The new rule on hate speech and other things is a mess to say the least: Some glaring issues: Reddit has asserted that there is such a thing as a persons "actual race". Reddit protects people...
Rule 1: Remember the human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and people that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.
Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families.
While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.
Some examples of hateful activities that would violate the rule:
Subreddit community dedicated to mocking people with physical disabilities.
Post describing a racial minority as sub-human and inferior to the racial majority.
Comment arguing that rape of women should be acceptable and not a crime.
Meme declaring that it is sickening that people of color have the right to vote.
Additionally, when evaluating the activity of a community or an individual user, we consider both the context as well as the pattern of behavior.
Some glaring issues:
Reddit has asserted that there is such a thing as a persons "actual race".
Reddit protects people based on their religions, but not political beliefs or creed.
"the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority". So you can be as abusive as you like to people in a majority. Great!
How did they not have at least one sensible person read through this? What did they even present at the mod council shindig they ran?
Why did they think not protecting majority groups was a good idea? Also, do they define majority based on local populations, population of reddit, world population, etc? Wikipedia says the Han...
Why did they think not protecting majority groups was a good idea? Also, do they define majority based on local populations, population of reddit, world population, etc? Wikipedia says the Han Chinese is the largest ethnic population, so are they the only ethnic group you can be biased against on reddit? According to Wikipedia, California has a higher percentage of Hispanic people than any other population. Does that mean if I post to reddit from California I can be as racist as I want against Hispanic people? If I post to a city or town subreddit, are the rules based upon the demographics of that area? Can I make a racist post towards black people on /r/blackpeople (idk if that even exists). This rule is just so poorly thought out.
It's clearly rooted in the strong trend in academic and popular leftism to redefine the -isms (racism, sexism, classism, etc.) not simply as prejudice on the basis of specific characteristics but...
Why did they think not protecting majority groups was a good idea
It's clearly rooted in the strong trend in academic and popular leftism to redefine the -isms (racism, sexism, classism, etc.) not simply as prejudice on the basis of specific characteristics but rather as prejudice plus power; where power is institutional or structural bias and oppression against the minority group. The cultural dominance that American progressivism now enjoys over big tech firms like Reddit means that the oppressor-oppressed relationships on which these policies are clearly predicated are those which the American left holds to exist in their society. To some extent these relationships are universal; there are essentially no societies anywhere on Earth that one could seriously consider structurally heterophobic, for instance - but in other cases this extrapolation of American socioeconomics to the scope of the entire globe crumbles at the seams (the example of whites in Zimbabwe is one that comes to mind).
I suspect that the extent to which these policies seem reasonable probably depends on the extent to which one buys into the theories and tenants of intersectionality. The sticking point I always hit with intersectional theory - and, this being Tildes, I hope and expect someone can rebut this well - is that power and oppression need not lie along the same axis. Intersectionality theory holds that racism by a black person towards a white person simply cannot exist because society and its institutions are inherently white supremacist. Reni Eddo-Lodge tells us that the Caribbean shopkeeper who reserves the choice cuts of meat for his black customers is prejudiced, but cannot be racist, since he is not in the position to affect the life-choices of his white customers, but only the quality of their lunch. Yet surely, by the very axioms of intersectionality, even if that shopkeeper does not benefit from racial privilege, he does benefit from male privilege, and most likely also straight privilege. If he denies a white woman a job on the basis of her race, is he not employing his power - which is at least to some extent derived from patriarchal nature of society - to be racist? I accept that this racism isn't necessarily structural, insofar as it doesn't align with the prevailing wind of discrimination in society at large, but it's racism nonetheless. It is for this reason that I cannot buy into the idea that discrimination is unilateral. To my mind, even if I accept the axioms of power imbalance and institutionalized oppression that intersectional thinkers assert, instances of discrimination and oppression must necessarily still exist in all directions. Tech companies, especially those with a global scope, must therefore take the stance to fight all discrimination and hate, or none of it. There is little justification for asymmetry.
Do you seriously think Reddit's ownership is progressive? This is the same big tech firm: that allowed T_D to exist for years after its subscribers killed people (promoting the Unite the Right...
The cultural dominance that American progressivism now enjoys over big tech firms like Reddit
Do you seriously think Reddit's ownership is progressive? This is the same big tech firm:
that allowed T_D to exist for years after its subscribers killed people (promoting the Unite the Right rally, the guy who killed his dad, etc)
that quarantined CTH for cheering on John Brown, a guy who killed slaveholders.. 160 years ago and gave r/FULLCOMMUNISM (iirc) a quarantine message about "the horrors of communism" when every other quarantined subreddit only had an explanation for why it was quarantined
allowed T_D to game the front page during the 2016 election system by repeatedly stickying and unstickying posts so they always had multiple posts in the top 10 of r/all
whose CEO has explicitly said in the past that racism and racial slurs are ok on reddit
The right-wing communities of reddit have been treated with kid gloves and continue to be, even after the bans today. As for the others, Twitter lets Trump say literally anything he wants, including endorsing white power, encouraging violence against protestors, threatening nuclear war, encouraging violence against governors in his own country, etc. Meanwhile an account that reposted every tweet of his got banned within three days.
Facebook won't even put some sort of disclaimer on Trump's lies, is sponsoring the RNC this year, Mark Zuckerberg had a secret dinner with Trump last year, allowed all sorts of horrible shit like the TPUSA group sharing racist memes, the CPB group sharing racist and sexist memes, etc.
Big Tech pays lip service to progressive social causes, but does nothing otherwise. They worship money above all else and only shut down the Alex Joneses and Milos when they start getting bad press about it.
Reddit's ownership these days is absolutely progressive. As I state in my comment above, my belief is that their new policies are firmly rooted in modern leftist theory. I accept that in the past...
Reddit's ownership these days is absolutely progressive. As I state in my comment above, my belief is that their new policies are firmly rooted in modern leftist theory. I accept that in the past the prevailing political undercurrent was what I tend to call 'Hacker News Libertarianism', which is probably best characterised as centre-right, but it's been some years now since those ideas have held significant sway at Reddit HQ.
Edit: a quick point with regards to this part of your comment:
As for the others, Twitter lets Trump say literally anything he wants, including endorsing white power, encouraging violence against protestors, threatening nuclear war, encouraging violence against governors in his own country
Fundamentally, it is more important that world leaders are not censored than that Twitter applies their rules equally. I think Trump is stupid, borderline-psychotic, and genuinely evil - but I would be deeply, deeply uncomfortable with tech corporations having the ability to limit his speech.
Do you have examples of how they're progressive besides the announcement today? Because no progressive would let places rampant with racism, sexism, etc., like r/conservative, r/LGBdroptheT,...
Do you have examples of how they're progressive besides the announcement today? Because no progressive would let places rampant with racism, sexism, etc., like r/conservative, r/LGBdroptheT, r/kotakuinaction, r/thelastofus2, et al. exist, and those are all still active.
If we're gonna call out some really fucked up places, how about we talk about /r/itsafetish and /r/neovaginadisasters (not linking because fuck those places)
If we're gonna call out some really fucked up places, how about we talk about /r/itsafetish and /r/neovaginadisasters (not linking because fuck those places)
itsafetish is a sub about the false idea that being transgender is actually just a sexual fetish. neovaginadisasters is a sub where people post pictures of sexual reassignment surgery, typically...
itsafetish is a sub about the false idea that being transgender is actually just a sexual fetish.
neovaginadisasters is a sub where people post pictures of sexual reassignment surgery, typically focusing on outdated photos (older procedures), very early post-op pictures (before it's actually healed and accordingly doesn't look so hot), and the occasional botched operation.
/r/itsafetish was a subreddit for documenting evidence to support the hypothesis that transgenderism is primarily a sexually-motivated phenomenon whereby trans women (IIRC it was pretty much...
/r/itsafetish was a subreddit for documenting evidence to support the hypothesis that transgenderism is primarily a sexually-motivated phenomenon whereby trans women (IIRC it was pretty much exclusively focused on trans women) are aroused by the act of performing the feminine gender. It was quite a hateful community. I never went on the second subreddit but I would guess its focus is pretty self-explanatory.
Reddit is progressive because they push their thumb on the scales in the direction of progressivism - as demonstrated by today's actions. If they were to ban all non-progressive communities from...
Reddit is progressive because they push their thumb on the scales in the direction of progressivism - as demonstrated by today's actions. If they were to ban all non-progressive communities from their general purpose discussion site, that would make them authoritarian leftists, not progressives.
I get where you're coming from, but I think the problem with this viewpoint is that you seem to be treating inaction as "neutral". It's not, really, it's just a different choice that has its own...
I get where you're coming from, but I think the problem with this viewpoint is that you seem to be treating inaction as "neutral". It's not, really, it's just a different choice that has its own consequences.
Reddit's ownership also hasn't meaningfully changed in a long time, so I'm not really sure what you mean by attributing progressiveness to it overall. For leadership, Steve Huffman has been CEO again for over 4 years now, and he was one of the original founders of the site 15 years ago, and stayed involved with it for quite a few years initially before leaving for a while.
In terms of actual ownership, it's still primarily owned by Advance Publications / Condé Nast and has been for almost its entire life—they acquired the site in October 2006. They've taken quite a bit of venture capital over the last 3 years as well, but major chunks of it are from organizations like Tencent (about 30% of the VC), which is associated pretty strongly with the Chinese government and so not exactly a progressive organization.
