[danko]

For those who need the context -- when Reddit had that big bust-up last week about banning subreddits like /r/fatepeoplehate, aggrieved commenters were recommending that others migrate to voat.co. That effectively means that voat.co recently absorbed the slimy runoff of Reddit's worst element.

Given that, it isn't wholly surprising that their hosting service wanted no part of them.

[sergiotapia]

Please don't misrepresent what happened. A lot of people, myself included, left Reddit because I don't agree with the way the CEO is handling things. My leaving Reddit had nothing to do with fatpeoplehate being banned. I just don't agree with shadowbanning people and removing -distasteful- subreddits. I just don't visit them.

Reddit has become a marketing tool either way, so I that was just another drop in the bucket for me and I left.

[fragsworth]

They should have handled the /r/fatpeoplehate problem by hiding them from /r/all. Then nobody will see the subreddit unless they directly go to it and/or subscribe to it.

What they actually did reeks of incompetence. The reaction they got from banning the subreddit was entirely predictable, and because of this, gives the impression that they're pretty far disconnected from their users. It doesn't bode well for the long-term success of the site.

[m3rc]

Your personal reasons for not using reddit don't have any impact on the fact that most of the people switching over were either from the /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/kotakuinaction, and /r/conspiracy crowd. You can have whatever personal BS with the CEO you want, but the fact is that voat's ex-reddit userbase is all from what is essentially the worst parts of reddit.

[Someone1234]

> I just don't agree with shadowbanning people and removing -distasteful- subreddits. I just don't visit them.

Please don't misrepresent what happened.

FPH has been bullying, harassing, and abusing individuals for almost a year. Pictures of people out in public, Facebook profiles, other Redditors, the Imgur staff, brigading other subs (inc. weight loss subs), attacking popular bloggers, YouTubers, and people on Twitter. Often this was just for the "crime" of being overweight and the abuse was nasty.

I'm tired of people defending this behaviour as being "distasteful" or "offensive." Even the title of Reddit's announcement was "removing HARASSING subreddits." And if you don't believe that's what FPH was doing then you literally didn't spend even one minute on it.

Key Reddit staff quotes:

> subreddit as a platform to harass individuals

> We’re banning behavior, not ideas.

> based on their harassment of individuals

> When we are using the word "harass", we're not talking about "being annoying" or vote manipulation or anything. We're talking about men and women whose lives are being affected and worry for their safety every day, because people from a certain community on reddit have decided to actually threaten them, online and off, every day. When you've had to talk to as many victims of it as we have, you'd understand that a brigade from one subreddit to another is miles away from the harassment we don't want being generated on our site.

If this is what you support, please leave Reddit. I welcome you gone.

[sanswork]

Unfortunately as is always the case with every popular social network/forum in the history of the internet when the "slimy runoff" says they are leaving what they actually mean is they are going to spend all day on in the same place talking above leaving and how shit the current site now is.

Reddit would be a much nicer place if everyone who threatened to leave over last weeks bans actually left.

[MCRed]

Tell that to the ghost town that is slashdot or Kuro5hin. To be honest, I see the same thing happening here already. So many posts on the front page with no comments, so much less comment activity than before. Feels like HN is emptying out.

Where they're going I don't know.

[x5n1]

> Given that, it isn't wholly surprising that their hosting service wanted no part of them.

It is very surprising, the hosting company should be concerned with providing hosting... not moderating content. that's the job of the government and the legal system.

[slg]

And the German government, like all governments, (although Germany's laws are slightly stricter than most western governments) puts limits on free speech. Reddit has a tendency to demonstrate Godwin's law pretty quickly. For example, it is common practice to upvote a post with a link to a Nazi flag and a headline about some hated group in attempt to get that to be the default image for Google searches of that group. I imagine with Voat being a Reddit clone, similar things have popped up on it. Something like that could run afoul of Germany's laws regarding how to portray Nazi history and iconography. I could imagine Voat's hosting provider wanted to wash their hands of the site before the government actually tries to come after them.

[mootothemax]

What's the logical conclusion of that?

The government forcing private companies to host content that they disagree with?

