This article dramatically understates the magnitude of the shitstorm that is currently unfolding. Check out http://www.reddit.com/r/all/ if you feel like seeing all the ugliness.
(And if anyone has any doubts that this is ultimately about harassment, count how many of the posts on the front page (and their comments) are made up of personal attacks and/or obscenities targeted at CEO Ellen Pao.)
I don't fault the Reddit admins for trying to clean things up but I can't see any good that will come of this. To paraphrase a comment that I saw earlier today and now can't find, it's like trying to get rid of an anthill with a leaf-blower; you just end up with pissed-off ants everywhere.
I think banning the fatpeoplehate subreddit wouldn't have gone over so badly if it wasn't for the fact that Ellen Pao was already kind of hated on the site for constantly banning and deleting anything disagreeing with her viewpoint about her law suit.
Even political cartoons with her driving the tank and the reddit alien with a down vote in front were getting deleted, which were quite funny and appropriate, since she was shadow banning and deleting people basically for down voting her law suit.
It's tough to stand up and defend the fatpeoplehate group, but when someone abusing their power and deleting anything they don't agree with in a lawsuit does it, well, in this case maybe a villain ruining the site on her managed to do something not terrible, but because she is a villain it comes across a lot worse.
I never understood why reddit was so lenient with its community. There are so many racists and hateful subreddits, that attract more and more people like that, that makes the community as a whole worse.
I'm really glad that moderation actions like that are taken, and I'm sad that people reply to that by "harassing" the CEO...
Hopefully such people will get frustrated by such events and will eventually leave reddit.
Note that it's mostly people posting to /r/punchablefaces that are reaching r/all right. Another hateful reddit for you...
PS: FWIW, /r/all has always been pretty bad. If you want a good reddit experience do like me: unsubscribe from most subreddits and suscribe to smaller subreddits with active moderators.
The situation seems almost identical to when Reddit axed r/jailbait: one of their more embarrassing communities started to get too much attention, its users were increasingly behaving in a way that was damaging Reddit, and Reddit decided to kill it (ostensibly for the greater good of the site).
But even though that pissed plenty of people off... I don't recall the front page being totally dominated by calls for anyone's head on a silver platter. Reddit's userbase seems to feel especially threatened by Ellen Pao, and it's hard for me to believe that the difference is anything rational.
You've got to give Christopher Poole credit, he was never dumb enough to try to police 4chan. This is as laughable as trying to get rid of trolling on IRC.
(And if anyone has any doubts that this is ultimately about harassment, count how many of the posts on the front page (and their comments) are made up of personal attacks and/or obscenities targeted at CEO Ellen Pao.)
I think people are just upvoting anything that is critical of reddit at the moment. I doubt most people actually care who, if anyone, is being targeted.
An analogy I like is "using a leaf blower in a sealed room full of leaves". Sure, you'll kick users out of their former resting spots on the floor, but they have nowhere to go and will just settle back into new resting spots after being in everybody's face for a little while.
Can someone explain how and/or why so many people have come to believe that freedom of speech obligates others to provide an arena for them to spread their opinions?
I see mentions of thought-policing etc., but that's really wholly different from censorship and moderation.
They should just shut down the site. Who knew the internet would devolve into middle school bullying of fat people? It was just ten years or so ago that the kids started to get on myspace. We've reached the point where even the dumbest people have internet access. They've ruined everything.
HN users consistently imply this place has better comments than Reddit. "Reddit is a cesspool." "Can we please not bring this to HN as well." etc.
I've never had a problem avoiding content I didn't like there. Meanwhile I saw great discussions at various times.
Here, on the other hand, I've nearly stopped reading. Besides the unjustified elitism, constantly I'd post on a thread here only to see it disappear with no explanation. I don't understand HN's weighting and it seems to change without notice, or it did a while ago. Arbitrary curating means someone is arbitrarily imposing their values on discussions. I prefer allowing legal speech.
I generally preferred Reddit to HN and will probably end up going to Voat.co like everyone else talks about.
EDIT: Case in point: When I posted the above, the story was number 1 and it was about fifty minutes old. When it hit one hour, it dropped to number 5. The stories that it dropped behind were 5 to 12 hours old so I doubt they suddenly got surges of activity.
In the time I wrote the above edit this story dropped to number 11. Soon it will probably drop from the front page. Who knows?
I don't understand HN's weighting. Maybe this story is getting downvoted and user behavior is driving its trajectory, but it seems arbitrary and tells me to leave the site.
EDIT 2: corrected voat.co address thanks to ljk's comment.