Alright, here's another perspective. I can't speak to the personally held opinions of Huffman, and unlike you I've never met him, but one thing that does seem apparent to me is that Reddit's...
Alright, here's another perspective. I can't speak to the personally held opinions of Huffman, and unlike you I've never met him, but one thing that does seem apparent to me is that Reddit's sustainability is contingent on being able to rake in huge amounts of advertising revenue from big brands. The sorts of brands whose target demographics use Reddit are almost all deeply concerned with maintaining a progressive image - what you might call performative progressiveness - so by extension, Reddit is required to adopt a progressive image for brands to want to associate with them. This performative progressivism requires corporate grandstanding on an impressive scale - hence big pronouncements and policy changes like those we've seen today. You can argue the toss about whether this does or does not constitute genuine progressivism but the consequence is fundamentally the same - to produce a website that is hostile to, if not entirely inhospitable for anti-progressive ideas and communities.
Today's actions are nothing against the last decade of inaction. T_D was already dead and the only big non-progressive sub that was banned was r/gendercritical.
Today's actions are nothing against the last decade of inaction. T_D was already dead and the only big non-progressive sub that was banned was r/gendercritical.
What if Twitter decided not to allow accounts for any national leaders or CEO's of public companies? It seems like the world would be a better place? They have other ways to get their message out....
What if Twitter decided not to allow accounts for any national leaders or CEO's of public companies? It seems like the world would be a better place? They have other ways to get their message out. If they want a blog, they can have an assistant set up a blog.
Twitter could say sorry, you're too important. Really, this is the best for all of us.
I don't hate this as a solution, but where do you draw the line? Are all MPs barred? Or just members of the cabinet? What about the shadow cabinet? Etc. Etc. I do think Twitter does a lot of harm...
I don't hate this as a solution, but where do you draw the line? Are all MPs barred? Or just members of the cabinet? What about the shadow cabinet? Etc. Etc.
I do think Twitter does a lot of harm by encouraging snappy rhetoric at the expense of nuance. But then again, plus ça change. Politics has never really been about subtlety. Carthago delenda est!
Yeah, there would be issues with setting rules for each country. I was thinking of whoever is considered the national leader. Ideally you'd have people saying, hey, I'm too important to have a...
Yeah, there would be issues with setting rules for each country. I was thinking of whoever is considered the national leader. Ideally you'd have people saying, hey, I'm too important to have a Twitter account too!
In my scheme, everyone's press spokespeople would be still allowed to have Twitter accounts and of course they could post quotes. It would be more a way to discourage late night, ill-considered tweets.
You would also have to deal with Musk creating an account named "Totally not Elon Musk" because that's exactly the sort of thing he would do. Maybe also prohibit parody accounts with the same names of national leaders or CEO's, and call it a day?
That makes sense, but they'll never do it. They get a ton of free advertising when the news picks up and talks about a leader's tweets. Not to mention the ad revenue from all the traffic to...
That makes sense, but they'll never do it. They get a ton of free advertising when the news picks up and talks about a leader's tweets. Not to mention the ad revenue from all the traffic to Trump's account specifically.
I'm not saying Twitter is more powerful than Trump, but I am saying that Twitter does have some power over him and his ability to broadcast his ideas. And yes, despite being quite libertarian, I...
I'm not saying Twitter is more powerful than Trump, but I am saying that Twitter does have some power over him and his ability to broadcast his ideas. And yes, despite being quite libertarian, I am coming around to the idea that we need to start having serious conversations about the role that internet forums play in our societies and our democracies. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, and even Reddit are the modern public sphere and it troubles me that people (especially leftists) are on-the-whole untroubled by private tech corporations dictating who does and does not have the right to participate in the conversation because it just so happens that the people who are getting banned are nearly all conservatives.
The people who are getting banned are advocating for violence and intolerance against minorities and others. The fact that they are also conservative is irrelevant to why they are being banned.
it just so happens that the people who are getting banned are nearly all conservatives.
The people who are getting banned are advocating for violence and intolerance against minorities and others. The fact that they are also conservative is irrelevant to why they are being banned.
I'm not sure that's true. Katie Hopkins got banned and while she's just about the last person in the country I'd want to have a pint with I don't think her ban was due to her advocating for...
I'm not sure that's true. Katie Hopkins got banned and while she's just about the last person in the country I'd want to have a pint with I don't think her ban was due to her advocating for violence. Regardless, it's not a matter of why people are getting banned, but rather that tech corporations have the power to de-facto shut people out of the public sphere. Now, I'm obviously not saying that people should never be banned from internet forums, but my gut feeling is that we should all be at least a little concerned that these decisions are in no way subject to legislation or the democratic process - at least in the case of the megasites.
She has a long, long, no seriously I mean an absurdly long wikipedia page detailing just some of the nasty intolerant shit she's tweeted. It doesn't matter whether the final straw was over...
She has a long, long, no seriously I mean an absurdly long wikipedia page detailing just some of the nasty intolerant shit she's tweeted. It doesn't matter whether the final straw was over advocating violence or not, she's done it in the past.
Katie Hopkins is not a good person. I don't dispute that one bit. And yet... It really kinda does. Because this is a discussion about what gets people banned from internet megaforums, and whatever...
Katie Hopkins is not a good person. I don't dispute that one bit. And yet...
It doesn't matter whether the final straw was over advocating violence or not
It really kinda does. Because this is a discussion about what gets people banned from internet megaforums, and whatever the final straw was, it was presumably what got her banned from Twitter, an internet megaforum. Actually, the fact that Twitter doesn't disclose the reasons for their high-profile bans is in and of itself problematic.
No, actually it doesn't. When someone is repeatedly an offender, and you tell them to stop, and they don't and you repeatedly ban them, it doesn't matter whether the last offense was the worst or...
It really kinda does.
No, actually it doesn't.
When someone is repeatedly an offender, and you tell them to stop, and they don't and you repeatedly ban them, it doesn't matter whether the last offense was the worst or whether it was 15 offenses ago. They've been repeatedly slapped on the wrist. Should they have been permanently banned after 3 offenses instead of 30? Maybe, but they're banned now, and they're banned because they've repeatedly been a terrible human being.
(JGB: early morning and I have a thundering headache - please read this as if I am smiling writing it. Not at any single point am I feeling hostile towards you. Not saying you think that but want...
Exemplary
(JGB: early morning and I have a thundering headache - please read this as if I am smiling writing it. Not at any single point am I feeling hostile towards you. Not saying you think that but want to be clear AF at the start that this whole thing is written with total respect and love - since this is internet, often things can be read as a conflict seeking or backhanded argument)
First off "racism" is a very very new idea on its own. On the one hand its as you say, assuming people have certain qualities defined by the way it looks - but that on its own haven't been the sole definition for the huge chunk of the time "racism" has been a common term. "Race" on its own for example is in many areas not a quality used (since humanity is a race, the subdivisions are not) and for most of the 20th century its been defined as "ethnicity" not "race".
Second, the issue is when it becomes a problem. For example was out at a local festival with some people from my local library group (yes I am a boring person) and one of them, an elderly woman in her 80's watched as some Nigerian-Swedish kids did some dance thing on stage and she happily proclaimed "Oh they do have rhythm in their blood". The looks me and all the others gave each other as we all thought whether we should inform her of the exotification she was slathering the kids with is a massive "no" and all came to the same conclusion to ignore it. Sure it was racism pure and simple - further it was exotification (which perhaps isn't an English term I now realize, basically to round people down to something different and exciting but nothing else) but it was comparatively non-problematic and this woman was old enough that "next summer" is a doubtful term.
Racism is relevant the more problems it brings to the table. Just like anything. Not as some strange tit-for-tat system.
Being objectified sexually, for example, is horrible when it comes with actual fear of assault, minimizes your capacity to be taken for a real human etc etc - but being objectified is also wonderful! We all want to be a bit objectified at times when we want to be objectified.
Racism without problems is basically a friend of mine going "Oh you Swedes are so damn emotionless!" for example. No one gets offended, no one suffers. Had the same phrase been said in say Minnesota around 140 years ago by a non-Nordic it would have been problematic. Buuuut if racism is nothing but a tit-for-tat system of points then its as horrid as going "black people have no emotional restraint" no matter when in time or place. Which obviously isn't true.
The point is that this isn't a new thing. Its not like racism is redefined by some longhairs at Berkeley during the BLM protests - its been like this for around 40 years now. Racism as a sociological term first and foremost is far from new. The idea that this is somehow a sudden new concept is I know very common in the US as a political thread currently - but I don't understand why it isn't challenged?
We've talked about positive racism for decades, where the racial stereotypes are positive, BUT can still be used to push people down (like "oh you're black, that means you're good at sports") same as any stereotype.
I can understand how it comes about though with "woke culture" (really, call me boomer but I wanna kill that whole ideal with fire) - where singular words, terms and lack of academic insight is equal to the counter-ideal of those terms. (I always talk about a foreman at a job I had decades ago who was my LGBTQ-supporter hero and one of the people who helped me the most by sauntering up in to my closet at work going "Look I know you're a cocksucker, and I think most here do too now, but if any of them give you a problem tell me and I'll fuck em up" (he did btw) - the dude didn't know what words to use and wouldn't be woke if you strapped alarm clocks on his head, but he was and still is one of the best ally's any LGBTQ person can have). The idea of reducing racism to a tit-for-tat system is natural when the same concept of simple point-taking is used by the people claiming to be antiracists.
