I find it kind of funny that people are getting so excited. Reddit has long had a policy of banning users who breach the site rules. /r/The_donald has long had a policy of breaching site rules including brigading, harassment, threats and sharing personal information. The users of that forum have literally been linked to public shootings. Given how often the breaches occur it seems quite reasonable to actually step in.
You'll note that with literally any other sub-reddit, the response to this behaviour would have simply been to shut down the sub-reddit. How many second chances do you need? Personally I would've thought the first person shooting up a restaurant would've been the red line but apparently not.
> The users of that forum have literally been linked to public shootings.
I dislike that subreddit as much as anyone, but that’s guilt by peaceful association and can be leveled at a lot of different websites, video games, and political parties.
> can be leveled at a lot of different websites, video games, and political parties.
Everyone - every signle website, author, pundit, politician, etc who finds themselves mentioned favourably in a mass shooter manifesto should at least ask themselves how they got there and what has gone wrong with their messaging. There may not be anything they can do, but a lot of places seem to think that hate never leads to action.
Didn't the Christchurch shooter also mention people like Nelson Mandela and MLK? Does this mean that their teachings are irrevocably tainted now?
For that matter, look at the 2017 Congressional baseball shooting - should Pelosi resign over the impact her words had? (Along with the rest of the DNC's leadership?)
Point being, mentally ill people do weird shit for illogical reasons. That doesn't make it the fault of whatever they used to justify their actions.
Nelson Mandela did spend thirty years in prison for terrorism and was vindicated only in hindsight. This comes back to the terrorist vs. freedom fighter conversation; looking at the rightness of the cause, the appropriateness and necessity of the methods, the power relations context, the violence carried out by the other side, and then still being very reluctant to support the use of violence to achieve a political goal.
(What was the essential difference between, say, the occupation of the Malheur wildlife refuge in 2016 by armed extremists and the occupation of the Dublin GPO in 1916 by armed extremists? Which could be considered mentally ill and why?)
(I also find it interesting that the most basic, minimal kind of critique - asking what the effect of the work is on the audience - has generated such outrage. I haven't called for censorship, I haven't even called for self-censorship, not directly attributed moral responsibility. All I said was should think about whether there was moral responsibility or not.)
This is my impression of the comment chain so far:
The root said "The users of that forum have literally been linked to public shootings.", as part of an argument that /r/the_donald is a shithole and deserves to be banned. The reply was that all sorts of people find themselves in mass shooter manifestos, and that this doesn't imply any sort of culpability whatsoever.
You then replied saying that everyone who finds themselves in such a manifesto needs to reexamine their messaging. This would seem to imply agreement with the root - that since /r/the_donald was mentioned by mass shooters, it's bad.
So if person X spends years writing about how Jews are an evil conspiracy that run the world, and then someone shoots up a synagogue leaving a manifesto saying "finally I'm going to do something" and citing X, those are totally unrelated?
And BTW, is we're speaking of t_d, I never seen there anything even close to "how Jews are an evil conspiracy that run the world". I've seen this on other alt-right places (like voat and some gab areas) but never even once on t_d. Of course, I don't spent hours every day reading every comment, so maybe somewhere in the depth of the comment trees there's stuff like that - but on a casual look I can't see anything even remotely like what you describe.
Likely yes, they are. There were people murdering Jews well before Internet, TV, radio, printing and arguably even written language existed. There still are. Attributing this to a random wacko, without specific casual proof, is likely to be wrong. Of course, in some cases (yes, that case, thankyouverymuch) there's ample proof. In most cases we're dealing with on the Internet, there isn't. And a single reference by a demented individual, without further proof, can't be taken as such. Otherwise you basically pass the control of the moral norms into the hand of demented wackos - the only thing they need to do to ruin anybody is to commit some atrocity and declare they were doing it in your name. Obviously that alone can't be a proof of anything. You need to examine whether they were sincerely inspired by those ideas, where those ideas indeed intend to inspire such reaction (some people are sure TV is full of secret messages telling them to kill the President, that doesn't mean we have to shut down the TV broadcasts) and whether this reaction is something that is inherent in those ideas.
Also, there is a myriad of possibilities between "totally unrelated" and "have direct causal link which imparts responsibility". If somebody is on the left politically, is he "totally unrelated" to Lenin and Pol Pot? Not exactly, they probably share some ideas somewhere. Is he responsible for all atrocities Lenin and Pol Pot committed? I don't think many people on the left would agree to that. And here we have direct link between ideology and actions, acknowledged by everybody. You are extending it to actions of insane people which may be just using ideology to dress up their demented impulses - this is even worse distortion.
People are responsible for their actions. But if some crazy person mentions somebody in a positive sense, that by itself does not impart responsibility on the person they mention.
A motivated investigator can always find extremists to discredit a large group. For example, among Bernie supporters, recently, talking about "an evil conspiracy that runs the world":
> if they try to do that [nominate someone other than Bernie at a brokered convention], forget the "political" part of the "political revolution" [1]
with thousands of upvotes and no moderator or admin action.
And some of the top comments on that post:
> If they do that it's time to revolt.
> This is a peaceful revolution. If they fight against it, they risk violence.
> Okay fine, a socialist revolution it is.
> Yeah the convention is a canary. If the canary dies we riot.
There's enough evidence of unmoderated site rules violations on that one post to shut down that sub if reddit wanted to.
But reddit doesn't want to, they're trying to tip the scales by censoring half of America.
Asking yourself why you were mentioned is not at all the same thing as taking responsibility. If a mass shooter mentioned how much they appreciated me, my work, or a group I ran (or was even in) I'd be concerned and would wonder why. That seems like a perfectly healthy response.
Actually that's the opposite of a healthy response. There's no reason to investigate why someone likes something unless it played an active role in the thing that is being investigated. Asking yourself why Joe Dirt liked listening to your podcast about cats and listed it on his BAD THING manifesto is truly at the polar opposite end of what normal people would do. They would definitely not feel concerned that he listed them as an inspiration.
I bet a lot of people like doughnuts. Just because they might write that in something when they get infamous does not make a doughnut shop question their actions.
>I bet a lot of people like doughnuts. Just because they might write that in something when they get infamous does not make a doughnut shop question their actions.
Are you seriously implying that hanging out and posting on 8chan,Voat, or alt-right subs is similar to eating doughnuts when it comes to race motivated mass shootings? Even with just the raw probability numbers it's off by many orders of magnitude.
Eating doughnuts for breakfast and committing murder is a random co-incidence, are you implying it was completely a random coincidence that those kind of sites show up repeatedly as hang out spots in mass hate killings?
But those sites are all just being racist ironically, which lets them off the hook. There are no actual racists anywhere on the internet - everyone is just a bored teenager posting edgelord memes and role-playing.
Anything by association is part of reality and I'm not sure how people are supposed to negotiate with that. If you march with a KKK rally, are you associated with the KKK now?
Also, presumably not everything the KKK does is bad. Is it wrong that people in the KKK are all lumped together?
These are all questions of guilt by association, no?
No, not if you "loaded in the past". But if you have recently engaged positively with it, sure.
Plus that's kind of two degrees removed from the original comment. If someone who does a horrible thing cites a community as a motivation/inspiration, yeah that group should absolutely at least think about what that says about them. It's not an immediate condemnation of guilt, but if there's strong evidence that that community's behaviour or ideology provided motivation, or if there's a repeated pattern, then it's a problem. The alternative is to say there's nothing wrong with white supremacists because all those people who commit racial violence citing white supremacy are just incidentally related, or that there's nothing wrong with gangs because we should avoid "linking" people who commit gang violence to their associates.