HN isn't very good, but it's a little better than the current state of reddit, which is like a middle school without adults. At least people try to be intellectual on HN.
> HN users consistently imply this place has better comments than Reddit
That isn't a big surprise, is it? If they thought otherwise, they'd be commenting on Reddit about how HN sucks :)
Reddit and HN have different audiences. I tried both and found HN suits me much better. If it's not your cup of tea, nothing wrong with that too.
Yes, HN story ranking is arcane and I wish there were better tools to track content I like. But it also has a lot of insightful people and great discussions while trying not to devolve into circus.
> will probably end up going to Voat.co like everyone else talks about.
Good luck with that. The users exiting reddit are precisely the kind of users you don't want on your website. The young, trolls, immature and racist/bigots. They're essentially filling their community up with 4channers. That site is already filled with reddit's /r/conspiracy users. They run many of the most popular subreddits.
That place is doomed to fail. And as far as I know, they've already begun banning users and blacklisting domains. So much for "free speech".
> constantly I'd post on a thread here only to see it disappear with no explanation.
We surely don't have the same experience with reddit then, most big subreddits have a huge amount of rules and posting to them will just cause a bot/moderator to remove your thread and ask you to make changes
> Arbitrary curating means someone is arbitrarily imposing their values on discussions.
This has been bothering me about HN for some time. Maybe it's due to a smaller user base, but having stories disappear, specific user's comments always being weighted lower, and childish hellbanning is really discouraging. It does give the sense of a 'country club', where if you're not of the same bread and butter as those making the rules then you're not welcome.
When something that was previously (more or less) politically neutral takes a stance people get upset. Especially when there is vendor lock-in.
Some thought experiments:
Imagine if Comcast blocked access to all liberal sites.
Imagine if Microsoft word was changed so only pro-liberal documents could be created. For extra fun imagine if people could be "shadowbanned" so all their files were silently deleted.
Imagine if Google could only be used to find websites that supported global warming.
Imagine if Facebook messages could only send "patriotic" messages (as determined by their moderators).
Imagine if Intel processors could only run non-violent games.
These may seem weird comparisons because when we think of forums, we think of moderators having the power. But reddit isn't a forum. Reddit is basically a site that hosts forums. And now it wont host some of them anymore. Not only will it stop hosting some of them. It stopped hosting them unexpectedly, with a self-righteous "fuck-you".
I don't know how to feel about this. On one hand I'm against censorship, on the other I'm against internet bullying.
/r/FatPeopleHate was engaging in both.
In the end reddit is a private site that can do what it wants. Wikipedia removes things all the time and sites like 4chan remove all sorts of extremely offensive material.
I'm glad the mods of the hate oriented subreddits have been shadow banned, I actually think this shit storm is wonderful and I hope the reddit admins literally pull the plug and shut down. The FPH spammers are complete idiots, buying thousands of guilds and donating money directly to reddit and hurting their cause by vote brigading at the same time. They're sealing their fate.
This whole fiasco has shown the true face of reddit, just a whole bunch of (slightly below) average kids who don't deserve my attention.
I can't wait until reddit dies, but I have no idea where I'll go. I want something like reddit, but more open and transparent, and with a way for users to somehow remove mods.
Reddit has replaced RSS for me. HN is nice but hyper-curated and very specialized; though I prefer the HN voting system and algorithms over reddit's.
Reddit also has a massive advantage when it comes to companies/games/etc communicating with their fan-communities. It's an excellent medium for it as the type of vote-curation that happens there is great to sort topics of importance and the threaded comments are far better than what you would find on bulletin boards.
Overall, reddit has had a fantastic impact on the internet when it comes to communication, IMO. I hope that sticks.
Yep. I would post from time to time to point out incorrect "facts" they posted. It doesn't matter how well researched and reasoned your argument is. If you aren't towing the line, you are moderated and banned. They auto moderate and message any user who is voted down by the self-proclaimed shitlords.
This is probably the best illustration of the 'no broken windows' theory at work on the web. You can start a new community and keep it 'clean' from day one, but you can't let your community turn into a cesspool and then one day decide to clean it up, the inmates will be able to achieve critical mass and they'll happily burn down the asylum if they can't have their cesspool back.
What I really don't get is that they choose these 5 subreddits to ban, reddit has at least 50 (and probably more) subreddits that are arguably a lot more offensive than the ones they just blocked.
Clarification from the Reddit Admins on their announcement post indicate that they're banning subs where moderators either took no action or encouraged organized harassment (as in going to other subs or websites and actively harassing the person in question) as opposed to subs that just post awful things about people.