My core argument is that racism without it being a sociological theory, and including oppression and power as part of it hasn't been relevant since the 70's. Or not AS relevant (there are still value in looking at how people interact with each other as racial prejudice is part of it - but racial prejudice isn't born magically, it is always in relation with the social surroundings we all exist in)
Sidenote about Zimabwe: shortest shortest - I think that scenario is way more complex than its described in western media. The whole interplay between white landowners, the Rhodesian deals, and the English Crown is a mess of epic proportions
But to end on a high note involving racism and Zimbabwe, my husband proclaimed in the shops recently when we where buying coffee and the tag line of the coffee I picked up was "A dark and complex blend": "Ah like Robert Mugabe!"
Also "to end on a high note involving racism and Zimbabwe" is probably not something I ever thought I would write in text.
I disagree with this on the same premise that I pointed out earlier in another comment. If a group of individuals is advocating for hate and discrimination towards another group, it is self...
Tech companies, especially those with a global scope, must therefore take the stance to fight all discrimination and hate, or none of it. There is little justification for asymmetry.
I disagree with this on the same premise that I pointed out earlier in another comment. If a group of individuals is advocating for hate and discrimination towards another group, it is self defense for the group that is being discriminated against to fight back.
There is a fundamental difference between a nazi advocating for the elimination of black people and for someone else to advocate for violence against nazis. I believe it is possible to take the stance to fight discrimination and hate and treat these two instances differently. The world does not operate in black and white and your laws and enforcement of said laws should not either.
I agree with all of this. That said, there is no reason why the aggressors and defenders in such a confrontation need align with the conventional perception of oppressors and oppressed groups....
I agree with all of this. That said, there is no reason why the aggressors and defenders in such a confrontation need align with the conventional perception of oppressors and oppressed groups. Black supremacists are likely fewer in number and certainly vastly less influential than white supremacists in the anglophone world, but they do exist and this rule would give them carte blanche to be the aggressors in advocating for hatred and discrimination.
That's like being worried about the existence of a couple of people who hate brown-eyed folks. Imagine looking for work, and stumbling across one of these people. They would try to act civil, but...
Exemplary
but they do exist and this rule would give them carte blanche to be the aggressors in advocating for hatred and discrimination.
That's like being worried about the existence of a couple of people who hate brown-eyed folks.
Imagine looking for work, and stumbling across one of these people. They would try to act civil, but you would see them looking down on you, not-so-subtly insulting you and, of course, denying you that job.
That would only be a problem on an individual scale. You would be harmed, sure, but that harm would be equivalent to the harm caused by someone who only hates you, personally. It would be an exceptional event that would be unlikely to happen again. You would be denied a job once, but you would still have access to the rest of the job market.
The same goes for housing, or getting service at some store/restaurant. You could rarely be denied it, but you won't have to stay homeless, and the activities whose owners don't hate brown-eyed people are the majority.
Imagine them being willing to go even further, insulting you on the street, spitting upon you, and attacking you physically. You would be hurt, but they wouldn't be given a pass on that attack: the rest of the world doesn't hate brown-eyed people. You would be able to find people to sympathize with and support you, and it would be extremely unlikely for such an attack to happen again, or to be more than one-on-one. Hell, you probably wouldn't even realize that you were targeted because of the colour of your eyes: you'd write it off as a random attack by an unstable, maybe drugged up individual, because there isn't a pattern for you to recognize and learn to fear.
In short, it lacks the weight of systematic discrimination, and it's barely comparable to it.
Even if actual black supremacists - which I frankly doubt are as poisonous as white supremacists - were to be given carte blanche to advocate for hatred and discrimination against white people, their impact would be insignificant.
In any case, I find that interpretation to be ridiculous. That rule was clearly added to head off the whinging about /r/BlackPeopleTwitter "discriminating" against white people, or LGBT+ subs "discriminating" against cis-het people, and besides that rules are always interpreted, never applied to the letter. Mods, admins, judges are not robots, and they will apply rules as they understand them. Considering that most belong to some majority group, well...
If the crux of this argument is on the majority/minority portion of the new reddit guidelines, I agree this shouldn't be in there. If your argument is more general in how we should approach...
this rule would give them carte blanche to be the aggressors in advocating for hatred and discrimination.
If the crux of this argument is on the majority/minority portion of the new reddit guidelines, I agree this shouldn't be in there.
If your argument is more general in how we should approach intolerant ideals, I disagree.
Well, my argument is with regard to Reddit policy, but of course I feel that the new Reddit policies would be equally unreasonable on pretty much any other general-purpose forum site.
Well, my argument is with regard to Reddit policy, but of course I feel that the new Reddit policies would be equally unreasonable on pretty much any other general-purpose forum site.
This isn't really accurate. If you ever actually interacted with any Black supremacists you would realize they spend at least as much time being aggressive towards women and Jews as they do being...
Black supremacists are likely fewer in number and certainly vastly less influential than white supremacists in the anglophone world, but they do exist and this rule would give them carte blanche to be the aggressors in advocating for hatred and discrimination.
This isn't really accurate. If you ever actually interacted with any Black supremacists you would realize they spend at least as much time being aggressive towards women and Jews as they do being aggressive towards Whites. Actual existing hate-groups are rarely all that laser-focused in who they're being hateful towards so I think this fear of yours is unfounded.
I'm of the stance that it is strictly immoral to do anything but advocate for violence against Nazis. The paradox of tolerance is very real, intolerance is not to be tolerated.
There is a fundamental difference between a nazi advocating for the elimination of black people and for someone else to advocate for violence against nazis.
I'm of the stance that it is strictly immoral to do anything but advocate for violence against Nazis.
The paradox of tolerance is very real, intolerance is not to be tolerated.
To educate someone, they must be first willing to listen, and you must have someone who: is willing to spend their time in educating people who are frankly morally repugnant; can spend their time...
Exclude them, try to educate them, etc. sure but I'm feeling a bit Kantian about not wanting to hurt people who I know have the potential to be good.
To educate someone, they must be first willing to listen, and you must have someone who:
is willing to spend their time in educating people who are frankly morally repugnant;
can spend their time on that without it impacting their mental health, and
has a hope of actually swaying them.
The last one requires both a good knowledge of a large swath of topics (as they oppose multiple groups, going from Jewish people to black people to LGBT+ people to people with disabilities), and the capacity to argue about those topics in a manner that can get through the dummy t h i c c skull of Nazis/the alt-right.
Further, you pretty much need to separate them in some manner from their usual haunts, or that will slow the de-radicalization process down in the best case.
As such, allow me to cast (X) Doubt on
everyone as an indivdual is redeemable
That could even be true in theory, but it's misleading because "redeeming someone" (again, they must want to redeem themselves) has a cost. It's not insignificant. It's massive, because it must be paid with the time, mental health, and possibly physical health of an ally, over a long period of time - during which they'll still contribute to the spread of their poisonous ideology - and the payoff is very much not assured.
They might be theoretically redeemable, but practically? You are much better off sinking that time on swaying the fence-sitters, shutting down your enemies to prevent them from doing the same.
That is, by excluding them. You can't do that via the official channels, though, because the platforms they use to recruit - cough Reddit cough - are known for their extreme laissez-faire towards hate groups. Governments, too, will refrain from stepping in until they are blatantly threatening - they certainly won't help de-radicalize anyone - and they have long since mastered the art of playing the victim.
Violence, when you can mete it out, works. It works against the bullied - it imposes a cost on them in the form of pain - but it is also one of the only languages that the bullies themselves understand.
Would it be better to take care of them in a non-violent way? Perhaps. I am not convinced that even trying to de-radicalize most of them is worth the effort.
Can we take care of them in a non-violent way? Can we exclude them from the public square, refuse them a platform, stop them from escalating - from following through on their violent ideology - without harming a hair on their head? No, we just don't have that power.
Personally, I have zero problems with wishing violence upon nazis, the alt-right, gender "critical" people and whatnot. I have the moral high ground, after all, and I gained it by standing on the pile of corpses of those like me that all these people have created.
To add to your argument, intentionally harming others to inflict pain and suffering is flat out wrong. Especially for the sake of ideology. It is easy to destroy and tear down. So easy a toddler...
To add to your argument, intentionally harming others to inflict pain and suffering is flat out wrong. Especially for the sake of ideology.
It is easy to destroy and tear down. So easy a toddler can do it. The suffering we can inflict on each other transcends beyond our 6 foot social distancing circles and affects friends, family, and any other person you can encounter.
It's a lot harder to pick up the pieces of whatever you have left and make it whole again. I would argue that if you are at the point where you feel like you have to harm others to make your point, you are no longer in the business of the greater good, but rather engaged in an act to grasp whatever perceived control you can get. It's tyrannical. Make no mistake, the ones that would make you feel pain and suffering because of the way you are different, also feel that they are getting a sense of control over "what's right". There are discernible moral platitudes in these scenarios, only people who have their egos wrapped around their eyes and can no longer see the humanity of the other human being they are trying to convince. There is no compassion, or empathy, or love, in violent actions. Only after you destroy the other person do you get to begin to pick up the pieces and try to construct your moral platitudes.