> No, not if you "loaded in the past". But if you have recently engaged positively with it, sure.
There was a lady who used YouTube in April 2018 who went to Google and shot three people. I recently engaged positively with YouTube. I also engaged positively with YouTube in April 2018.
Am I linked to a shooter simply because we used and enjoyed the same content on the same website?
What about brigading, harassment and intent to incite violence of other subreddits related to Sanders, r/politics, r/news, r/worldnews? Are they under similar quarantines and rules?
They quite literally are subject to the same rules, they comply with those rules though. There's a very distinct difference between what /r/politics does - which is comply with the rules to the best of their abilities, vs what /r/the_donald does which is to turn a blind eye because they disagree with the rules.
Do you have any examples of 'intent to incite violence' from those subreddits? The difference is that moderators of those subreddits try to remove that type of content.
That's quite a dishonest question. I asked a person that made a claim to provide examples of their claim. I have made no claims about TD inciting violence.
The mods of t_d stickied a recruiting post for the deadly Unite the Right rally in which it was readily acknowledged that their users would be joining ranks with actual Nazis.
>Prior to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, The_Donald hosted a stickied post encouraging members to attend the rally and march alongside neo-Nazi and “ethnostate” groups, because, “In this case, the pursuit of preserving without shame white culture, our goals happen to align.” [0]
That's not true. It's plastered all over not to brigade. NP links are required to prevent it. Ironically T_D deals with brigading from other subs all the time.
The mods at T_D have followed every rule to the tee. Other subs are not expected to control all of their users, but at least to enforce the site rules, T_D mods have done this. I haven't seen any evidence otherwise. Guilty until proven innocent if we want to use the fairest judgement standard.
I don't have links at the ready, but I have seen multiple instances of TD brigading with pinned topics. I am not saying I know for a fact it has happened recently, but it has happened. I don't blame you for wanting evidence, but their track record doesn't give them the benefit of the doubt.
The nerve you have to accuse, then say you don't have links of proof, then demand links of proof from me when I say I've seen brigading. They are both anecdotal and yet you feel like yours is right and mine is laughable.
Neither side can say who is brigading for sure but only one side is getting banned.
The sanders subreddits and /r/politics brigading is prevalent from what I've seen. Hell, it was an issue on one of the Democratic debates about his supporters brigading. Warren seemed to think it was bad.
Anti-brigading rules were enacted on T_D and you can still see them in full force. I have never seen any pinned brigading posts. Other subs have not done the same an yet they haven't even been quarantined.
I don't have any links and you just said you don't have any links with proof of T_D brigading. Why would I keep track of that? I'm not the company banning users for their ideologies and pretending it was because of "brigading" while providing no proof. I'm the guy saying it's an unpassable purity test and no sub would be safe under the same scrutiny. It's targeted and wrong.
All of this is anecdotal and that's how you know it's targeted. There hasn't been one sliver of evidence that T_D mods supported brigading.
Yes there are probably a lot of reports, but that's because it's a political subreddit in this climate, of course there are, especially when everyone else on the site hates them.
Reddit is now officially 100% an echo-chamber. Congrats you're on the way to be Digg. Good riddance.
You are ignoring the obvious for anyone observing the sub since its creation. I had meme post on Reddit long ago near its creation on if the sub was satire or not (it was started as satire in support of candidate Trump). Think AdviceAnimals Afroid to Ask Andy meme from Parks and Rec. Shortly after that the mod team turned over and it went down it's current path of clear rule breaking, racism, misogyny, and worse. You could read through the comment son most posts and find any sort of rule breaking behavior if not outright calls for violence. It's an echo chamber mods could not (or would not) stay on top of with a ton of reports to Reddit admins.
The current policy applied is to stifle the sub without a full ban to eliminate publication of its death. The policies for new mods are designed to either force in people who are disconnected from typical subscribers and can enforce the rules without bias or demonstrate how much of a cesspool it is and strengthen the argument to remove entirely.
I suspect this is a case of an isolated demand for rigor. It’s quite difficult to have a political reddit with 700,000 subscribers and not have comments or post being made that break the rules. Especially when there are strong incentives for people to use alts to make false flag posts.
I strongly doubt r/the_donald is being fairly treated by reddit when most of the admin team has a fundamental objection to the sub’s message. The admin team in the past have shown they cannot act professionally. For example the CEO edited user’s messages in the r/the_donald to try and create discord between users.
> For example the CEO edited user’s messages in the r/the_donald to try and create discord between users.
This is inaccurate - it was very clearly not intended to 'create discord between users' and claiming that it was is at best politically biased and at worse a lie.
I just googled it and it seems like he changed messages that were insulting him to insult moderators of the subreddit. The parent's comment doesn't seem wrong to me, if that's true. He altered communications of reddit users to make it look like they were insulting reddit moderators, in such a way as to falsely attribute those insults to the original authors.
You're still spinning it unfairly, by leaving out relevant information. It was a pranking attempt that fell flat, and was neither intended to nor successful in having the effect of surreptitiously turning T_D users against each other. The admin in question quickly admitted to the deed and explained his motives. Attributing other, conflicting motives without further justification is misleading at best.
No you're spinning it by saying "It was a pranking attempt that fell flat". Either way do you really think it's okay for a CEO to "prank" users by silently editing their posts then only admitting to it after being caught. Seems like the "prank" excuse is a spin.
If it was a prank he would have done it and admitted it without getting caught in-between.
Also, it has to be funny to be a prank, otherwise it's bullying, where was the punchline?
Imagine Mark Zuckerberg using FB admin rights to turn a "Donald Trump is the worst president of our generation" post by Biden into "Bernie Sanders would be the worst president of our generation".
Would characterizing that as "an attempt to turn democrats against each other" be fair?
Yeah, it is clear evidence that reddit and this subreddit are in open conflict for quite a while. I find it quite impressive admins didn't just end this spat, but instead go more creative routes like this one or creating quarantine mode for subs, beside the infamous & less impressive events. I totally had expected this sub to get banned already. Well see about the future...
I personally think that this article buried the lede as far as controversial Reddit actions go. Users now can be (and have been) banned for upvoting posts in quarantined subreddits (both on the right - T_D - and the left - Chapo Trap House - among others). I've seen controversy erupt all around Reddit about this and it doesn't feel right to me. If the content that people are upvoting is bad enough to get banned over shouldn't it just be removed from the site and not left up to upvote?
Edit: the official policy is that only upvoting rule breaking posts will be cause for banning which makes sense. The Redditors I've heard from claim differently but are obviously biased. So take what I said with a grain of salt.
> Users now can be (and have been) banned for upvoting posts in quarantined subreddits
I've heard this thrown around, but I thought it was for upvoting posts that are later removed for violating Reddit's rules - not just upvoting any posts on quarantined subreddits.
I can't figure out if this is the case, though, here is what Reddit said, I think:
> Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension.
And that's fair. I should've done a better job differentiating between the official word and the word of random Redditors that have a vested interest in making themselves look better. I have to assume the actual implementation will look for like the former than the latter.
Correct me if I'm wrong and I read it wrong, but I think you're mixing up things here.
