"As of January 29, 2015, reddit has never received a National Security Letter, an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or any other classified request for user information. If we ever receive such a request, we would seek to let the public know it existed."
Is this the warrant canary? Has this been around before?
Moxie saying "Every lawyer we've spoken to has confirmed that [having a warrant canary] would not work." Which isn't surprising. When the government tells you not to communicate something, you aren't allowed to communicate it. Not not not not communicating it isn't some clever loophole.
Perhaps one situation where spam could be the solution. Notify everyone that contacts your main contact email that all emails received and sent are also copied to some watchdog organization. That way, when your already-in-place system copies an NSA info request, your culpability is lessened. That's my theory for how to deal with this kind of shadiness anyways - infinite sunshine.
There is little need for government takedown requests when the moderators of many subreddits are paid shills of various stripes. There are a few subs like r/undelete and r/undeleteshadow and r/longtail dedicated to snapshotting this sort of thing. Among the duplicate submissions that are legitimately deleted you can find some real gems.
When one views reddit moderation decisions through an anti-corporate/governmental lens, circumstantial evidence of mods being paid off seems to be everywhere. But there is not a single piece of direct evidence to suggest that mods are being paid by large organizations (corporate or otherwise) to manipulate reddit content.
> here is little need for government takedown requests when the moderators of many subreddits are paid shills of various stripes.
As someone who is a mod of one or more default subreddits, I promise you, this is certainly not the case.
I can't "prove" it, but I work with these people every single day and have for years. I'm intimately familiar with the "power mods". We even have our own semi-private subreddit, /r/DefaultMods, where we actually talk about things like this. We discuss how the conspiracy wackos will accuse us of being reptilian shills for Pepsi today, then tomorrow turn around and accuse us of being shills for Coke. Next week we're shills for the U.S government, the week after we're shills for the KGB or the PRC. This is not an exaggeration. I personally have been accused of being all of those things on numerous occasions over the years. Truth is, I'm just a welder here in Chicago. Let me tell you how fun it is coming home from a long day at work only to be called a government shill by some teenage neckbeard who thinks aliens did 9/11.
At some point, you just get tired of it, ignore it, and you have to laugh at the situation. It's why some mods make fun/light about the whole thing. If you start taking it seriously, you're going to go crazy. Modding a large subreddit is a lot like babysitting, except you're not babysitting infants, you're babysitting high school kids.
The only real evidence that "mods are shills" is a minimal and extremely exaggerated. Years ago there was a mod who was busted for spamming links to their own stuff. SEO type spam. I think his name was SolInvictus. The admins caught him and shadowbanned his account immediately. There's also examples of other mods catching and busting mods for spamming (like the quickmeme guy). These things don't go left unchecked. If you think the admins aren't paying attention and catching/busting mods, then you'd be naive. They are, and have been. If there was someone working to systematically undermine their subreddit, the evidence to the admins and even to the other mods would be overwhelming and obvious.
By the way, /r/Undelete is populated and run by people from /r/Conspiracy. Overwhelmingly so. Mods will show up to explain why a submission was removed (which rule it broke and why) and the conspiracy crowd will blatantly ignore it and downvote the helpful mod. That place was nice in the very beginning, now it's as toxic as any stormfront forum. No exaggeration. You'll actually probably find more level headed people in a stormfront forum.
The paid shills probably do less damage to reddit than the way e.g. one neo-Nazi has managed to take over mod duties in about 80 subreddits by gaming the moderation rules - including /r/holocaust!
[+] [-] ipsum2|11 years ago|reply
Is this the warrant canary? Has this been around before?
[+] [-] danielweber|11 years ago|reply
Moxie saying "Every lawyer we've spoken to has confirmed that [having a warrant canary] would not work." Which isn't surprising. When the government tells you not to communicate something, you aren't allowed to communicate it. Not not not not communicating it isn't some clever loophole.
[+] [-] doughj3|11 years ago|reply
I would imagine not, considering this is their first transparency report.
[+] [-] thesimon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RankingMember|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryoshon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sixothree|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baseten|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motbob|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mahranch|11 years ago|reply
As someone who is a mod of one or more default subreddits, I promise you, this is certainly not the case.
I can't "prove" it, but I work with these people every single day and have for years. I'm intimately familiar with the "power mods". We even have our own semi-private subreddit, /r/DefaultMods, where we actually talk about things like this. We discuss how the conspiracy wackos will accuse us of being reptilian shills for Pepsi today, then tomorrow turn around and accuse us of being shills for Coke. Next week we're shills for the U.S government, the week after we're shills for the KGB or the PRC. This is not an exaggeration. I personally have been accused of being all of those things on numerous occasions over the years. Truth is, I'm just a welder here in Chicago. Let me tell you how fun it is coming home from a long day at work only to be called a government shill by some teenage neckbeard who thinks aliens did 9/11.
At some point, you just get tired of it, ignore it, and you have to laugh at the situation. It's why some mods make fun/light about the whole thing. If you start taking it seriously, you're going to go crazy. Modding a large subreddit is a lot like babysitting, except you're not babysitting infants, you're babysitting high school kids.
The only real evidence that "mods are shills" is a minimal and extremely exaggerated. Years ago there was a mod who was busted for spamming links to their own stuff. SEO type spam. I think his name was SolInvictus. The admins caught him and shadowbanned his account immediately. There's also examples of other mods catching and busting mods for spamming (like the quickmeme guy). These things don't go left unchecked. If you think the admins aren't paying attention and catching/busting mods, then you'd be naive. They are, and have been. If there was someone working to systematically undermine their subreddit, the evidence to the admins and even to the other mods would be overwhelming and obvious.
By the way, /r/Undelete is populated and run by people from /r/Conspiracy. Overwhelmingly so. Mods will show up to explain why a submission was removed (which rule it broke and why) and the conspiracy crowd will blatantly ignore it and downvote the helpful mod. That place was nice in the very beginning, now it's as toxic as any stormfront forum. No exaggeration. You'll actually probably find more level headed people in a stormfront forum.
[+] [-] rodgerd|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickfl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3rc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Kalium|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samspot|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b0t|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noobface|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thissideup|11 years ago|reply
It's a tool for disseminating information and talking points.
[+] [-] secfirstmd|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackuser|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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