So I agree. I believe 99.999% (have to account for psychopaths) of the human population has the capacity for empathy and to learn and grow. We have to do our best to create the conditions that will help people overcome their irrational beliefs. We cannot be like toddlers who throw temper tantrums when things don't go perfectly. We will always have to fight prejudice and inequality throughout our lives in many different forms. But we will win these battles on the wholesome path.
I totally get that it's possible to reform bigots, and even support doing so, when people's lives aren't at stake. You can take your time reforming your racist grandma, or your well-meaning but...
I totally get that it's possible to reform bigots, and even support doing so, when people's lives aren't at stake. You can take your time reforming your racist grandma, or your well-meaning but ignorant neighbor. Even so far as reforming Nazis.
But, when push comes to shove, violence must be used to shut down violence.
It's preferrable to de-escalate nonviolently, to break them of their bubbles and reform. But when they cross the line, they must be shut down quickly and violently if needed.
I would also point out there are degrees of violence. Maybe not to kill on sight the way at least one politician has called for against antifa. But a 'respond in kind' violence is definitely in order.
If Nazis are permitted to advocate for violence, we must be permitted to do the same against them. And when they follow through on their rhetoric (as they tend to do, because they're Nazis), respond in kind until they cease to be a problem.
We'd probably have a lot less violent racist cops if we allowed the survivors (or their families) to act with the same level of respect and restraint that the cops showed their victims.
I think the "redefining of the -isms" that you mention is generally a good thing. Racism looks a lot different when it evolves from the myopic "white guy thinks X about black person" to "systems...
I think the "redefining of the -isms" that you mention is generally a good thing. Racism looks a lot different when it evolves from the myopic "white guy thinks X about black person" to "systems in society that were created by the white guy who thinks X about black people are biased against black people." It reveals silent and systemic discrimination that isn't the white guy thinking X.
The way I unpack it is, in the direction of white --> minorities, you've got the superficial racism of a white person being prejudiced toward minorities, and you've got the societal systems of racism (from housing to employment, etc.) influenced by that prejudice that discriminates on a far deeper level. From this lens, the racism really only goes one way, because the societal racism was created by the majority group.
My big fat HOWEVER, is that the superficial stuff that goes in all directions is clearly cut from the same cloth. It's the same form of racial prejudice, regardless of how reflected/amplified it is in society at large. I am genuinely bothered, rustled even, that the effort to redefine this prejudice as "not racist" by virtue of power imbalance has in many ways excused it in public discourse. There is a genuine double standard, and it's a bridge we're going to have to cross at some point in the future.
They need a way for sub-reddits run by and for marginalised people to be able to exclude others. BlackPeopleTwitter needs a way to say "this is a place for black people to post about the Black...
Why did they think not protecting majority groups was a good idea?
They need a way for sub-reddits run by and for marginalised people to be able to exclude others.
BlackPeopleTwitter needs a way to say "this is a place for black people to post about the Black experience". They've already tried letting anyone post, and it ended up as a racist hell-hole.
Anecdotally I can tell you from a reddit mod slack which includes a lot of prominent mods that they more or less ignored the input from mods.... or perhaps more accurately, they took in the impact...
Anecdotally I can tell you from a reddit mod slack which includes a lot of prominent mods that they more or less ignored the input from mods.... or perhaps more accurately, they took in the impact and weighed it against the financial drive of the investors and decided who has more sway.
You don't need the anecdote: They even write out that every single mod split-out group they discussed this with in some form or other pointed out that the term "vulnerability" was bad in various...
It's not that I doubt they ignored all mod feedback and checked the box "got community feedback!" without embracing any of it, as admins have done many times with various policies in the past. This time they just said "screw it!" and even spelled out that they'd just ignored all the feedback.
I think the admins must have asked this question as an opener. It's much too coincidental that it came up as a talking point in each individual group. It also seems like they weren't able to get a...
They even write out that every single mod split-out group they discussed this with in some form or other pointed out that the term "vulnerability" was bad in various ways.
I think the admins must have asked this question as an opener. It's much too coincidental that it came up as a talking point in each individual group. It also seems like they weren't able to get a consensus on a better term. Some suggestions were "disenfranchised" and "protected classes", but those present their own difficulties.
I imagine this is about weird ironic anti-white quips. Only a false equivalence exists between anti-black slurs and whatever passes as an anti-white slur. Stuff like anti-white comments largely...
"the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority". So you can be as abusive as you like to people in a majority. Great!
I imagine this is about weird ironic anti-white quips. Only a false equivalence exists between anti-black slurs and whatever passes as an anti-white slur. Stuff like anti-white comments largely doesn't reflect a systematic oppression of white people, so as a white person, I don't feel particularly offended at that sort of thing. I imagine attacks against your background impact a lot more when they correlate to bigoted positions held by society that have kept people of that specific background down for generations.
This rule doesn't counteract other general rules about harassment that apply more universally.
I mean the skin check to be white will likely just be because people are trying to share white supremacist ideals while the skin check on /r/blackpeopletwitter is to stop all the brigading by the...
That threads which require you to send a photograph of the color of your skin to moderators is okay, as long as the requirement isn't that the skin be white.
I mean the skin check to be white will likely just be because people are trying to share white supremacist ideals while the skin check on /r/blackpeopletwitter is to stop all the brigading by the former.
That is not what I said at all. If you don’t want to feel alienated, maybe read the comment properly or don’t purposefully create strawman arguments. Read it again: I said if you’re in a group...
you don't see the issue with starting off with the assumption that folks with white skin are white supremacists?
That is not what I said at all. If you don’t want to feel alienated, maybe read the comment properly or don’t purposefully create strawman arguments.
Read it again: I said if you’re in a group that verifies the skin color of the participants is white, what else kind of group would you think does that?
Also to the point of the double standards: again: the bpt verification was because moderating the sub was hell whenever a controversial post hit the front page. Not to mention that white people could still get verified there.
I don’t know if you’re trying to argue in good faith or whether you want to argue semantics right now. Maybe I did phrase it wrongly. But if I lock my bike, and I say ‚this is against bike...
I don’t know if you’re trying to argue in good faith or whether you want to argue semantics right now. Maybe I did phrase it wrongly.
But if I lock my bike, and I say ‚this is against bike thieves, this area has some‘. You can’t just turn this around to claim I said ‚everyone here is a bike thief‘. It also doesn’t mean I assume everyone will steal my bike.
we can agree that requiring someone to show the color of their skin is racist
I am not sure if I would use the term racist here, especially since white people are specifically allowed on the subreddit, they just need to also get verified. It’s just easier to verify a poc if you want to keep the wrong people out.
I am 100 percent not saying all white people are racist or white supremacists. I do think locking everyone unverified out will keep the discussions sane.
prevent many outside of that group from joining the discussion as well
I agree, I also only got verified on bpt recently because I had mixed feelings on sending a photo of my skin in. In the end i felt like joining the discussion was worth the ‚sacrifice‘. And I think blocking out a few people because they don’t want to be verified is a worthy sacrifice, if it keeps the moderators sane by keeping the wrong people out too
I mean this (not being fully open) is what tildes does in a way as well. Instead of requiring a skin color check it requires someone else to invite you though.
BPT was full of racist comments from people who saw threads in r/all and decided to hop in and be racist. They were in there every single thread. The subreddit has been way, way better since they...
BPT was full of racist comments from people who saw threads in r/all and decided to hop in and be racist. They were in there every single thread. The subreddit has been way, way better since they put in the new system.
The difference is that barely anyone who says "kill all cis white men" has attempted to do so, while there's a laundry list of people who say "kill women" or "kill black people" or "kill Jewish...
The difference is that barely anyone who says "kill all cis white men" has attempted to do so, while there's a laundry list of people who say "kill women" or "kill black people" or "kill Jewish people" who have done so.
While I agree with the sentiment of this comment, this is just inviting someone to come in with the one instance of this happening and attempting to derailing the point you are trying to make. It...
While I agree with the sentiment of this comment, this is just inviting someone to come in with the one instance of this happening and attempting to derailing the point you are trying to make. It might be better to rephrase.
I need to be clear before I type up a big ideological paragraph for a misinterpreted strawman, are you implying it's okay to post "kill all cis white men" onto any sort of moderated forum...
I need to be clear before I type up a big ideological paragraph for a misinterpreted strawman, are you implying it's okay to post "kill all cis white men" onto any sort of moderated forum whatsoever? I can't think of a single instance where that shouldn't also be removed, regardless of whether someone will actually do it.
I think feeling threatened by some rando posting "kill all white men" is overblown because it almost never happens. I don't think it's in good taste and I'm not opposed to it being removed, but to...
I think feeling threatened by some rando posting "kill all white men" is overblown because it almost never happens. I don't think it's in good taste and I'm not opposed to it being removed, but to say "kill all white men" and "kill all black people" are equivalent is ignorant at best.
I get where you're coming from, and while the results are clearly different in the real world they come from the exact same place of hatred. The reason one is worse than another is due to the...