> Users that have more than 500 karma in quarantined subreddits outside of The Donald will not be allowed on the list of approved applicants [to be a moderator]
This is only for being a moderator. Simply upvoting posts (that don't break any rules) in quarantined subreddits does not get you punished.
> If the content that people are upvoting is bad enough to get banned over shouldn't it just be removed from the site and not left up to upvote?
What ends up happening in this subreddit is that the bad content doesn't get reported/deleted, which is what leads to the subreddit being quarantined in the first place. The whole point of a quarantine is exactly to push people to report bad content, and acts as a warning. This new change makes sense as far as pushing people to report said content and not keep promoting it.
I also don't think the content is being "left to be upvoted", but rather when found, they will retroactively flag anyone who upvoted it instead of reporting it. But the problem is that the content often doesn't get flagged/deleted until it gets to the top of the subreddit. This is the problem they are trying to fix with this change.
> Simply upvoting posts (that don't break any rules) in quarantined subreddits does not get you punished.
The problem is that parenthetical, and determining it. Users were told that upvoting rule-breaking posts would risk a sitewide ban, without being told what content it was or what rules it broke.
Reddit says it gets to punish users by declaring any content "bad", by arbitrary or overly broad or even unspecified rules. That's the uproar.
This is not trying to improve behavior, this is trying to deplatform wrongthink.
> Users were told that upvoting rule-breaking posts would risk a sitewide ban
The consequences are very gradual, starting with warnings, then going up to temporary and eventually permanent ban. So it won't come out of nowhere, you will have plenty of change to adjust your behavior.
> Reddit gets to declare any content "bad" by arbitrary or overly broad or even unspecified rules. That's the uproar.
Not really, they have very precise rules and content policy, which they use to take down content.
I do agree that being told which content you're being punished for, and what specific rules said content broke, would help users adjust their behavior, but you also run the chance, as with any sort of moderation, to teaching abusers ways to bypass the system. That's why things like shadowbanning exists.
At the end of the day, as yesterday's ruling for Youtube showed [0], these websites are not public forums, and they are free to have any rules they want. If you're not happy or you don't trust that they apply their content policy fairly, you can move to a different website with different rules.
That's Reddit's content policy, and it's not precise at all. Pretty much anything can be deemed to fall under "threatens, harasses, or bullies" if it speaks against any group or opinion whatsoever. And the enforcement has been entirely selective and biased, targeting conservative subreddits and supporters, while "eat the rich" type posts are celebrated.
Right, Reddit is a private platform and can choose to host or not any content it wants. I don't think anyone is disputing that. We can still wish Reddit would choose to act in favor of free speech and openness rather than choosing to deplatform opinions that fall on the unpopular side.
The actual source is the Transparency report [0] from yesterday:
> When we expanded our quarantine policy, we created an appeals process for sanctioned communities. One of the goals was to “force subscribers to reconsider their behavior and incentivize moderators to make changes.” While the policy attempted to hold moderators more accountable for enforcing healthier rules and norms, it didn’t address the role that each member plays in the health of their community.
> Today, we’re making an update to address this gap: Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities.
Seems like their justification matches my guess in the parent post.
What would the fallout be? The collapse of quarantined communities? The policy only applies to individuals that consistently upvote policy-breaking[1] content within quarantined communities which is pretty clearly qualified. Those individuals will also receive a warning(s?) prior to being banned. Seems like a pretty fair policy all around seeing that upvoting is a conscious choice.
> This is only for being a moderator. Simply upvoting posts (that don't break any rules) in quarantined subreddits does not get you punished.
That was a requirement given for being a new mod at /r/the_donald. There is also a separate, new rule change revealed in the recent "Transparency Report" that says that users who consistently upvote rule-breaking content will be banned.
> The whole point of a quarantine is exactly to push people to report bad content, and acts as a warning. This new change makes sense as far as pushing people to report said content and not keep promoting it.
That may be the case. On the other hand, that may only be the pretense. Every four years we see the same thing happen on Reddit. We saw massive upvoting of anything related to Obama, which at that time it was just thought to be organic (and maybe it even was).
Then in 2016 we saw massive Bernie Sanders support to a swift and sudden change to Hillary Clinton support. That was followed by the "Correct the Record" movement and then later "Share Blue." These were all coordinated efforts to inorganically promote one political party and suppress another.
But that wasn't enough to keep r/the_donald posts from regularly popping up on r/all. That's when they quarantined it. Now they're taking it even further.
Before, political minority users may not post out of fear of being downvoted or targeted by those searching through their post history, but they felt safe upvoting content they agreed with. But now, there is this implication that they could face repercussions for simply upvoting the wrong thing.
Sure, we're told it's only for things like illegal content or racial slurs, and only in quarantined subs. However, we'd be stupid not to see the political bias on Reddit. There's ambiguity over what counts as the wrong thing to upvote. They don't tell you what content you upvoted that you're being punished for. The net result? The "wrong" type of political content will be naturally suppressed by users now being reluctant to upvote it.
I'm sorry but this is classic tinfoil conspiracy theorizing. I do regularly check T_D out of curiosity, and almost every single time I see rule breaking comments in top posts. Threats of violence, doxxing, etc. If you can find similar content on left leaning subreddits on a regular basis that doesn't get reported and deleted right away, then I'd be happy to entertain your theory, but I have not seen it.
Also, the Donald wasn't quarantined until a few months ago, which is long long after The_Donald peaked and started popping up on r/all.
I wasn't just talking about the_donald, but the broader effects of no longer having the promise of a "secret ballot." When people know their vote is being observed, they change their behavior. My point is how this will favor Reddit's political majority and disfavor the minority.
> My point is how this will favor Reddit's political majority and disfavor the minority.
If you cannot support a political position without consistently violating Reddit's rules that do not restrict any normal behaviors of reasonable political debate, then what you're supporting probably shouldn't be described merely as a "political minority".
Your assumption here is that the enforcement of the new rule will be executed perfectly and without bias, and further that people will believe it will be enforced that way. This totally misses my central point.
> Your assumption here is that the enforcement of the new rule will be executed perfectly and without bias,
Not at all. Even if Reddit was completely biased and never enforced the rules against liberal-oriented cesspools, that wouldn't make T_D's current norms and behaviors any more acceptable.
The only problem is if you believe that Reddit will go far beyond their stated content rules and start punishing civilized discourse on the basis of political alignment. That would have a damaging chilling effect, but I think it's pretty clear Reddit has their hands full with rebellious mods and users who aren't even trying to stay within the posted rules and are making plenty of posts that really should be removed no matter where you fall on the spectrum of political beliefs.
Then they should remove those rule-breaking posts and ban the posters, but that's already the case.
My point is that I think political minority users will believe that they may be punished for upvoting content that doesn't explicitly break the rules. It doesn't even need to be true. As long as users believe it, that will be enough to impact their behavior. In fact, it's already enough just to know that big brother is watching what you upvote. This passively results in upvoted political content being more in line with Reddit's political bias.
> I see rule breaking comments in top posts. Threats of violence, doxxing, etc.
I also check out t_d occasionally and have never seen a single threat of anything.
On the contrary, the community seems well self-regulated. I have often seen comments that are overly harsh (such as unnecessary personal insults) being condemned by other posters for being disrespectful. I have never seen this on any other forum. IMO t_d is a model for free, open and respectful self-regulated discussion.
>Then in 2016 we saw massive Bernie Sanders support to a swift and sudden change to Hillary Clinton support. That was followed by the "Correct the Record" movement and then later "Share Blue." These were all coordinated efforts to inorganically promote one political party and suppress another.