And yet subreddits like 'coonville' and 'GreatApes' still exist and continue shitting all over reddit. I know it makes my (black) wife feel welcomed when subreddits she frequents are slammed with the most virulent hate speech you can imagine.
This marks the beginning of the end of Reddit. It's been a long time coming and Reddit has become a huge promotional platform for pseudo user generated content submitted by shills and celebrities.
Reddit just put the world on notice that they are willing to become user babysitters, and historically this has never ended well for the company involved.
1) Reddit is a business and has certain interests at stake. If they want to seriously monetize their inventory (i.e., subreddits and pages), it needs to be with content that jives with advertisers. Odious content and sub-reddits are kryptonite to advertisers. Clorox doesn't want to see their advertising next to fat-shaming/racist/misogynistic horseshit.
2) Whether or not you think Reddit is suppressing "freedom of speech" is irrelevant (I personally don't think they are). What matters to Reddit is that those who contribute objectionable content according to advertisers leave the site, either because their subreddit has been shut down or because they find Reddit is suppressing their freedom of speech. All those pages were a cost to Reddit that had no chance of making money. When they're gone, they don't have to worry about them anymore. Reddit is probably rooting for other platforms, like Voat, to get traction so that people who want to post horseshit don't linger and leave immediately.
People always say that Reddit is fine, you just have to unsub from the defaults. That's nonsense. The defaults are representative of the userbase of the site, and their values seep into every crevice. Furthermore, Reddit has never actually been about "free speech". The vast, vast majority of people who browse Reddit don't do it because they can say whatever they want; they do it because it's an esay way to aggregate and consume light content. I mean, this should be obvious to anyone who uses Reddit with any frequency. The people who trot out the free speech defense — at least from what I routinely see on the site itself — are often exactly the ones who enjoy reading vile subs like /r/fatpeoplehate.
If Reddit can't survive this cleanup, then good fucking riddance.
Claiming that insulting obese people in an extremely offensive and aggressive manner for the sole purpose of personal entertainment has anything to do with free speech is something that even the average 14 year old Redditor should be able to recognize as a bit bold.
They aren't banning behavior, they're banning the expression of certain ideas.
It would be one thing if the group was about beating up fat people, but posting comments online about them is clearly under the ideals of expression.
If they want to ensure it's behavior and not ideas they should get a judge to rule on whether the expression would be constitutionally protected.
And yes, as a private entity it is their prerogative to ban certain ideas on their site, however, they should just be honest about it, they are limiting speech in a manner that would likely be unconstitutional if they were a government entity, aka. they are abridging freedom of expression.
I really wonder if there's not some money involved into those subreddits. It seems pretty easy for a PR company to just create fake accounts and build a popular subreddit and pretend that "the reddit community is angry".
I'm really starting to doubt that plain users can put so much energy in hating fat people, and I'm really dubious that it would create such chaos.
I wonder if the popularity of reddit has not brought some attention from PR groups.
[+] [-] teraflop|10 years ago|reply
(And if anyone has any doubts that this is ultimately about harassment, count how many of the posts on the front page (and their comments) are made up of personal attacks and/or obscenities targeted at CEO Ellen Pao.)
I don't fault the Reddit admins for trying to clean things up but I can't see any good that will come of this. To paraphrase a comment that I saw earlier today and now can't find, it's like trying to get rid of an anthill with a leaf-blower; you just end up with pissed-off ants everywhere.
EDIT: Ah, found it. It was in the "can I sue Reddit for violating my freedom of speech" thread in /r/legaladvice. http://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/39c58h/could_so...
[+] [-] lnanek2|10 years ago|reply
Even political cartoons with her driving the tank and the reddit alien with a down vote in front were getting deleted, which were quite funny and appropriate, since she was shadow banning and deleting people basically for down voting her law suit.
It's tough to stand up and defend the fatpeoplehate group, but when someone abusing their power and deleting anything they don't agree with in a lawsuit does it, well, in this case maybe a villain ruining the site on her managed to do something not terrible, but because she is a villain it comes across a lot worse.
[+] [-] baby|10 years ago|reply
I'm really glad that moderation actions like that are taken, and I'm sad that people reply to that by "harassing" the CEO...
Hopefully such people will get frustrated by such events and will eventually leave reddit.
Note that it's mostly people posting to /r/punchablefaces that are reaching r/all right. Another hateful reddit for you...
PS: FWIW, /r/all has always been pretty bad. If you want a good reddit experience do like me: unsubscribe from most subreddits and suscribe to smaller subreddits with active moderators.