I get where you're coming from, and while the results are clearly different in the real world they come from the exact same place of hatred.
The reason one is worse than another is due to the different power dynamics held by the members of each group making the threat. Should those power dynamics ever change due to geography, demographic shifts, even cultural power, then those ideas become just as dangerous (eg. places like South Africa or Zimbabwe).
I don't think ideas of that nature should be allowed to grow at all, even saying something like "kill all *insert race*" in jest only serves to increase racial tensions on both sides even if it won't be acted upon directly. On top of that I think that with the internet being a global community you need to remember you might be exporting that racism to somewhere where it could genuinely be acted upon.
I know you say you're not opposed to removing it, which is good, but I can't think of any logical situation where you shouldn't remove it.
I think it should be allowed for underrepresented groups to make limited spaces online explicitly for themselves depending on the circumstances. Excluding others is an extreme move, but it can be...
I think it should be allowed for underrepresented groups to make limited spaces online explicitly for themselves depending on the circumstances. Excluding others is an extreme move, but it can be hard for underrepresented groups to find spaces of themselves to discuss their issues or culture, and it's important for groups to be able to have that. It can be hard for minority groups online to find spaces to discuss their perspectives on predominantly-white sites like Reddit without being absolutely overrun by well-meaning numbers of majority groups or even actively pushed back or subverted by hateful people. Majority groups like straight white men largely do not have that issue online, so the extreme move of exclusion would serve more as a statement about excluding for exclusion's sake rather than that benefit.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that it's either okay for everyone, or it's not okay to do.
I'm not operating from some absolute principle of "either exclusion is absolutely right or wrong in all circumstances" here, and I think it's harmful to do so. Whenever there's large negatives to exclusion, like especially if political power, influence, or networking opportunities were overwhelmingly concentrated in the exclusive space, then I don't think the space should be allowed to be exclusive.
These rules aren't here to protect feelings but to protect against genuine harm and political trends with history. I had to click your link and this post kinda says it all. This is right beneath a...
These rules aren't here to protect feelings but to protect against genuine harm and political trends with history.
I had to click your link and this post kinda says it all. This is right beneath a twitter reply to a BLM poster that features a smirking SS soldier saying "how compelling, please face the wall, now". Equating this and especially the frequency of cases is plain cynical.
The "actual or perceived" applies to everything in the sentence, not just race. I think it's meant to deal with cases like... I guess as a common example, a lot of people call Michelle Obama the...
The "actual or perceived" applies to everything in the sentence, not just race. I think it's meant to deal with cases like... I guess as a common example, a lot of people call Michelle Obama the t-slur even though she is not trans. That's still unacceptable anti-trans speech, and this rule could be invoked to protect her on the basis of gender identity even though she is a cis woman. It is... phrased awkwardly, but I think I understand the intent here.
Additionally, I assume the regular rules regarding harassment still apply to everyone.
The rule regarding majorities is clearly meant to allow criticism towards hegemonic groups, not necessarily literal statistical majorities. This is not penal code. I’m okay with it.
The rule regarding majorities is clearly meant to allow criticism towards hegemonic groups, not necessarily literal statistical majorities. This is not penal code. I’m okay with it.
Let's say I don't believe in a religion, but am a humanist, an atheist, or whatever else I define myself as: That isn't protected, but any religion, however violent that religion's message is is...
Let's say I don't believe in a religion, but am a humanist, an atheist, or whatever else I define myself as: That isn't protected, but any religion, however violent that religion's message is is indeed protected.
It's just an early 20th century western understanding of what this entails. Reddit clearly hasn't considered countries where people can be vulnerable and persecuted because of other beliefs, even if that belief is simply the belief in science-based medicine.
If the admins had just listed out US protected groups, they'd have veteran status in the mix. They don't, so they've clearly thought about adding and removing different groups but landed on a really bad conclusion that betrays that they haven't spoken to anyone with a current understanding of the field, even in the most basic United Nations or Universal Human Rights terms.
It seems like they're reacting to the problems and criticism they faced specifically. It's not obvious to me that those are the same exact problems the US had when it listed out protected groups....
Reddit clearly hasn't considered countries where people can be vulnerable and persecuted because of other beliefs, even if that belief is simply the belief in science-based medicine. [...] If the admins had just listed out US protected groups, they'd have veteran status in the mix.
It seems like they're reacting to the problems and criticism they faced specifically. It's not obvious to me that those are the same exact problems the US had when it listed out protected groups. I haven't seen or heard the case of anti-veteran biases being a large problem on Reddit, so the lack of a rule about them isn't surprising.
Race isn't really real beyond people's perception of it. Ethnicities sort of exist, but races bundle up a bunch of/parts of ethnicities in ways that don't really make sense or carve reality at the...
Race isn't really real beyond people's perception of it. Ethnicities sort of exist, but races bundle up a bunch of/parts of ethnicities in ways that don't really make sense or carve reality at the joints.
I think the "actual or perceived" is also meant to apply to all the traits.
I actually think that was a fortuitous choice of words. Race is largely as social construct with great cultural input. If you’re perceived as black, you’ll be treated as such. This is less about...
I actually think that was a fortuitous choice of words. Race is largely as social construct with great cultural input. If you’re perceived as black, you’ll be treated as such. This is less about genetics and more about perception.
I believe the point that the commenter above you is making is that there is only perceived race; since race is a social construct there can be no such thing as 'actual race' as that would imply...
I believe the point that the commenter above you is making is that there is only perceived race; since race is a social construct there can be no such thing as 'actual race' as that would imply some sort biological truth that simply doesn't exist.
Maybe it's something similar to "female presenting nipples" on Tumblr, where something went through legal, pr, and community outreach so many times it loses all meaning?
Maybe it's something similar to "female presenting nipples" on Tumblr, where something went through legal, pr, and community outreach so many times it loses all meaning?
I think that 'perceived' is meant to be how the comment or post percieves your race, while 'actual' is how you might be perceived in real life. So if a post makes an anti-black remark against you...
I think that 'perceived' is meant to be how the comment or post percieves your race, while 'actual' is how you might be perceived in real life. So if a post makes an anti-black remark against you it violates the rule, even if you would never be considered black in real life. This way I cannot call you racial slurs and claim that "it turns out that isn't even your race, so it isn't racism".
I think this is a good thing, and I’m surprised at this step for once. Closing /r/the_donald comes too late as that forum has mostly migrated off site, but the other closings are good. I am sure...
I think this is a good thing, and I’m surprised at this step for once. Closing /r/the_donald comes too late as that forum has mostly migrated off site, but the other closings are good. I am sure there will be outcry from the free speech crowd over there though.
By reddit's very design, it was always going to be hard for /r/unpopularopinion to be filled with anything other than "very popular opinion among redditors that is less popular in the average...
By reddit's very design, it was always going to be hard for /r/unpopularopinion to be filled with anything other than "very popular opinion among redditors that is less popular in the average person's social group". They probably didn't go with the latter as a subreddit name because reddit has a character limit for subreddits.
I haven't seen anyone mention this, but I feel like people really misunderstand the action taken against /r/the_donald I have a strong guess that this was their end game the whole time. The sub...
I haven't seen anyone mention this, but I feel like people really misunderstand the action taken against /r/the_donald
I have a strong guess that this was their end game the whole time. The sub was dead because they created a set of demands for new mods that simply couldn't be met, and locked the sub until a new mod team was set up. But I think they just wanted to cool things off before banning the sub, because they were worried about the backlash.
Probably figured if they let it die off first people wouldn't care as much, which seems to mostly be true seeing as how many people regard this move as late and ineffectual. Not really sure I can fault them either, given how unhinged some people are these days.
Yep. I didn't realize that the sub was mostly dead already as I've had it blocked for a long time, but I still think most people will think or /r/the_donald when it comes to online forums for...
Yep. I didn't realize that the sub was mostly dead already as I've had it blocked for a long time, but I still think most people will think or /r/the_donald when it comes to online forums for Trump, so while the sub may have been dead, it still would redirect people to their new location, and at least that road sign is gone now.
I have been seeing this comment a lot, as I haven't been following along so I feel out of the loop. I'm guessing they didn't just disappear, did they migrate to another sub/website/ did Russia...
I have been seeing this comment a lot, as I haven't been following along so I feel out of the loop. I'm guessing they didn't just disappear, did they migrate to another sub/website/ did Russia stop funding the bots?
I've been looking for an answer to these more cynical predictions and found a study that concluded that their last wave of banning in 2015 actually worked. The definition of "worked", here, is...
I've always thought that r/the_donald was used for 'A B testing' of campaign messaging. So I guess keeping the same structure makes sense. I am morbidly curious how this unlocks the crazys and how...
I've always thought that r/the_donald was used for 'A B testing' of campaign messaging. So I guess keeping the same structure makes sense.
I am morbidly curious how this unlocks the crazys and how they will moderate it.
Not at all, this move just serves to make users think that they're gone while they're just utilizing more subtle ways to influence people. I'm more convinced than ever that reddit is actively...
Not at all, this move just serves to make users think that they're gone while they're just utilizing more subtle ways to influence people. I'm more convinced than ever that reddit is actively involved in coordinating psyops.
The poster on the_donald are about as subtle as a hammer against glass. Now nation state actors sure, but that will never be confirmed any time soon. Also I'm highly suspect of reddit's allowance...