You can't have it both ways.

[DasIch]

Given voat's new community that content will be everything from the more "friendly" organizing harrassment and doxxing people to child pornography.

Nobody in his right mind is ever going to knowingly host them for long.

[s73v3r]

Do you want your company to be associated with harassment, even if you're not doing it directly?

[monksy]

It's not just the worst. Its people that disagree with the current fad of "politically correctness." There were very few people that were sad to see most of those subs go, but those subs weren't well known.

The FPH was a response to the silly "body positive" movement that has been encouraging non-healthy behaviors. (The execution wasn't popular, but the idea of it is well supported)

Additionally: Another big reason for the migration is that the ban came out of nowhere. There was no interaction with the Admins, and there has been a threat that has been expressed by Pao. ["We're going to make it safe" (for who and what political adgenda has scared the users quite a bit)]

[zorpner]

Its people that disagree with the current fad of "politically correctness."

Given that the subs which were removed were not removed for offensive speech but rather for encouraging and tolerating criminal harassment off-site, these "people" are either extremely misinformed or are using free speech/political correctness as red herrings to conceal their desire to harass and abuse.

[unbudgingprawn]

FPH was posting photos of imgur's staff and sending them hatemail, I belive.

[s73v3r]

If you're one of the people who agree with the behavior of FPH and many of the more vile comments about the CEO, then you're part of the worst.

[ramy_d]

    Given that, it isn't wholly surprising that their hosting service wanted no part of them.

Which means, by their own judgment, since voat.co isn't "correct" they deserve no warning, no refund, and no negotiation in good faith - only termination. How can you say that isn't surprising?

[danso]

The motivation for deleting r/fatpeoplehate was because the admins asserted there were clear and identifiable patterns and instances of person-to-person harassment. Whatever you think about how moderation/censorship should be done...I don't think it's obvious that Reddit admins were trying to go the route of sanitization based merely on content...if that were their intention, they would've wiped out the many other subreddits that have much more controversial content and fewer subscribers (i.e. fewer people to raise a fuss about).

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/remov...

[finnn]

Ellen Pao, the new (interim) CEO of Reddit, Inc. is trying to make reddit into a "Safe Space", which seems to mean safe from ideas that might offend anyone. This is a big issue because reddit has historically been possibly one of the largest, most popular forums where free expression was allowed/encouraged, and they would generally try to protect their users and fight takedown requests.

[trjordan]

Typo in GP: it's fatpeoplehate that was banned. They posted pictures of fat people or food and made fun of people that were fat. You can't get to it anymore, because it's banned.

[MCRed]

Ellen Pao is CEO of Reddit and has said she does not believe in "free speech" (when referring to the site) and plans to clean it up, which basically means, removing everything that isn't politically correct. FPH is the poster child to try and justify the censorship but it goes far wider.

- Posts about Ellen Pao's legal problems and rulings are repeatedly deleted

- Subbreddits have been removed from showing up in /r/all so that popular posts (often critical of Pao) are not seen by the wider community

- Brigading and betting are going wild on the side of the "politically correct" factions such as SRS, while reddits that don't do it are demonized.

It's pretty much a civil war as much as a civil war can happen on a discussion forum.

[mootothemax]

From the little I understand, they were harassing people, and then comparing their subreddit to talking behind someone's back. Unpleasant enough, and conveniently ignoring the hate overflowing elsewhere.

[trentmb]

They didn't keep to themselves like, say, /r/coontown.

[sanswork]

The posting was slimy(for example posting other reddit users progress shots to make fun of them is slimy). Harassment across subreddits by a lot of the users is what got them banned.

[pas]

http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/39c0n3/cmv_red...

[bluecalm]

I don't like you labeling those people "slimy runoff of Reddit's worst element". I think this kind of labeling is commonly used these days (and especially on Reddit) to shut down unpopular ideas. There were 150k subsribers to fph and probably several times more readers. It was one of the most active subreddits at the time of the ban. How is it "slimy runoff of Reddit's worst element"? Maybe you know, there were many reasonable, frustrated with PC culture in there who just wanted to vent sometimes.