for a ban. Seems to me like all the mods within certain subreddits knew and it got leaked to other mods.
Sorry, but what are exactly saying here? That the headlines are false? that they are comparing apples to oranges? That it is out of context? I could believe any of them, but it is unclear what you are implying.
From just looking at the headlines I can only infer a 11/12 death/hours > 8/24 death/hours
Cloudflare isn't in the business of deplatforming and moderating the way that social media companies are. We all know about that one case, but it was not only an extreme outlier, but also had some other reasoning behind it. I will predict CF does not deplatform them any time soon.
As I mentioned, I'm just (genuinely) curious. Not making judgement either way. Exceptional times and all that jazz. It is very rare such natural experiments come along.
They take perverse glee in being named, because it attracts more bad actors to their cause and strengthens their ability to harm others. By naming their site openly here, you too are now helping them market to HN readers. Why would you do so voluntarily here?
Trump is the president of the United States, Republicans have both the Senate and the Supreme Court, and I can barely go two seconds without hearing the perspective of people who voted for Trump. There is an entire news network that acts in an almost official capacity as the Republican party press arm. What on earth makes you think Reddit is the only major place that people could discuss "issues"?
People closing down your internet forum after a billion warnings and blatant violation of the rules of the site is not discrimination. If anything The_Donald was allowed to stay around for way longer than most other subs that did the kind of things it did, precisely because they did not want to have to deal with the tremendous number of communication channels available to Trump supporters to complain about it.
I do, but that doesn't change my point in any material way. To act as though Trump supporters are victims of systematic censorship when they literally run the United States is just ridiculous. And in any case, Reddit is not a government-sponsored social media service, and even if it were I very much doubt they would not have provisions for removing objectionable content (given how other government sites work).
This is correct, those two ideas are often mistaken for each other.
Reddit is not a governmental entity, and as a private platform, has every right to decide what speech it will or will not publish.
But we can wish that Reddit as a speech platform would embrace the principles of the First Amendment rather than suppressing all the speech it doesn't like.
> But we can wish that Reddit as a speech platform would embrace the principles of the First Amendment rather than suppressing all the speech it doesn't like.
That's easy to say when you aren't liable for any damages caused by said speech.
This seems rather ironic, since TD was banning people that went against the majority opinion.
If TD is repeatedly violating freedom of speech principles what exactly is your recourse to ensure they comply and adhere to freedom of speech? If we accept that TD has the right to ban users it doesn't like, then we accept that Reddit has the right to ban subreddits it doesn't like.
To repeat a trite argument, that is the case for the free speech that is guaranteed under the US constitution. Free speech advocates usually claim that either reddit does indeed violate that constitutional right (similarly to how it applies to federally funded private companies) or that the human right of free speech is violated.
This second version is assumed to exist a priori from any state/law similarly to how international human right conventions Recognize human rights rather than Create them.
Doesn't the concept of freedom of speech necessitate the freedom from speech, ie. the right to remain silent? To force a company to say something they don't want to is in my opinion worse than allowing them to say nothing. I don't expect Breitbart to voice my opinions, for instance, and I don't expect Twitter to voice theirs if they don't want to.
Is there a "real" definition of hate speech? It seems like a hard to define rule. I also hate Trump but am allowed to say any horrible thing I want to about him, but if I were to same the same things about Hilary (I also hated her as a politician) it would be hate speech.
No, which is why it’s such a slippery slope and why places like the US have such broad laws protecting speech. As the old adage goes, it’s not good speech that needs protecting.
Unless you're saying horrible things about her by attacking her gender, then it wouldn't be hate speech.
If you have a difficult time saying horrible things about Hillary Clinton without attacking her gender, you might actually be sexist. Think about it. How do you really feel about women?
Do you mean like attacking members of her own gender when she persecuted her husband's rape victims to protect her own political aspirations? I imagine Juanita Broddrick would have something to say about this?
I think your reply is irrelevant to what I've written. I'm not defending Hillary. My point is that if you can't attack Hillary Clinton (a politician) without gender slandering, you're probably be sexist.
> If you have a difficult time saying horrible things about Hillary Clinton without attacking her gender, you might actually be sexist. Think about it. How do you really feel about women?
It is unclear for me where this comes from? Did GP update their post after you replied or did you reply to something GP didn't say or even imply?