The poster on the_donald are about as subtle as a hammer against glass.
Now nation state actors sure, but that will never be confirmed any time soon.
Also I'm highly suspect of reddit's allowance of the constant tiktok marketing on their platform
Damn, wasn't expecting the bans on ChapoTrapHouse and Cumtown. Kinda happy they included GenderCritical though, that place was only inches away from being a full-blown hate sub.
Damn, wasn't expecting the bans on ChapoTrapHouse and Cumtown. Kinda happy they included GenderCritical though, that place was only inches away from being a full-blown hate sub.
I think part of it was to avoid criticisms of leftist favoritism, but tbh Chapo has broken numerous rules at this point so can't really argue about them being banned.
I think part of it was to avoid criticisms of leftist favoritism, but tbh Chapo has broken numerous rules at this point so can't really argue about them being banned.
Part of it was certainly to promote an appearance of impartiality, but I’m not shedding any tears over CTH any time soon. I have never encountered any posts of value from that sub and they did...
Part of it was certainly to promote an appearance of impartiality, but I’m not shedding any tears over CTH any time soon. I have never encountered any posts of value from that sub and they did frequently break rules.
Very happy that gendercritical is gone as well. My guess is CTH and cumtown had some sort of history with brigading or something questionable that while frankly shouldn't have gotten them banned,...
Very happy that gendercritical is gone as well. My guess is CTH and cumtown had some sort of history with brigading or something questionable that while frankly shouldn't have gotten them banned, was done either out of retaliation for having to ban T_D or simply to try and equally enforce rules, rather than enforce rules with egalitarian mindset.
I think it's fair to have a "do not advocate violence" rule, but when a group of individuals is advocating that you be killed for any reason it's self defense to say that you should respond to them with violence. You should ban the aggressor, not the person on the defensive.
I'll miss /r/gendercritical, it's one of a couple dozen subs I'd check every month or so as a sort of cultural temperature check. Same with Chapo and The_Donald until they were quarantined. Reddit...
I'll miss /r/gendercritical, it's one of a couple dozen subs I'd check every month or so as a sort of cultural temperature check. Same with Chapo and The_Donald until they were quarantined. Reddit has had long standing personal feuds with chapo's community and leadership though, so it's not that much of a surprise. I've been on reddit long enough to notice an almost 1:1 relationship between telling admins to fuck off, and your subreddit getting brought down months after the flashpoint; it's almost tradition at this point.
You check the temperature of that particular group of folks. What they are talking about, a=what their current issue du jour is, if it's very chatty at the moment, or if things have gotten pretty...
You check the temperature of that particular group of folks. What they are talking about, a=what their current issue du jour is, if it's very chatty at the moment, or if things have gotten pretty quiet due to world events. The fringes of the greater polity are always interesting to me, whether or not I find myself within them.
4 years too late, in my opinion. TD is responsible for the radicalization of a terrifying amount of young disaffected men coming straight off the heels of GamerGate. Instead of banning them when...
4 years too late, in my opinion. TD is responsible for the radicalization of a terrifying amount of young disaffected men coming straight off the heels of GamerGate. Instead of banning them when it was obvious they were toxic and breaking the site's rules every day, they chased the traffic it was driving and let it grow to a size where any action they took against it would be perceived as political. Any criticism Reddit receives here is entirely their own fault for fucking up.
It feels like some real both sides logic to ban both T_D and CTH, especially since T_D was already dead, but at least some other TERF / hate subs went down too.
It feels like some real both sides logic to ban both T_D and CTH, especially since T_D was already dead, but at least some other TERF / hate subs went down too.
Chapo was pretty dead for the last few months too (and generally post quarantine). /r/moretankiechapo gets just as much content in spite of having a small fraction of the subscriber count.
Chapo was pretty dead for the last few months too (and generally post quarantine). /r/moretankiechapo gets just as much content in spite of having a small fraction of the subscriber count.
Oh, it definitely will. Even if IAF, TrollGC & co are still around GenderCritical was, by far, the largest and most active sub in the "TERfsphere": I ran the numbers on some 70+ GC subs about a...
Oh, it definitely will. Even if IAF, TrollGC & co are still around GenderCritical was, by far, the largest and most active sub in the "TERfsphere": I ran the numbers on some 70+ GC subs about a year ago, and GenderCritical proper was
the largest sub by at least an order of magnitude: its userbase had doubled since April 2019, but back then the next largest sub was /r/truelesbians, and it had six times less users;
the most active sub by far, as it had more posts (~1.03x) and comments (~1.3x) than the next ten largest subs put together.
They just lost their largest recruitment ground - it doesn't help that most of their other subs went private following the ban - and even if the users are still there, their userbase is now fragmented. It will take a long, long time for them to recover, if they will ever manage that.We will see a tide of TERs spreading hatred all over Reddit, that much was inevitable, but I doubt they will be able to keep at it for long.
You might be happy to hear that Reddit just banned pretty much every remaining GC subreddit. If they keep at it like this, I might eventually have to take back what I said about them not taking...
Ah, pre-coordinated media coverage, of course. Other ones: The Verge - Reddit bans r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse as part of a major expansion of its rules The Washington Post - Reddit closes...
Uh, what? It's major news, whatever conclusion you draw from it. Not sure you have any idea what it's like to be a journalist, but this has "drop everything and write about it" all over it.
Uh, what? It's major news, whatever conclusion you draw from it.
Not sure you have any idea what it's like to be a journalist, but this has "drop everything and write about it" all over it.
All of them are full articles posted at exactly the same time as the announcement, and have quotes from "a call with reporters", which obviously had to be done ahead of time for that to be...
All of them are full articles posted at exactly the same time as the announcement, and have quotes from "a call with reporters", which obviously had to be done ahead of time for that to be possible. It's clearly something that was coordinated with press, including a specific embargo for the time they were allowed to release their articles.
No, but Reddit was a much smaller company when I worked there, and took a very different approach towards communication with the users and the media. For example, it would have been unthinkable to...
No, but Reddit was a much smaller company when I worked there, and took a very different approach towards communication with the users and the media. For example, it would have been unthinkable to post announcements about Reddit on the separate blog site, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram without even posting them to Reddit itself, but they do that regularly now. The official subreddits like /r/blog and /r/announcements are rarely used any more.
Back then, the relationship with the media was often more like you can see in this Newsweek article, where Reddit's general manager sent them a random gif when asked for a comment, and didn't respond to follow-up questions.
I'm frustrated by the uncritical repetition of the Reddit party line that 'The vast majority of the forums that are being banned are inactive'. Looking through the list on /r/reclassified that...
I'm frustrated by the uncritical repetition of the Reddit party line that 'The vast majority of the forums that are being banned are inactive'. Looking through the list on /r/reclassified that doesn't seem to be the case, even just going off the lower bound of subreddits that I had heard of prior to today.
For this particular action, it's hard to say until we see how they follow it up, but personally, I think it seems weak. The "headliner" bans were two subreddits that were both already quarantined...
Exemplary
For this particular action, it's hard to say until we see how they follow it up, but personally, I think it seems weak. The "headliner" bans were two subreddits that were both already quarantined a long time ago, and /r/The_Donald had even been completely locked by its mods with no new posts for something like 3 months now. Banning them at this point doesn't really make any meaningful difference to the site's culture, and feels more symbolic than anything.
The policy changes don't seem very significant overall, and as always, policies are completely meaningless unless they're actually enforced. There have been multiple previous times that Reddit has implemented "new, stronger policies" against hate speech or similar types of awful content, but after an initial set of obvious bans they don't seem to follow up with much enforcement, and things quickly slide back downhill to as bad or worse than they were before, just based inside different subreddits. I don't have much confidence that this is going to be the one that finally turns everything around.
In terms of overall opinion of Reddit, they're going in a very different direction than I would have liked to see (and that's a lot of why I left). When I worked there, we talked about Reddit in ways like "a platform for creating communities" (I wrote that post). But the way they run the site now gives me an impression far more like "a meme app that also hosts some vestigial discussion boards". The most popular "communities" on the site now are closer to hashtags than communities, they're mostly just vague groupings of low-investment, quick-entertainment content, and the design/mechanics are all being tuned towards that.
In my opinion, the biggest issue is that instead of recognizing what made Reddit special and emphasizing it, they decided to look at what every other popular site was doing and try to copy all of it. That is, instead of focusing on "what are we doing that nobody else is?", they went with "what is everyone else doing that we're not?". That's why the site has so many Twitter-like aspects now, chat rooms, a streaming service, image hosting, video hosting, emoji reaction awards, and more and more that they just keep adding.
There was also a huge shift in the company/business culture—when I started working there, they didn't have any venture capital investors and the site was just left to run fairly independently with limited resources. Then they took $50 million in venture capital in late 2014, and now they've taken $500 million more in the last 3 years, so they really, really need its traffic and advertising revenue to keep growing until they can IPO or get acquired to give those investors a large return. The things you have to prioritize when your goals are major growth and selling the site for billions of dollars are very different from the things you'd do if your goal was making it good.
Does it? I feel like I've heard more people say "delete your Facebook" than "delete your Reddit" and it's still very much a strong presence on the internet. When it's good enough for "most",...