[+] [-] powrtoch|10 years ago|reply
The situation seems almost identical to when Reddit axed r/jailbait: one of their more embarrassing communities started to get too much attention, its users were increasingly behaving in a way that was damaging Reddit, and Reddit decided to kill it (ostensibly for the greater good of the site).
But even though that pissed plenty of people off... I don't recall the front page being totally dominated by calls for anyone's head on a silver platter. Reddit's userbase seems to feel especially threatened by Ellen Pao, and it's hard for me to believe that the difference is anything rational.
[+] [-] fleitz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Goronmon|10 years ago|reply
I think people are just upvoting anything that is critical of reddit at the moment. I doubt most people actually care who, if anyone, is being targeted.
[+] [-] beloch|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a89anqm2ovn|10 years ago|reply
An nice juxtoposition is the top post of the default homepage is social justice outrage about a police officer shooting somebody.
[+] [-] olefoo|10 years ago|reply
This is reddit in the act of growing up. And it's about time and a a good thing in my opinion.
I like that I manage my filters well enough that I visited reddit several times today and was blissfully unaware of this particular bit of drama.
[+] [-] voltagex_|10 years ago|reply
That's really sad - I don't think there's many communities like /r/assistance and even /r/buildapc around.
[+] [-] tmerr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] txru|10 years ago|reply
http://imgur.com/a/5KMCS#0
[+] [-] emehrkay|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ljk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eivarv|10 years ago|reply
I see mentions of thought-policing etc., but that's really wholly different from censorship and moderation.
[+] [-] chjohasbrouck|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zxcvcxz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spodek|10 years ago|reply
I've never had a problem avoiding content I didn't like there. Meanwhile I saw great discussions at various times.
Here, on the other hand, I've nearly stopped reading. Besides the unjustified elitism, constantly I'd post on a thread here only to see it disappear with no explanation. I don't understand HN's weighting and it seems to change without notice, or it did a while ago. Arbitrary curating means someone is arbitrarily imposing their values on discussions. I prefer allowing legal speech.
I generally preferred Reddit to HN and will probably end up going to Voat.co like everyone else talks about.
EDIT: Case in point: When I posted the above, the story was number 1 and it was about fifty minutes old. When it hit one hour, it dropped to number 5. The stories that it dropped behind were 5 to 12 hours old so I doubt they suddenly got surges of activity.
In the time I wrote the above edit this story dropped to number 11. Soon it will probably drop from the front page. Who knows?
I don't understand HN's weighting. Maybe this story is getting downvoted and user behavior is driving its trajectory, but it seems arbitrary and tells me to leave the site.
EDIT 2: corrected voat.co address thanks to ljk's comment.
[+] [-] zxcvcxz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|10 years ago|reply
That isn't a big surprise, is it? If they thought otherwise, they'd be commenting on Reddit about how HN sucks :)
Reddit and HN have different audiences. I tried both and found HN suits me much better. If it's not your cup of tea, nothing wrong with that too.
Yes, HN story ranking is arcane and I wish there were better tools to track content I like. But it also has a lot of insightful people and great discussions while trying not to devolve into circus.
[+] [-] mahranch|10 years ago|reply
Good luck with that. The users exiting reddit are precisely the kind of users you don't want on your website. The young, trolls, immature and racist/bigots. They're essentially filling their community up with 4channers. That site is already filled with reddit's /r/conspiracy users. They run many of the most popular subreddits.
That place is doomed to fail. And as far as I know, they've already begun banning users and blacklisting domains. So much for "free speech".
[+] [-] ljk|10 years ago|reply
correct url is https://voat.co!
[+] [-] baby|10 years ago|reply
We surely don't have the same experience with reddit then, most big subreddits have a huge amount of rules and posting to them will just cause a bot/moderator to remove your thread and ask you to make changes
[+] [-] robot22|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] therobot24|10 years ago|reply
This has been bothering me about HN for some time. Maybe it's due to a smaller user base, but having stories disappear, specific user's comments always being weighted lower, and childish hellbanning is really discouraging. It does give the sense of a 'country club', where if you're not of the same bread and butter as those making the rules then you're not welcome.
[+] [-] im3w1l|10 years ago|reply
Some thought experiments:
Imagine if Comcast blocked access to all liberal sites.
Imagine if Microsoft word was changed so only pro-liberal documents could be created. For extra fun imagine if people could be "shadowbanned" so all their files were silently deleted.
Imagine if Google could only be used to find websites that supported global warming.
Imagine if Facebook messages could only send "patriotic" messages (as determined by their moderators).
Imagine if Intel processors could only run non-violent games.