I see this claim often, and having been a Reddit user from back when there no comments and no subreddits, I can tell you what you're claiming is not remotely the most plausible option.
Right from the beginning Reddit swings left wing and libertarian, their first preference is someone like Ron Paul and Sanders. That's why you see competing candidates demonized, and those candidates idolized. They don't like the mainstream GOP at all.
The sudden swift that you're talking about happened it was clear that Sanders would lose the primaries and after he conceded the race, and told his supporters to support Clinton. Reddit didn't like Clinton in 2008 and in 2016, but they would take her any day over Trump or any other GOP candidate except Ron Paul.
Why would you expect Reddit to keep supporting Sanders after he conceded the race? Who would that help? That would help Trump. That's why a lot of right wingers including Russian trolls encouraged making Sanders supporters angry to suppress turnout. That's why you saw the massive shift after the primary because that sub on Reddit does not like Trump at all and would even have Clinton over Trump. Think of the typical Sanders or Warren supporter, would they support Trump or Clinton as President?
All these complaints about Shareblue and CTR are just noise, and what T_D and conspiracy subs convinced a bunch of people was happening.
Why couldn't CTR or Shareblue suppress Sanders support and chime up Clinton support on Reddit before Sanders gave up? The Sanders sub was regularly multiple times in r/all and Clinton support and subs weren't popular at all even in r/politics. If they were so powerful, why can't SB or CTR suppress Sanders support over the past few months when he has become a viable candidate?
No one can give a straight answer, because there isn't one, yet they are absolutely convinced of their version of events. It's the modern day version of an urban legend given how many people believe in the narrative you posted.
"Don't encourage them" is a standard admonishment given to people in a group IRL when one member is acting out. And it's demonstrably impossible for moderators to find and remove 100% of content in violation of policy.
It pushes added responsibility on the upvoters to think before they upvote, but perhaps that is a fair request to make of forum participants.
(And taking off my "community moderator" hat and putting on my "sysadmin" hat---both dusty from lack of use---using sock-puppets or a like-minded collective to brigate-upvote content so that it is visible before it gets banhammered is a known attack vector against the infrastructure itself, and mitigating that attack vector via added penalty for the supporting accounts doesn't seem unreasonable).
>It pushes added responsibility on the upvoters to think before they upvote, but perhaps that is a fair request to make of forum participants.
That's nice in theory, but there's no clear guidelines for what you're not allowed to upvote, and there's no transparency on anything, just user reports.
For example, this post[0] from someone who claims to have received a warning from the reddit admins for upvoting a post titled "Reminder that the police steam more money each year than burglars. Totaly normal country", linking to a screenshot of an article about law enforcement seizing $181,000 from someone. In the comments, OP posted a screenshot[1] of the message they claim was sent to them, which states "abusive content is not acceptable on Reddit, nor is engaging with it".
This content doesn't seem abusive to me, it seems like a totally standard reddit post. There is _far_ more abusive content on the front page regularly. How would I have known not to upvote that?
Yes, if a user can be banned for repeatedly upvoting posts that encourage brigading or actual violence, I don’t see why users who repeatedly upvote the same content shouldn’t be included. Either there are rules which have meaningful sanctions or there aren’t.
Reddit will ban users for upvoting RULE BREAKING posts on quarantined subreddits. In other words, they're going to ban the people posting rule breaking content and also people promoting it via upvotes (after warnings/repeat behaviour/etc).
To let others know about this without including the RULE BREAKING part is misleading.
Given they don't have to specify the rules broken nor the posts which broke the rule, that clarification is essentially irrelevant to the way in which this policy will likely be used.
You didn't even mention the worst aspect of the upvote policy which is that when they warn you not to upvote content that goes against their content policy they don't tell you what you upvoted that was found to infringe it. You have to try to guess what you did wrong I guess?
Each post on the forum has an forced-visible explanation of what content should be flagged. Reddit was careful to remove plausible deniability as an excuse before taking more drastic steps.
The sub mods don't remove the rule breaking content allowing it to be upvoted so the site admins step in to remove those accounts. Now they are working on that first part by adding mods that will remove rule breaking content.
Anything said by supporters of this and the other subs you mention are coming from an echo chamber of self victimization. The Youtube related first amendment case form earlier in the week is directly analogous to this but Reddit Admins are trying to handle this on site and not draw media attention to their actions or the sub.
The actual policy as stated is if a user consistently upvotes policy violating content that is later removed in a quarantined sub they will be warned and banned if they continue. They are removing violating content it's just adding the fact that you shouldn't be upvoting this content because upvotes = higher visibility and support, it's supposed to mean 'this is good content.'
As far as I understand none of the people who are being warned for upvoting are given a copy of the post that triggered the warning. This makes it quite difficult for people to adjust their behaviour because they might be upvoting content the genuinely believe is not breaking the rules. If you weren’t assuming good faith on Reddit’s part then you might suspect they were doing this so they could distribute warnings to users who were supporting wrong opinions. The more innocent explanation is they either overlooked this or they don’t want to distribute the rule breaking content. I believe twitter often shows you a copy of the offending tweet when you get temporarily suspended.
There is much more content than people. To the extent that a platform engages in policing thought, people will always be a much cheaper enforcement target than content.
This is fearmongering. Tencent owns a small part of Reddit, has no board seat, and has no influence. They can’t “pull their money” so they would have no leverage to make threats.
And by the way do you know who is the majority owner of Tencent? Naspers, a South African media company.
> And by the way do you know who is the majority owner of Tencent? Naspers, a South African media company
Naspers does not own a majority position in Tencent. They own closer to ~31% of the company. A large position, however that means very little given it's a Chinese juggernaut (see: Yahoo vs China in the Alibaba & Alipay spats).
Tencent invested in reddit's series D financing round in 2019. Can't figure out what % they "own", but OP implying full ownership is not entirely correct.
Edit: and looks like OP edited their comment to clarify.
Condenast has a huge PR, advertising, and media business in China, which would've been a near impossible task even for a domestic Chinese company, let alone foreign, or American one on top of that.
The propaganda ministry razed the media landscape to the ground over the last 5 years. Even completely apolitical companies like publishers of professional literature, science textbooks, photo journals, and children books got a boot.
The state has also been said to forcefully breaking up big media groups, denying mergers in between ad/pr/media companies.
Seeing Condenast thriving in China, knowing how things there are now, is very suspicious.
It's ironic that this publication is ostensibly anti-censorship. One of the few things I know about this subreddit is how quick they were to delete posts and ban commenters that didn't fit in with their worldview.
Similary the conservative subreddit has a rule stating it is not a debate platform and dissent or debate will be removed.
It's an echo chamber of self-victimization that probably sees the Youtube case earlier this week on first amendment application as both a win for private companies and a loss of what they consider their right to free speech.
The same echo chambers exist on the left. I was banned almost immediately from the Bernie subreddit for asking why he's running on a platform of getting money out of politics while at the same time being the most aggressive campaign when it comes to requesting donations. The "I am once again asking for your financial support" meme perfectly captures this.
Yeah, those are not the same thing and your point would be sen as disingenuous unless you were asking about the difference vs stating them as the same.
Hes running to get big/dark/foreign money out of politics ad is funded 100% by citizen/supporter donations not special interests.
He could push for a public funding system to eliminate both types but would need either careful legislation, a supreme court reversal, or a constitutional amendment (and probably both the first 2 to work long term anyway).