Surely the reddit growth bubble has to burst at some point? It must come all crashing down sooner or later. From reading the comments on the announcement thread (although I'm aware that is likely just a very vocal minority), they seem to be really alienating some users this time.
Does it? I feel like I've heard more people say "delete your Facebook" than "delete your Reddit" and it's still very much a strong presence on the internet.
When it's good enough for "most", things tend to stick around for a long time, even if they're not the best products, services, companies, etc. because people enjoy complacency.
I mean hell, I know I should switch from Chrome for a billion reasons but I've been lazy to do so for another set of reasons. When there's no obvious competitor for the specific niche it fulfills it's hard to convince people to jump ship. It's more likely a much longer process as people get fed up and slowly migrate to other platforms.
This is disappointing. Not the bans/crackdowns -- it's the ambiguity I don't like. The wording in the new content policy is vague and confusing, and currently /u/spez has only half-answered four...
This is disappointing. Not the bans/crackdowns -- it's the ambiguity I don't like.
The wording in the new content policy is vague and confusing, and currently /u/spez has only half-answered four of the hundreds of questions in the announcement thread. Nobody is sure exactly what the new rules imply, and administration is leaving its users to fuddle over the semantics and speculated intent of the short-form doctrine they've contracted.
The murkiness of this situation is already enabling the construction of agenda-laden narratives 'explaining' the policy, which Reddit's sects will adopt and use as conflict fuel in their flame wars. In sum, this looks like another decision that will exacerbate the widespread polarization of online communities.
Reddit could mitigate the impact of these events by engaging with its user base and defining a few of the terms the policy uses. There's a chance they want to perpetuate the conflict so right-wing users leave the site, though. I've seen Ruqqus and other alt-Reddits popping up in the comments, which will probably be hit with yet another wave of conservative refugees. The echo chambers are getting louder.
Also: I saw someone mention (unfortunately I lost the link) that this could be prep work for Reddit going public -- I doubt it, but I don't know enough to say more. Anyone know anything about this?
Ambiguity is often incredibly beneficial, as it helps prevents people intentionally breaking the spirit of the law but not the letter, and prevents rule lawyering defenses of said actions which...
Ambiguity is often incredibly beneficial, as it helps prevents people intentionally breaking the spirit of the law but not the letter, and prevents rule lawyering defenses of said actions which force the administration to endlessly debate and justify every action. For the rationale behind it, see: On a technicality, and Tildes own Code of Conduct, which is based on similar principles.
As for reddit going public, I think that's inevitable. They have taken hundreds of millions in venture capital funding, and those investors need to see returns eventually, which is likely only going to be possible if reddit launches an IPO or gets acquired. And it should be noted that preventing that inevitability is the reason why Tildes was founded as a non-profit, and will not take on any investors or advertisers.
Thank you for the reality check, I hadn't even considered that aspect of ambiguity. I tend to forget just how hard it is to manage large communities (especially online ones). I was mostly thinking...
Thank you for the reality check, I hadn't even considered that aspect of ambiguity. I tend to forget just how hard it is to manage large communities (especially online ones).
I was mostly thinking of the "majority" clause when I wrote my comment, which I would still say is 'confusing,' regardless of how ambiguous it is.
NP. And yeah, there are definitely a few confusing parts which probably could have been worded better, even if the goal was to be slightly ambiguous and give themselves leeway in enforcement. But...
NP. And yeah, there are definitely a few confusing parts which probably could have been worded better, even if the goal was to be slightly ambiguous and give themselves leeway in enforcement. But if the goal was to be ambiguous, they even sort of failed at that by getting so specific in certain areas, IMO. I guess we shall just have to wait to see if they modify their wording at all in the future, and see how they choose to apply the new policy, to figure out what they really mean by everything and what their intent actually was.
When they're banned on reddit, communities usually move to Voat... so I quickly visited their site to see what they were saying. Big mistake! What a toxic place.
When they're banned on reddit, communities usually move to Voat... so I quickly visited their site to see what they were saying. Big mistake! What a toxic place.
It's good to see it hasn't really grown much (that I'm aware of). I don't think insular platforms like Voat can really sustain the hateful energy of its users like a dedicated subreddit could. I...
It's good to see it hasn't really grown much (that I'm aware of). I don't think insular platforms like Voat can really sustain the hateful energy of its users like a dedicated subreddit could. I think being a part of a larger community to fuel argument, brigading, and attention is a big part of their success. Without that, only the most adamant of extremists will participate—something they'd do anyway.
Banning The_Donald has come about four years too late for me to give reddit any credit for doing the right thing. However, based on the other toxic communities that were banned, I do hope this is...
Banning The_Donald has come about four years too late for me to give reddit any credit for doing the right thing. However, based on the other toxic communities that were banned, I do hope this is the start of reddit finally taking a stand against the proliferation of hate groups and bigots on their platform.
They did a Q&A today and addressed a number of moderator questions. https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/hunyxh/have_questions_on_our_new_hate_speech_policy_im/?sort=qa Oddly enough they...
They did a Q&A today and addressed a number of moderator questions.
I think this post on /r/WatchRedditDie was the original: Reddit's largest ever banwave is coming Monday But yeah, it's pretty hard to keep this kind of thing secret, between reddit having over 500...
What scares me is that they keep trying too keep this sort of thing secret instead of doing what all well-functioning democracies do when they have hearings and incorporate feedback to improve...
What scares me is that they keep trying too keep this sort of thing secret instead of doing what all well-functioning democracies do when they have hearings and incorporate feedback to improve ideas and rules before implementations to guide society.
Why not solicit feedback to get things right? Baffling.
In a way it is. /u/Yishan used these words back in 2014. https://redditblog.com/2014/09/06/every-man-is-responsible-for-his-own-soul/
In a way it is. /u/Yishan used these words back in 2014.
The reason is because we consider ourselves not just a company running a website where one can post links and discuss them, but the government of a new type of community. The role and responsibility of a government differs from that of a private corporation, in that it exercises restraint in the usage of its powers.
Eh, that's Yishan though. He definitely had some... grandiose ideals about what reddit was and what it stood for (that blog post is probably the main expression of it). He's been gone for over 4...
Eh, that's Yishan though. He definitely had some... grandiose ideals about what reddit was and what it stood for (that blog post is probably the main expression of it). He's been gone for over 4 years at this point, and the site's not being run the same way any more.
That's very true. I guess I posted it mostly for historical value. I think it's also worth pointing out that Yishan has largely walked back those views. The caustic realities of running an...
That's very true. I guess I posted it mostly for historical value.
I think it's also worth pointing out that Yishan has largely walked back those views. The caustic realities of running an "anything goes" website eventually clashed with his free-speech philosophy.
The free speech policy was something I formalized because it seemed like the wiser course at the time. ... Having made that decision - much of reddit's current condition is on me. I didn't anticipate what (some) redditors would decide to do with freedom. reddit has become a lot bigger - yes, a lot better - AND a lot worse. I have to take responsibility.
He was an odd duck, but one thing I did appreciate about Yishan is how hard he defended Ellen after the site mercilessly attacked her. It's true that his own policies allowed such a hate machine to be formed in the first place, but it could have been interrupted at any point.
The hatred against Ellen Pao was really nasty. But it's interesting to consider that these days the hivemind would probably be massively in favor of what she was trying to implement. I find that a...
The hatred against Ellen Pao was really nasty. But it's interesting to consider that these days the hivemind would probably be massively in favor of what she was trying to implement. I find that a curious reflection of how drastically the site culture and politics have swung.
The goals/values/policies of reddit change on a minute by minute basis if only via inaction/action and not by policy. Reddit also had a policy of "free speech" right up until it started getting...
In a way it is. /u/Yishan used these words back in 2014.
The goals/values/policies of reddit change on a minute by minute basis if only via inaction/action and not by policy. Reddit also had a policy of "free speech" right up until it started getting them negative attention and potentially costing them money.
But these seriously glaring mistakes, like asserting that there's such a thing as "a real race" that consequently must have objective (literally racist) characteristics is sure to cost them huge...
But these seriously glaring mistakes, like asserting that there's such a thing as "a real race" that consequently must have objective (literally racist) characteristics is sure to cost them huge potential investment to any investor that actually cares about these types of rights and regulations.
It (and the other omissions I point to in the top-level comment) show that they have no idea what they're doing with these issues and clearly didn't care enough to have a single person in the field read through their rule!
Because they don't need to. It's their website, it's their userbase if they can keep it. If you think democratic oversight by the users is important, seek a platform that ensures this.
Because they don't need to. It's their website, it's their userbase if they can keep it. If you think democratic oversight by the users is important, seek a platform that ensures this.
Curious about the rest of the censored 200. As far as i can tell there is no way to find out if a subreddit you were subscribed to was banned. The only named one i was subscribed to was...
Curious about the rest of the censored 200. As far as i can tell there is no way to find out if a subreddit you were subscribed to was banned. The only named one i was subscribed to was consumeproduct but that quickly became a trash sub and was mostly meta posting and lazy pol stuff so thats no great loss.
e1. /r/reclassified currently has a fairly large list of banned subs.
e2. They also got classic4chan which is a shame. There are also people saying they have banned all quarantined subs.