You'll need to email the site moderators using the footer Contact link if you wish to have any influence on their views in this matter. Posting about it here will have no effect at all.
3 of some of the biggest right wing YouTube channels, Trump's Twitch account, and 2000 other subreddits including The_Donald all being banned in the span of less than an hour is just a coincidence. More of a criminal conspiracy.
Whatever else you want to want to say about our current president, "The People" did not vote him in.
The fact that he's President really is going back to the founding fathers' intention, and why we have an Electoral College in the first place:
So that underrepresented voters would have a say in who the President was. And they did, so he is. And now he's pretending that he's the voice of our country, when he so clearly is not. The People spoke, and they requested someone else.
A reasonable person would look at his election results and create an agenda from there, but not Trump. I am hopeful that is his downfall. I'm not holding my breath about it, though.
But there is not "one true way" to coordinate a democratic election. Especially when considering the differences between presidential republics and parliamentary republics.
Or even concepts like "one person one vote" force systems to converge towards a few stable establishment parties.
It would still be democratic if voter could grade candidates and the winners were chosen by some appropriate statistical measure, or if voters could select arbitrary subsets of okeyish candidates and the winners were those with most votes, or any combination of many other systems.
The real objective of most democratic electoral systems is governability and meaningful representation. Pretending that popular vote is the only meaningful way to elect representatives is naive.
I wonder how someone like Hitler would have been treated. I guess free speech advocates would have helped him to spread his sick ideas and rise to power? Free speech needs to have limits somewhere. If others are insulted, smeared, de-humanized, if hate is spreaded, if under the protection of free speech people rise to power who poison the political climate, then the whole system is in danger of falling apart, with all the good elements, even the right for free speech.
Throwing Hitler out as a boogie man does not nullify the entire legal system of our country or the intellectual tradition behind it. Yes Hitler would have had free speech too although most of what is viewed as problematic by Hitler would have been considered violent hate speech in our current legal system and would still not be allowed.
As a jew, I support free speech for hypothetical Hitler. Stop using these lazy arguments.
The Weimar Republic had hate speech laws, and prosecuted Nazis for violating them. This simply resulted in more polarization and Nazis becoming more committed to their cause.
Free speech is not a god given right to spread hate, misinformation, antisemitism, misogyny, etc - And yes: Not confronting people who threaten the very basics of our democracy (respecting human rights and the dignity of our fellow citizens) will help those dark forces rise to the power. The nazis have been elected to power in the Weimar Republic.
If this drives away lots of users of that subreddit, it may well be the case that Reddit becomes less representative (of drastically unpleasant people) and more cohesive. So, good to see it go.
They didn't ban Trump, nor did they ban all subreddits about Trump. They banned a single subreddit which repeatedly violates reddit rules and refuses to moderate according the rules.
Not likely. All the conservatives have move to /r/conservative, which actually bans people for threatening to kill people and things like that, and Reddit appears to have no problem with them.
As I commented in a previous discussion of reddit's policies (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23601595), the "quarantined subreddits" half measures were clearly too tame as a middle point, where reddit decided to both moderate which communities are wrong and at the same time not ban them (worst of both worlds).
I wonder if the discussion there was read by people at reddit, though it's probably not relevant opinions to them.
Chapo was the only interesting subreddit remaining, or at least the only one that still brought me to the site, but I’d gladly take losing it so that reddit can use a “both sides” narrative to deplatform racists.
TD was pretty much in zombie mode since they replaced all the mods and the users moved to other conservative subs. I also think many of the more extreme/active users graduated to 8ch. This is probably just reddit getting ahead of the election to be extra sure they can keep it advertiser friendly as it heats up
There is constantly tremendous pressure on you to perform opposing actions, and even making no decision at all will cause you significant mental stress and harassment, regardles of what the issue is.
You have to pick who you want to cave to, and to what extent, and no matter how good of a job you try to do, a lot of people will really really hate you.
This is even more apparent when you see that Reddit has been taking action against a lot more subreddits recently, some of which are listed in the article, and many of which clearly have little to do with the president. The attitude of some of these communities may be abhorrent, but they are still communities, and people do not react well to their communities being deleted, whether a company had the legal authority to, or was justified in doing so, or not.
It's very tough and I wish that we didn't have to go through these things to begin with, and could have more federated and decentralized platforms, or at least more client-side filtering inside of centralization curation. I can always dream.