I'm not against Reddit's move, but I do think they're being more than a little naive if they think it will stop here.
hueypriest (Reddit admin) says:
/r/trees isn't in remotely the same legal area as CP stuff. Not even close. They'll ban /r/trees when they pry it out of our cold dead hands.
And yet, facilitating a drug transaction is almost definitely illegal. Posting torrent links is at least legally dangerous. Sure, these things haven't become problems yet, but neither were the other things a couple years ago.
What the Reddit admins are saying right now is that anything goes, as long as it doesn't represent a plausible legal threat that can be waged against them. This is fine. The problem is that Reddit doesn't know that they're saying this. They think it's about CP, but it's not, it's about legal threat.
The slippery slope you describe simply does not exist. "First they took the CP, and I said nothing..." is not a valid concern, primarily because CP has always been an issue, and whenever it's come up it's always been removed from Reddit. This change in position is not nearly as large as it seems.
Contrast, as you seem to want to, with /r/trees. How many posts in /r/trees get taken down due to their questionable legality? How many posts in /r/letstradetorrents (apocryphal) get taken down due to their questionable legality? None and none. The nature of CP on the Internet is unique, and not viewed similarly to anything else on the Internet. Reddit isn't saying "as long as it doesn't represent a plausible legal threat that can be waged against them", they're saying, "as long as it's not CP, and as long as it's manageable through an ad-hoc process."
Due to the SomethingAwful attack, or due to some other, unknown reason, the volume of CP was too high to continue to deal with it on an ad-hoc basis. That is all.
First, I'm not saying that they shouldn't be taking the position they are. In fact, I believe that Reddit should always make the best effort to comport itself to US law in order to protect the site's existence for its users everywhere. However, I am saying that CP is not the only possible legal threat and it is naive to assume that it will continue to be the dominant legal threat going forward.
Contrast, as you seem to want to, with /r/trees. How many posts in /r/trees get taken down due to their questionable legality? How many posts in /r/letstradetorrents (apocryphal) get taken down due to their questionable legality? None and none. The nature of CP on the Internet is unique, and not viewed similarly to anything else on the Internet. Reddit isn't saying "as long as it doesn't represent a plausible legal threat that can be waged against them", they're saying, "as long as it's not CP, and as long as it's manageable through an ad-hoc process."
I agree that it is not yet a problem. Reddit has not yet been taken down by the FBI because of widespread drug trade on r/trees. Nor have they been sued because of torrent links. What I question is how long it will take before these things become issues?
What I'm asking is: what is it about CP that makes it the only possible legal threat that Reddit can face? Reddit is still a maturing community that can evolve in many different ways. Reddit's policy is not about CP specifically, it's about credible legal threat. This is not what they say, but what they mean. If you think otherwise, I invite you to tell me what they will do if a non-CP related legal threat comes along.
I'd love to see a single "facilitated drug transaction" in /r/trees. No really, it would be relevant to my interests. Also, it's a load of nonsense, as are most of the comments about /r/trees, /r/atheism and other subreddits that are being compared to CP in this thread.
It was one cautious commenter away from being a thread all about where to meet up to do and buy illegal drugs. You think that just because you say "share" with a wink and a nod everyone's immune from prosecution?
So a 2 month old post (that wasn't even in /r/trees) whose TOP comment says specifically "do not talk about actual trading of drugs" is your evidence that /r/trees is illegal? Besides, there's nothing inherently illegal about me claiming "I sell lots of drugs". Yes, it's (not) true, drivebyacct2 sells massive amounts of marijuana. Come persecute me and everyone else in this thread!
Even the second comment is how to be safe and not attract too much attention. The third top comment suggests that it be a "treeless" meetup.
In the interest of fairness, I've never been to /r/nyctrees before and it's certainly a different style than trees. I'm still not sure anything there looks like dealing and again, I don't really see "hey, let's get high and meetup in [some] park" as being that dangerous or scandalous.
hueypriest (Reddit admin) says:
/r/trees isn't in remotely the same legal area as CP stuff. Not even close. They'll ban /r/trees when they pry it out of our cold dead hands.
And yet, facilitating a drug transaction is almost definitely illegal. Posting torrent links is at least legally dangerous. Sure, these things haven't become problems yet, but neither were the other things a couple years ago.
What the Reddit admins are saying right now is that anything goes, as long as it doesn't represent a plausible legal threat that can be waged against them. This is fine. The problem is that Reddit doesn't know that they're saying this. They think it's about CP, but it's not, it's about legal threat.