These may seem weird comparisons because when we think of forums, we think of moderators having the power. But reddit isn't a forum. Reddit is basically a site that hosts forums. And now it wont host some of them anymore. Not only will it stop hosting some of them. It stopped hosting them unexpectedly, with a self-righteous "fuck-you".
[+] [-] tdmule|10 years ago|reply
For example, both AWS (http://aws.amazon.com/aup/) and Google (https://cloud.google.com/terms/aup) have very broad acceptable usage policies that allow for doing anything deemed legal by US law.
[+] [-] kayamon|10 years ago|reply
If Google didn't let people search for what they wanted, they'd just go use a different search engine.
If reddit doesn't do what people want, there are other websites for them.
[+] [-] zxcvcxz|10 years ago|reply
/r/FatPeopleHate was engaging in both.
In the end reddit is a private site that can do what it wants. Wikipedia removes things all the time and sites like 4chan remove all sorts of extremely offensive material.
I'm glad the mods of the hate oriented subreddits have been shadow banned, I actually think this shit storm is wonderful and I hope the reddit admins literally pull the plug and shut down. The FPH spammers are complete idiots, buying thousands of guilds and donating money directly to reddit and hurting their cause by vote brigading at the same time. They're sealing their fate.
This whole fiasco has shown the true face of reddit, just a whole bunch of (slightly below) average kids who don't deserve my attention.
I can't wait until reddit dies, but I have no idea where I'll go. I want something like reddit, but more open and transparent, and with a way for users to somehow remove mods.
[+] [-] scrollaway|10 years ago|reply
Reddit also has a massive advantage when it comes to companies/games/etc communicating with their fan-communities. It's an excellent medium for it as the type of vote-curation that happens there is great to sort topics of importance and the threaded comments are far better than what you would find on bulletin boards.
Overall, reddit has had a fantastic impact on the internet when it comes to communication, IMO. I hope that sticks.
[+] [-] adamnemecek|10 years ago|reply
I feel like censorship isn't the right word for this but I can't think of a better one.
[+] [-] chisleu|10 years ago|reply
It is a pretty disgusting place.
[+] [-] infinitone|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|10 years ago|reply
What I really don't get is that they choose these 5 subreddits to ban, reddit has at least 50 (and probably more) subreddits that are arguably a lot more offensive than the ones they just blocked.
[+] [-] Navarr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a2tech|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergiotapia|10 years ago|reply
A lot of people are migrating to Voat.
http://voat.co
[+] [-] elinchrome|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChikkaChiChi|10 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/notch/status/608706518972788736
Reddit just put the world on notice that they are willing to become user babysitters, and historically this has never ended well for the company involved.
[+] [-] pjscott|10 years ago|reply
/r/FatPeopleHate
/r/HamPlanetHatred
/r/TransFags
/r/NeoFAG
/r/ShitNiggersSay
[+] [-] mmalon6|10 years ago|reply
1) Reddit is a business and has certain interests at stake. If they want to seriously monetize their inventory (i.e., subreddits and pages), it needs to be with content that jives with advertisers. Odious content and sub-reddits are kryptonite to advertisers. Clorox doesn't want to see their advertising next to fat-shaming/racist/misogynistic horseshit.
2) Whether or not you think Reddit is suppressing "freedom of speech" is irrelevant (I personally don't think they are). What matters to Reddit is that those who contribute objectionable content according to advertisers leave the site, either because their subreddit has been shut down or because they find Reddit is suppressing their freedom of speech. All those pages were a cost to Reddit that had no chance of making money. When they're gone, they don't have to worry about them anymore. Reddit is probably rooting for other platforms, like Voat, to get traction so that people who want to post horseshit don't linger and leave immediately.
[+] [-] kzhahou|10 years ago|reply
Anyone know how /r/fph suddenly jumped so high?
[+] [-] archagon|10 years ago|reply
If Reddit can't survive this cleanup, then good fucking riddance.
[+] [-] mahouse|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noahbradley|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _pmf_|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fleitz|10 years ago|reply
It would be one thing if the group was about beating up fat people, but posting comments online about them is clearly under the ideals of expression.
If they want to ensure it's behavior and not ideas they should get a judge to rule on whether the expression would be constitutionally protected.
And yes, as a private entity it is their prerogative to ban certain ideas on their site, however, they should just be honest about it, they are limiting speech in a manner that would likely be unconstitutional if they were a government entity, aka. they are abridging freedom of expression.
[+] [-] evanriley|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokoon|10 years ago|reply
I'm really starting to doubt that plain users can put so much energy in hating fat people, and I'm really dubious that it would create such chaos.
I wonder if the popularity of reddit has not brought some attention from PR groups.