On top of that, the conservative subreddit literally has rules about it not being a place of debate or questions. Compare it to the Bernie sub rules and see if you can spot how once again both sides are not the same.
> I was banned almost immediately from the Bernie subreddit for asking why he's running on a platform of getting money out of politics while at the same time being the most aggressive campaign when it comes to requesting donations.
It seems like you were rightly banned for being deliberately obtuse. Pretending that there's no difference between grassroots small money donations and the kind of money that Sanders wants to eliminate from politics is straight up trolling. Even if you believe that both categories need to be eliminated, you didn't start with anything resembling a lead-in to a reasonable discussion on the matter.
Don't know about the politics, but we beat up each other too much:
People end up in groups based on their journey to find someone who validates their hardship.
In 201x, the process goes something like this:
When we struggle, we reach out for help, and rather than finding articles that are soothing chicken soup, they're news articles that we are worthy of contempt based on characteristics we have. The reader may get angered, as preposterously, some how, a specified group of people's needs and niche circumstance eclipses everything else. The algorithms leads to a string of sensational articles about how society needs to be restructured honor the whims of people based on a trait and exceptional edgecase circumstances.
Respect is conditional based on tribal loyalty and repeating generalized tropes with religious zeal - if you dare to dissect it as a social construction - you're out of the club. You're not enlightened, don't get it, and generally what's wrong with society, somehow.
I think general miserliness and insensitivity create the conditions for people to resort to unifying over absurd polarizing generalizations above all else. If our feelings and worth are based on preconditions, I'd assume it'd be pretty hard to build consensus, cooperate and make everyone feel loved and cared for.
That said, when people squabble over rhetorical devices instead of unifying to improve the conditions of legal persons universally, it's great for the stock market.
What is really happening is reddit is just taking over all the most popular subreddits. They want to control the main vibe of the site. Understandable for a corporation but not in line with the original idea of the founders.
This sub is popular among a small group but overall despised by the community. It openly flaunts the site rules and promotes content that draws a black eye from media attention. The current moves are though to be aimed at stifling the sub until it dies off vs a full ban as that would quickly draw headiness even though Youtube got the legal go ahead vs free speech rights just this week.
I meant in terms of overall Reddit users. If it is the 6th most popular web site in the US then however many active, non bot subs this subreddit has is minor and probably makes up a much larger percent of reports and issues than it should. It can't buy awards or make ad revenue (while quarantined) so is a huge cost center and time drain as well.
Advertising and free discussion do not mix, at all. It is not surprising this sort of thing is being done by a company whose true customers are their advertisers, not users. Internet companies who mess with user content to appease advertisers are going to learn soon enough that they can't serve both masters at least for anything anyone is very passionate about, like politics.
When I was a kid®, this sort content lived in web forums or newsgroups hosted by interested parties. You were unlikely to find any of it unless you went looking for it. It is probably best if it goes back to that.
Internet pro-tip: If you don't want to be beholden to reddit, YouTube, Twitter, etc. don't use them, it is really that simple.
The problem is there aren't many places where free discussion can be had without ad funding. It's one of the reasons I started plebia.io -- because ad funded discussion platforms will ultimately make decisions that are in the best interest of their customers (ad companies), not their users.
I do not own it in a legal/licensed sense, I own the bytes that are stored in my database. As it it is easily queryable by me, where it wouldn't normally be if only using the API.
Its more than that. A notifier let’s you know who’s interested in what. Second level analysis of that is trends of interest over time or weighted interest vs influence (measured via user karma).
I think it would be more effective and less heavy-handed/controversial to take the newgrounds.com approach and give you more voting power if you upvote stuff that doesn't receive @dang-action and less voting power if you upvote stuff that eventually gets blammed/rejected/banned.
I always thought it was a clever maneuver on newgrounds' part. Not to say this doesn't already happen on any forums, but my real point is that overtly punishing users with disciplinary action for what they upvote (as Reddit started doing) really seems like the worst of all solutions. Like something that was specifically engineered to maximize user outrage.
Maybe, that would require a more complex voting algorithm though which might be constrictive at Reddit's scale. I doubt it would be less controversial though, r/td is already convinced reddit is faking their subscriber count adding a shadowy vote weight to every users account probably wouldn't get a pass.
>I wonder how the tone of Hacker News, for example, is changed by users upvoting comments in clear violation of forum policy.
It seems to me that Hacker News' singular focus doesn't allow for either strong, purposeful ideology nor for people intently metagaming the community to signal boost ideology. Maybe HN has this problem in a lesser capacity for PR submarines/advertising, but it's not nearly as severe as what the people in "the donald" are doing.
Worth pointing out that Reddit up/downvotes have been heavily monitored for as long as Reddit fought voting rings. At least ten years. Any "suspicious" account has its voting rights neutered: The arrows become placebo buttons. I've observed this with every Reddit account I've owned (another certain website does this).
It's far more active than I would have imagined from this sort of splinter forum. Though it's also the height of T_D drama which lights the perfect fire under a splinter forum.
It's been active for months. They knew Reddit was moving in this direction over a year ago and then when they got quarantined last summer they sped up development and released it. T_D had close to 1 million members, so it's a big population of users.
It's been the official website of the T_D subreddit for awhile now.
This is not the first wave of drama T_D mods have dealt with. They've dealt with quarantines, post-editing, brigading, and ranking algorithm changes, that's why they have a site already and are using it as a primary platform as opposed to a backup (although the subreddit still has a much larger user base, the content is fresher on the main site).
Also, half of America approves of Trump's job, it's not crazy to think that there's a large amount of traffic, they have to go somewhere online.
Just wait. Next week they'll be trying to impeach him because he asked the prime minister of Italy for a pizza. By the end of that, he'll be up at about 58%. Good job!
So I tried to visit https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/ to see what the fuss is about, but apparently Reddit wants me to jump through hoops to give them my email to even be able to view it. Is there any archive site or whatever that will let me view this subreddit without giving reddit my personal information?
The sub has been quarantined and I think requires you to be a verified user and go directly to the sub to view like its not listed on the site or even visible in third party apps.
What does this do besides drive them to Whatsapp? Indian Nationalist movement grew to the level it is today in part because of the rapid growth of Nationalist whatsapp echo-chambers.
In the end, the reddit admins aren't responsible for moderating whatsapp. Replacing TD moderators isn't a solution to end white nationalism, it's just about policing a forum which consistently flaunts site rules. If those people want to build their own site, with blackjack and hookers, they're more than welcome to. I mean, that's where Voat came from.
Whatever one's personal views, selective enforcement has been used as a stick with which to beat certain groups and should concern everyone, even if–perhaps especially if–you aren't a member of the group being beaten at the moment:
Really tasteless, given the actual number of Indian Hindu nationalists currently physically using sticks to beat and kill Muslims, given how that's the context of the current thread. Those people should be deplatformed and jailed. They hate other people an plan violence against them. Should be a really simple moderation decision and really simple adminisgrative decision to report them and provide their user data to law enforcement.
If anything, the_donald has gotten preferential treatment compared to everyone else. They've routinely broke rules and ignored warnings from admins. If any other subreddit did what they've done it'd be banned instantly. Instead Reddit keeps giving r/T_D leeway because they don't want to seem biased.
Value to whom? Reddit has decided that they do not value the users being deplatfomed. Any value you receive from the platform as a user is a byproduct.
