There are other options available to them. The major problem that I have with Reddit at the moment is the idea that somehow Adrien Chen's behavior was more egregious than Michael Brutsch.
Brutsch is living by the sword and dying by the sword. Reddit has to at some point contend with the fact that being internet famous means that you are actually famous (or infamous as the case may be).
There are consequences to fame and infamy, and Reddit can't claim that it does awesome things lifting people up, and collecting for charities, without acknowledging that anti-social behaviors will also have consequences.
There is a place for anonymous free speech. And the more notoriety one gains, the harder it is to protect anonymity, and, justly i think, the harder it should be to make the case that one should remain anonymous.
With great power comes great responsibility. (this comment may sound like a platitude coming at the end of what i've written. It's not, and if anyone wants to discuss it i'd be happy to furnish examples.)
I am not an expert on morality and ethics, unless by virtue of experience gained from living through the consequences and self-guilt from the immoral an unethical choices I've made myself in the past half-century.
...which is a way of saying, I'm sure you're right that there are several other choices Reddit can make, some of which it may be making behind closed doors...
So, you'd like Reddit to suffer from self-guilt as well? ;)
I think that they can champion free speech at the same time recognizing that free speech and notoriety have consequences. Doxxing is a problem, but a lack of accountability is also an issue. If Reddit wants to consider itself akin to a nation state (which its CEO has asserted), the question of accountability is a very real and very material one.
That I think is the real crux of the issue, not whether or not they stand behind Michael Brutsch's odious behavior (to be more specific. They can stand behind him or not, that's not the important problem. Brutsch is just one man. What about all of the other future Brutsches?).
I think you're conflating Reddit users/mods with Reddit staff. Raganwald's rant was clearly about Reddit staff, so talking about Reddit's users' behaviors distracts a bit.
Nope. Reddit staff has been decrying Gawker's doxxing just as much as the mods have.
Reddit staff have also been intentionally hands off of controversial subreddits. Those are choices they have made, and they have defended their mods and the culture that they're fostering. I agree with Reg that Reddit is currently behaving inconsistently, but I don't entirely agree with Reg's two prescriptions to address the inconsistency.
Is it possible to stop calling it 'doxxing'? It's revealing personal information in public that's the issue here. Sometimes that's justified, sometimes it's not.
You say that, but after reading half of this HN discussion, after being a Redditor for many years, after consulting two dictionaries, and after googling "doxx", I still have absolutely no idea what that "precise definition" is. In fact, I have no idea what the word is supposed to mean at all, other than from context.
If only it were so simple. 'Doxxing' has some pretty obvious connotations that a more precise (if also a bit more verbose) description of what happened does not have. It has also first and more frequently been used in certain contexts (e.g. users of some website searching for and revealing personal information about other users of that website) while not in others (e.g. investigative journalists revealing personal information about people in their stories), so it doesn’t really translate well if applied everywhere.
Just to make that clear, I think Gawker was wrong in revealing personal information, but I think that’s more a general disagreement with journalistic ethics and culture in the USA. There personal information is in general much more often and frequently revealed than where I come from (Germany).
I use the term because Reddit uses the term, and my intent was to characterize their feelings on the subject. I don't personally think that Gawker actually did maliciously leak ViolentAcrez's personal information. I think that they were reporting legitimately on someone at the center of a controversy who has chosen to put himself there.
There are other options available to them. The major problem that I have with Reddit at the moment is the idea that somehow Adrien Chen's behavior was more egregious than Michael Brutsch.
Brutsch is living by the sword and dying by the sword. Reddit has to at some point contend with the fact that being internet famous means that you are actually famous (or infamous as the case may be).
There are consequences to fame and infamy, and Reddit can't claim that it does awesome things lifting people up, and collecting for charities, without acknowledging that anti-social behaviors will also have consequences.
There is a place for anonymous free speech. And the more notoriety one gains, the harder it is to protect anonymity, and, justly i think, the harder it should be to make the case that one should remain anonymous.
With great power comes great responsibility. (this comment may sound like a platitude coming at the end of what i've written. It's not, and if anyone wants to discuss it i'd be happy to furnish examples.)