Pool funds for VMs and fire up phpBB or IRC if unhappy with the platforms available.
Gab did that and was summarily attacked by silicon Valley et al., so I guess you would have to build an entirely separate internet infrastructure instead of just opening up shop with phpBB.
>What does this do besides drive them to Whatsapp?
Whatsapp, etc is not nearly as powerful a recruitment tool as a service designed to create communities, like reddit. Not saying it's not a problem (it is obviously), but it's still limiting compared to reddit.
> “We’ve been running a research project over last year, and when someone relatively famous gets no platformed by Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, there's an initial flashpoint, where some of their audience will move with them” Joan Donovan, Data and Society’s platform accountability research lead, told me on the phone, “but generally the falloff is pretty significant and they don’t gain the same amplification power they had prior to the moment they were taken off these bigger platforms.”
> There’s not a ton of research on this, but the work that has been done so far is promising. A study published by researchers at Georgia Tech last year found that banning the platform's most toxic subreddits resulted in less hate speech elsewhere on the site, and especially from the people who were active on those subreddits.
> There are lots of examples of people who have been deplatformed and have seen their power wane. After he lost his Fox News show, Glenn Beck couldn’t sustain his influence—The Blaze reaches only a fraction of the people he used to. Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart personality, was permanently banned from Twitter for inciting targeted harassment campaigns against actress Leslie Jones, and he resigned from Breitbart over comments he made about pedophilia on a podcast. His general prominence in public discourse has waned ever since.
> What does this do besides drive them to Whatsapp?
The mods of T_D have created a website, thedonald.win, in anticipation of T_D being shut down. Anyone who visits that sub regularly knows that that's "The new T_D"
Which is a good outcome for everyone involved. Reddit wants to contain the blast radius of T/D. T/D wants to be able to post things that aren't considered acceptable on Reddit. People can and should vote with their feet.
Reddit is a public forum, and it wasn't a nice place with T_D on the front page. T_D has mounted a coordinated effort to take over the platform for their needs to the detriment of others.
Reddit admins aren't doing it to stop Trump or his supporters. They are fighting to keep their platform alive for the other 99% who perhaps want to read about knitting and Linux without being called cucks.
I believe this would allow the civilized T_D members to continue having a presence on Reddit. It's for their sake too.
> But according to the Pew Research Center, the number of adults using Facebook plateaued in 2018, and WhatsApp user number decreased: Only 20% of U.S. adults use WhatsApp in 2019, down from 22% in 2018. This is vastly smaller than the 73% who use YouTube, and the 69% who use Facebook. The only social media network that was less popular in the U.S. was Reddit.
Perhaps, but I’d suspect they’re disproportionately concentrated in expat communities - folks who need to communicate with family/friends back home.
It’s not implausible that lots of Americans don’t know someone who uses WhatsApp. I only know one person, and they use it to talk to relatives in South America.
I wonder if any proponents of deplatforming can comment on the parent's point.
edit: why downvote this? I think the parent makes an important point. Is the goal of deplatforming to herd members into their own fortified echo chambers?
Can you post it somewhere where people can view it without having an account, like tinypic/postimage/etc? I get a "Sign in required" from your image link.
That’s usually due to supporters of the forum in question flagging it to prevent others from viewing it easily. If you have the mobile Imgur app it can view the link without being signed in.
1. I develop a community dedicated to fascism.
2. I appoint moderators who are themselves avid ideological defenders of fascism.
3. Given the motives for belonging to the subreddit, the users naturally chafe at and violate the sitewide rules for reddit. They have their own interpretations of how to best implement and promote fascism.
4. Because of the moderators' sympathies for the underlying motives and tendencies, abuse and rule-breaking continues.
Is anyone at fault here other than myself, the moderators, and the users?
PS: This article is poorly written and doesn't actually explain any of actual things going on in the_donald, it just insinuates a political agenda to this happening.
This is a bad take. I don't follow the_donald or its memes. I'm saying that if you build a community that is committed to breaking the rules of reddit it's going to get banned. You can insert knitting for fascism. It's the same across the board.
The actual difference is that certain ideologies attract people who think the ends justify the means or find transgression itself attractive and amusing; these qualities in the right combination lead to communities that will inevitably break the rules and undo themselves.
News sites like NYT and WSJ have introduced a featured comments section that is curated by the editorial team. In order to expose reddit users to different biases could the politics sub appoint a moderation team “fairly” and pick a few featured comments to expose reddit users to different leanings?
I would argue that that’s true for most reddit users. The US House has rules for decorum in the political arena where people take turns speaking. Should we try to recreate that for the politics subreddit?
That would be an interesting approach for another forum dedicated to that experiment. You could start a sub of your own with mods assigned to that purpose if you wished to. I would advise against forcibly converting an existing forum without experimental results, though.
Reddit has become highly successful as a political discussion forum for people from pretty much every part of the spectrum, but the moderation is utterly opaque. Even relatively centrist subreddits, such as /r/Canada, have mods who ignore the published moderation rules of their own subreddit and do what they please. If they don't like a thread or post it just disappears, even if it violated no rule. Reddit's moderation system is designed to prevent users from seeing how it works.
The result is a cocktail of factors ripe for exploitation:
1. Some political subreddits have hundreds of thousands of users and are highly influential.
2. Mods have unrestricted power and virtually no accountability. Users have no way to check that moderation is fair and unbiased.
3. Mods are unpaid and anonymous.
If Russia or China specifically set out to design a way to influence foreign politics, Reddit would be a fantastic platform to do just that. If you can get mods in your pocket you can promote or suppress issues to suit whatever agenda you desire.
If Reddit were going to try to reign in the very worst of its mods, /r/The_Donald would probably be a good place to start. Most reddit users view that forum as a cesspool that was quarantined for good reason. However, the methods Reddit is using here are as opaque as that of the moderators themselves. There has been no direct communication to users. All the reporting on this "purge" is sourced from the purged moderators themselves. While I have no sympathy for the mods of /r/The_Donald whatsoever, the way Reddit is operating here is indeed reminiscent of a totalitarian state's propaganda ministry. They permit much, but certain things bring the fist down hard, and it's done in a way that most people are not meant to see.
If you rely on Reddit for political information then you are making yourself vulnerable to unknown influences. While reddit is a fantastic resource in many ways, it's simply not safe to rely upon for certain things.
With most traditional news sources now being owned by a small number of international conglomerates, there is a real need for alternative forums of political discussion. Reddit, as it currently exists, should not be that forum. However, with changes something like Reddit could be made to work. Such a forum would need to make moderation much more transparent. You can't give mods the power to simply disappear that which they don't like. Users need to be able to examine the actions of moderators and question them. Taking away the toy of unchecked, anonymous power would naturally make it harder to find mods, so they might actually have to be paid. How you make money like Reddit does without volunteer moderators is a problem worth solving, as is finding a way to select moderators that can be trusted by the community they serve and not necessarily the company paying them.
This is a huge problem with popular discussion platforms. Users have no oversight over moderator action, and forums are run like fiefdoms. This can be a real problem when these forums grow to 100k+ users, and moderators abuse their power for person gain or just to stroke their own egos.
I'm going to shamelessly plug my own discussion platform https://plebia.io, where there is total oversight over all moderator action (a record of deleted posts and banned users), and users can actually change the rules of their forums and replace moderators through a voting system. If your mod is absent or abusive, you now have a mechanism to replace them with someone who is better.
Forums should work best for their users, not their moderators, and most importantly, not their advertisers (basing a discussion platform on ad revenue never ends well, which is why Plebia will never run ads of any kind).
Not only is Reddit's moderation system designed to prevent users from seeing content, the upvote system itself does the same. You'd expect a generic sub such as /r/politics to be somewhat neutral, meaning you'd find opinions from right wingers, left wingers, and centrists alike. Instead, you see nothing but anti-Trump and pro-Bernie posts because a larger part of the user base is left leaning. You could describe Reddit as a form of true democracy, in the sense that everyone gets one vote that determines the success of a post or comment. When dealing with a true democracy, you quickly run into tyranny of the majority, which is a big reason why right wing opinions are quickly suppressed on what's supposed to be a neutral sub.
This is why Reddit sucks as a political forum. Along with more open and honest moderation, you would likely have to do some serious changes to the upvote system, or do away with it all together.
Any other subreddit would have simply been banned long ago for unremitting and unrepentant rule breaking and evasion. And by the subreddit moderators themselves, no less, not just the users!
Exactly, Reddit admins are never this patient with rule-breaking communities. If you check the timeline you can see how many times they have tried to work with the mods and they were uncooperative
I can't say the behavior of its participants and moderators is all that shocking. If you venerate someone famous for breaking rules, shattering norms, and thumbing his nose at the delicate sensibilities of others, what are the odds you are going to be careful with "community guidelines" and such? And what are the odds you'll meekly accept your dethronement by "insiders", the reddit "deep state"? I don't expect this to unfold gracefully or be over any time soon.
Well, I don’t follow this that closely, but I do sort of follow, and it’s still not clear exactly what rules they were actually breaking: after all, Reddit doesn’t have that many. No illegal content, no real names, and no “group voting” (did I miss any)? Have the mods actually engaged in any of that? This seems to me to be very selective rule enforcement; every time I’ve looked through t_d, all I ever saw was silly pro-trump and anti-democrat pictures.
The writing has been on the wall for a very long time, so thedonald.win was started by r/the_donald moderators in anticipation of the inevitable. That's the recommended place for r/the_donald users to migrate.
Check out r/worldnews or r/politics for reddit's consensus view of "impartial moderation". The recent events are to be expected and certainly were.
The 'frontpage of the internet' is actively taking control of the subreddit of a presidential candidate, in an election year. I know that HN is highly against Trump, and probably cheer for this decision, but how is this not a democratic issue?
Reddit is a private enterprise and enforces its own rules for conduct across all communities and the_donald has routinely broken those roles as have the moderators. You don't have free speech on a private platform nor is there any democratic mandate to how Reddit must operate.
If that is the case, would you mind sourcing policy-breaking content from antithetical subreddits that have not been removed, quarantined, banned, etc?
You say this as if the members of r/the_donald are just regular ol' folks just talkin' about their candidate. This was/is one of the most rule-breaking subreddits on the entire website, which has only survived until this day due to preferential treatment. Subreddits have been completely banned for much, much less.
Do you think the growth in users at T_D occurred before or after Trump announced his candidacy? It is clearly a political forum. And as far as politics and identity goes, I don't think you can find two more tightly related topics other than perhaps religion.
My contention is that there is very little actual political discussion happening there. It's mostly memes, upvoting parties, and tribalism. Any talk of "libs" or "liberals" is not based on any specific policies or ideology, it's almost exclusively based on "us" vs "them"; anybody who does not worship Trump, the American flag, guns, the military, or local law enforcement (but not the FBI!) is part of "them".
What’s your point? That because in theory you might have been able to say something without losing your head before the US constitution existed, that suddenly we should apply constraints meant only for the government to private entities or citizens? Seems like a non sequitur to me.
I see nothing wrong with it according to my morals. Maybe you could expand on what moral system would force people to interact with trolls. And I’m surprised to hear from a self-avowed libertarian that doesn’t seem to have heard of the concept of freedom of association.
The “they” in that poem refers to the Nazi government. Reddit is not a government. It is people having discussions on a website run by a company. Everyone has a choice of whether or not to use it; not so with the Nazi regime.
Have you never had to throw unruly people out of a house party? If not, well then lucky you, but that’s basically what’s being done here.
> I see nothing wrong with it according to my morals.
Then you're blinded by bias.
> Maybe you could expand on what moral system would force people to interact with trolls.
The members overall aren't trolls and trolling isn't concentrated just in the T_D. Stopping all trolling is impossible and T_D mods did not encourage it in anyway. I have yet to see proof in this thread or the Reddit announcements.
> libertarian that doesn’t seem to have heard of the concept of freedom of association
I wouldn't mention freedom of association because it's heavily tied into freedom of speech in the US judicial system (NAACP v. Alabama). It rules that freedom of association is an essential part of freedom of speech because, in many cases, people can engage in effective speech only when they join with others.
> Reddit is not a government.
Well this contradicts your previous point above, but sure let's take this path. Yes, Reddit can do whatever they want, I noted that above saying it's legal. That does not mean if makes it right. If the government couldn't do it because it violates the Constitution then it's wrong in my eyes for a company to do it, even if they can legally.
> Everyone has a choice of whether or not to use it; not so with the Nazi regime.
No they don't, because they are being kicked out and the rules have been changing specifically for them.
> Have you never had to throw unruly people out of a house party?
Have you ever thrown a small get together and everyone in the block called the cops because they just hate you and want to see your fun shut down? That's more what it's like it my eyes.
You misinterpret my point. Nobody is forced to use Reddit. It is a privilege, not a right or requirement.
> Have you ever thrown a small get together and everyone in the block called the cops because they just hate you and want to see your fun shut down? That's more what it's like it my eyes.
I disagree this is a better analogy. That would be more like Twitter/Facebook/etc wielding some power of e.g. regulatory capture to shut down Reddit.
But you do raise an interesting point. This is like the rule “if you run into an asshole on your way to work, chances are they’re just an asshole. If everyone you meet is an asshole, it’s probably just you that’s the asshole.”
If you really have multiple neighbors shutting down your house parties, chances are much higher you were fucking up, either with the party itself, or generally in your relations with those neighbors.
Same goes for T_D. It’s much more likely they are the assholes here. Split hairs all you want, they’re getting kicked out because they just aren’t pleasant citizens of the site in the opinion of the admins, which at the end of the day, are the only opinions that matter on their site.
I won’t hold my breath waiting for thedonald.win to adhere to your moral system of fairness. Nor would I expect them to with their own site.
Free speech isn't limited to the government. The government may be the only entity legally obligated to uphold it, but we can still be unhappy when others elect to suppress it.
This is at the end of a long long line of trying to find some way to deal with one of the more unruly subreddits on the site that's been the source of loads of brigading, vote manipulation [0], and doxxing. If a community can't behave after 4 years of warnings and increasing controls at some point Reddit had to do something, this is short of just banning everyone and nuking the community which they're well within their rights to do.
[0] At one point td was basically the only thing on r/all because they found out that by upvoting everything and stickying posts to get upvoted they could spam the rest of the site.
HN is actually surprisingly pro-Trump. I have been shocked at the broad support for economic nationalism (trade protectionism, etc.) from HN participants, as well as the chorus of agreement with Trump's anti-China stance.
Supporting "liberty" would lead just as logically to being "anti-China" as it would to being "anti-US". China is perhaps more authoritarian, but not fundamentally different.
It's not a surprise. The war media has conditioned Americans to mistrust other nations and nationalities. Trump happens to agree with the dominant narrative with respect to China. So of course lots of news consumers agree with him, with respect to China.
Go and start you own website, create a sub-page for /r/president_warren and fill it with gay porn. It's not a democratic issue. It's also worth noting, /r/the_donald isn't and has never been controlled by actual people associated with the Trump campaign so to describe it as "the subreddit of a presidential candidate" is frankly just incorrect. It's a sub-reddit for supporters of a candidate, and those users happen to also be repeat offenders under the site-wide policies.
Calling T_D "the subreddit of a presidential candidate" is like calling a forum for hardcore Harry Potter-themed BDSM erotica "the forum for Harry Potter".
Except ... that the latter is pretty harmless and all in good fun for the people who are into it, while T_D is a venue for (among other things) radicalizing literal children with blind ideological hatred and shameless untruths.
Disturbing? I don't think so. I subscribe to the_donald because I want to keep up with what the nutters are saying. Yesterday I reported a post where they had photshopped out the dots in the " i "s in all of Mike Bloomberg's ads and replaced them with the star of david. That's just yesterday. And just one post that caught my eye. And it was one of the top posts of the day with thousands and thousands of votes and hundreds of comments. What's actually disturbing is the view that subreddit affords into the minds of 20-30% of the country.
The_donald has always been breaking the rules. The only reason it isn't banned is because reddit doesn't want the bad press of deleting it outright, even by their own rules it should have been nuked ages ago.
Finally, this isn't even touching the level of silent censorship that happens on hacker news to maintain its quality so its a really funny place to take a stand on it. If reddit is disturbing to you then man, you should be horrified by this place. Funny how HN is such a great place for discourse -- wonder how that happened.
edit: since a ne'er-do-well has accused me of lying here's a screenshot of the post. But I want to make it clear, this is one example out of an infinity of examples. I am illustrating that the_donald will not follow the rules and that's why this is happening: https://i.imgur.com/NHN1Mhx.png
Your one example is wrong. Maybe you have the wrong idea of the other side? Maybe your bias blinds your judgement and you hate what you don't understand? Certainly seems that way. We can all find hate when we look for it.
>in light of the fact Reddit's CEO was once caught secretly editing
Again, you're making this seem more nefarious than it actually was. He did it because he thought it would be appreciated (obviously he was wrong). In the end, it was a dumb and immature move from a young, rookie CEO ... on a social network site (i.e. not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things)
I don't really see this action by Reddit to be newsworthy at all. There are a lot of subreddits that straddle the line of being banned. The_Donald is certainly one of those communities.
> He did it because he thought it would be appreciated (obviously he was wrong).
It's a bit beyond "I thought this would be funny, honest mistake, sorry", isn't it? How often has he (and others) done that without being caught doing so? And of course, once you're caught red handed in the cookie jar, is anything you say about acting alone and that not being SOP true, or is it just damage control?
Regarding him being a "young, rookie CEO", he's been the CEO of reddit for years previously and was the CTO of Hipmunk. It's not like he found himself in a role with a lot of power and overstepped the line a bit in his first week.
I don't think it's a state affair, but it's not "I was tired and emotional and I kind of clicked on the wrong button" either.
You touch upon something that I think we really need to contend with, there's all this pearl-clutching as if the people being who are being affected by this wouldn't a) censor /intimidate into silence other people if they (they actively try) and b) make completely disingenuous arguments all the time.
Conspiracy theories are not considered valuable commentary here on HN, so ironically you may find your post flagged and remove by the community due to violating of this forum’s user and mod expectations.
“Can't assume this is being done in good faith as the comments leading The Donald to be quarantined could be edits, or shill accounts.”
Some mods were caught upvoting content forbidden by the Reddit participation guidelines, leading to the removal of said mods. Are those mods shill accounts? What evidence can you provide supporting that?
My post was not intended to be a conspiracy theory. The point I'm trying to make is that rewriting comments (or reassigning moderation teams) is worse than straight out deleting or banning...because the potential that people can be misled is there.
In response to this action the most upvoted thread was mocking WWII holocaust victims.
The sub got quarantined for numerous rule breaking actions including racism, doxing (inc. Reddit and Imgur employees), sexism, harassment of other subs, and violent threats.
The only way to believe that this has anything to do with supporting a political candidate is simply to ignore all the actual content and posters on that sub.
Is there a sub with 1M users that doesn't experience this? Or is it the nature of large numbers of people on anonymous internet forums that such things will always occur?
/r/hardware has passed 1M users, and is quite obviously afflicted by passionate sectarian disagreements between loyalists to different brands. There's also a lot of generally ill-informed and low-effort commenting there. But the mods there do put in some genuine effort, and a large fraction of that community seems to have a limit to the degree of BS they'll upvote.
Compare to /r/AMD_Stock which has a fraction of the size but basically exists to take sides in one of those contentious issues. Most of the time I venture there, I come away with the impression that an outright majority of the comments are shitposts that the community would be better off without. Though I don't think even on that subreddit that I've run into any egregious violations of Reddit policy.
> In response to this action the most upvoted thread was mocking WWII holocaust victims.
So what? Obviously, it is in poor taste and is a bad look but its just idiots on the internet trying to be edgy and generate outrage.
Knee-jerk reactions to shut them down are exactly what they want and feed off of. Trump himself does the same thing. He says and does things specifically to rile up journalists and the left to cause more chaos and entertain his followers. We should stop falling for it!
You missed the point. It is knee-jerk in the sense that a panic is had whenever certain kinds of words or phrases are uttered on social media. It is like people really believe the content in question is some sort of real-life spell that could cause someone actual harm or someone else to cause physical harm. Words are just words.
Actions and words are two very different things and we shouldn't lose sight of that lest we be stripped of our right to speak our mind.
Unbunch you undies and stop trying to control everyone you don't agree with.
I think the approach is bizarre. How will replacing 1/2 of T_D mods with new management solve anything? What is the goal? I would really like to understand what is going on in the room when these ideas are presented.
T_D is a cesspool. It's not the only cesspool on Reddit. It is a special cesspool with special attention and solutions that are tricky, especially in an election year. At some point, big tech companies are going to have to articulate their role (wanted or not) in tweaking society.
Reddit is pretty clearly trying to find any viable alternative to outright banning T_D. They're attempting a proof by exhaustion that the community will not cooperate with any viable moderation policy. They're rightly afraid to just pull the trigger and delete the whole subreddit.
There's also some chance that they can get the community in its current form to die in a more organic and less sudden manner, by expunging enough of the worst users and behaviors that it is no longer such a self-sustaining cesspool. Banning mods who directly encourage "shitposting" by name seems like a reasonable step toward that goal.
What obscure and/or twisted definition of "shitposting" are you operating under where you don't see it as bad for a forum that's intended to foster civilized discussion?
If you want shitposting, why would you ever choose a platform that has moderation and content guidelines in the first place?
> If you want shitposting, why would you ever choose a platform that has moderation and content guidelines in the first place?
That's a totally legit argument. People shouldn't. But as someone that was on reddit from 2008 on there were a few years were it wasn't corporate run and actually celebrated free speech in both words and policy. Then that changed. I stopped. But network effect keeps groups there.
You'll note that with literally any other sub-reddit, the response to this behaviour would have simply been to shut down the sub-reddit. How many second chances do you need? Personally I would've thought the first person shooting up a restaurant would've been the red line but apparently not.