Navigate to the subreddit page. If you're subscribed to /r/Cats and want to find out if it was banned, go to www.reddit.com/r/cats and see if there's a page saying "This community has been banned".
As far as i can tell there is no way to find out if a subreddit you were subscribed to was banned.
Navigate to the subreddit page. If you're subscribed to /r/Cats and want to find out if it was banned, go to www.reddit.com/r/cats and see if there's a page saying "This community has been banned".
I'm a little sad about ConsumeProduct being banned too. Along with CTH, I think it was one of the few banned subs that I would actually sometimes read. It was admittedly a very alt-right...
I'm a little sad about ConsumeProduct being banned too. Along with CTH, I think it was one of the few banned subs that I would actually sometimes read. It was admittedly a very alt-right community, but I think they were more right than wrong about some aspects of modern consumer culture and the normalisation of extreme pornography - though there was a great deal of the usual anti-semitism and racism that would put off someone with a weaker stomach for such rhetoric.
I sometimes browsed ConsumeProduct to fuel my need to read hateful stuff against the LGBT (why do I (and apparently a lot of other people) do this?) community, and I have to say I didn't really...
I sometimes browsed ConsumeProduct to fuel my need to read hateful stuff against the LGBT (why do I (and apparently a lot of other people) do this?) community, and I have to say I didn't really see anything going too far. It of course was fully infested by the alt-right community, and whenever anyone (who probably wasn't aware that it's an alt right sub) wanted to seriously talk about any topic they were downvoted to oblivion. So it probably isn't too much of a loss. But still. I am not sure if actually banning subreddits that aren't too terrible is the right solution.
Amusingly, /r/MoreTankieChapo seems to have survived the purge. I don't consider myself left-wing but I did enjoy reading ChapoTrapHouse. I have a lot more time for them than I do for effete...
I don't consider myself left-wing but I did enjoy reading ChapoTrapHouse. I have a lot more time for them than I do for effete blue-tick tokenistic progressivism.
Chapo never really struck me as super tankie, more just edgelord left. But then again I didn't pay very close attention to them because they were annoying
Chapo never really struck me as super tankie, more just edgelord left. But then again I didn't pay very close attention to them because they were annoying
The Tankieness used to come in and out like the tides. It would oscillate between Lenin LARPing and Bernie Sanders fetishism based on how the Democratic primaries were going. And then once Bernie...
The Tankieness used to come in and out like the tides. It would oscillate between Lenin LARPing and Bernie Sanders fetishism based on how the Democratic primaries were going. And then once Bernie Sanders lost it got stuck in Lenin LARP mode.
It's me being derisive. LARP is Live-Action Role Playing. Lenin is, well Lenin. Many Leftist spaces online tend to get overrun with people who care more about tough-guy talk around vanguardism and...
It's me being derisive. LARP is Live-Action Role Playing. Lenin is, well Lenin.
Many Leftist spaces online tend to get overrun with people who care more about tough-guy talk around vanguardism and destroying the structure of capitalism rather than actually doing anything concrete or practicable in the real world. They're LARPers because they enjoy the aesthetics of Bolshevik revolution but don't actually care about any of the actual interesting questions around what a just economic system would look like.
For me, this might be the last straw for reddit. I feel like I have also become too easily distracted by it. I'm gonna try to make tildes as my only social media.
For me, this might be the last straw for reddit. I feel like I have also become too easily distracted by it. I'm gonna try to make tildes as my only social media.
Yeah, honestly I might spend more time on Reddit if they start to have better central administration. Their laissez faire attitude has led to the tyranny of the majority (and mods) on various...
Yeah, honestly I might spend more time on Reddit if they start to have better central administration. Their laissez faire attitude has led to the tyranny of the majority (and mods) on various subreddits, where the majority can be extremely unpleasant.
Nothing wrong with banning hate speech, I just think that Reddit seems very disingenuous. Furthermore, I just don't want to waste my time on the website anymore. It's very addictive.
Nothing wrong with banning hate speech, I just think that Reddit seems very disingenuous. Furthermore, I just don't want to waste my time on the website anymore. It's very addictive.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks like you’re mistaken about the goals and philosophy of Tildes. Start here: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes More info: https://docs.tildes.net/
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks like you’re mistaken about the goals and philosophy of Tildes.
I think his point is that virtually all the rhetoric and content that has been banned by Reddit today would almost certainly also be unwelcome on Tildes.
I think his point is that virtually all the rhetoric and content that has been banned by Reddit today would almost certainly also be unwelcome on Tildes.
Ah! I understand. I think the difference between the two is that the operators of Tildes seem genuine. I trust them more. This move by Reddit is about 3 years too late in my opinion and it seems...
Ah! I understand. I think the difference between the two is that the operators of Tildes seem genuine. I trust them more. This move by Reddit is about 3 years too late in my opinion and it seems completely for publicity.
Oh I see. No. That isn't what I meant. Although, I now see how it came across that way. I actually think that this ban is about 3 years too late. My problem moreso lies in the fact that I don't...
Oh I see. No. That isn't what I meant. Although, I now see how it came across that way. I actually think that this ban is about 3 years too late. My problem moreso lies in the fact that I don't believe the Reddit team is doing this for the right reasons. Spez is on record saying some shady things and I doubt he's suddenly seen the light.
I don’t want to be a wet rag about this but: why do we keep posting about reddit’s major updates on tildes? It seems like many of the users are here because we didn’t like the direction reddit was...
I don’t want to be a wet rag about this but: why do we keep posting about reddit’s major updates on tildes? It seems like many of the users are here because we didn’t like the direction reddit was going but then stuff like this is always on top. Is it jealousy? Envy? Wanting to see if you’re better off than your ex?
I don’t necessarily hate these posts, I just don’t see the point in compulsive updates on a separate site here.
It's major tech/social media news about one of the largest sites on the internet, and a lot of people are interested in it. There are articles about this on practically every major tech news site...
It's major tech/social media news about one of the largest sites on the internet, and a lot of people are interested in it. There are articles about this on practically every major tech news site right now.
There's an "ignore" function on the post if you don't care about it, and you can also easily ignore all reddit posts by adding "reddit" here: https://tildes.net/settings/filters
I happily use both platforms, as well as Hacker News to aggregate media. I think both have unique value props, it just depends what you are looking for. I don't comment on reddit anymore because I...
I happily use both platforms, as well as Hacker News to aggregate media. I think both have unique value props, it just depends what you are looking for. I don't comment on reddit anymore because I don't value the discourse, but there's certainly a lot more content, and it's far more granular, than tildes just based on the sheer difference in scales at work.
The new rule on hate speech and other things is a mess to say the least:
Some glaring issues:
How did they not have at least one sensible person read through this? What did they even present at the mod council shindig they ran?
Why did they think not protecting majority groups was a good idea? Also, do they define majority based on local populations, population of reddit, world population, etc? Wikipedia says the Han Chinese is the largest ethnic population, so are they the only ethnic group you can be biased against on reddit? According to Wikipedia, California has a higher percentage of Hispanic people than any other population. Does that mean if I post to reddit from California I can be as racist as I want against Hispanic people? If I post to a city or town subreddit, are the rules based upon the demographics of that area? Can I make a racist post towards black people on /r/blackpeople (idk if that even exists). This rule is just so poorly thought out.
It's not poorly thought out, it's deliberately vague, so they can enforce it however they like.
It's clearly rooted in the strong trend in academic and popular leftism to redefine the -isms (racism, sexism, classism, etc.) not simply as prejudice on the basis of specific characteristics but rather as prejudice plus power; where power is institutional or structural bias and oppression against the minority group. The cultural dominance that American progressivism now enjoys over big tech firms like Reddit means that the oppressor-oppressed relationships on which these policies are clearly predicated are those which the American left holds to exist in their society. To some extent these relationships are universal; there are essentially no societies anywhere on Earth that one could seriously consider structurally heterophobic, for instance - but in other cases this extrapolation of American socioeconomics to the scope of the entire globe crumbles at the seams (the example of whites in Zimbabwe is one that comes to mind).
I suspect that the extent to which these policies seem reasonable probably depends on the extent to which one buys into the theories and tenants of intersectionality. The sticking point I always hit with intersectional theory - and, this being Tildes, I hope and expect someone can rebut this well - is that power and oppression need not lie along the same axis. Intersectionality theory holds that racism by a black person towards a white person simply cannot exist because society and its institutions are inherently white supremacist. Reni Eddo-Lodge tells us that the Caribbean shopkeeper who reserves the choice cuts of meat for his black customers is prejudiced, but cannot be racist, since he is not in the position to affect the life-choices of his white customers, but only the quality of their lunch. Yet surely, by the very axioms of intersectionality, even if that shopkeeper does not benefit from racial privilege, he does benefit from male privilege, and most likely also straight privilege. If he denies a white woman a job on the basis of her race, is he not employing his power - which is at least to some extent derived from patriarchal nature of society - to be racist? I accept that this racism isn't necessarily structural, insofar as it doesn't align with the prevailing wind of discrimination in society at large, but it's racism nonetheless. It is for this reason that I cannot buy into the idea that discrimination is unilateral. To my mind, even if I accept the axioms of power imbalance and institutionalized oppression that intersectional thinkers assert, instances of discrimination and oppression must necessarily still exist in all directions. Tech companies, especially those with a global scope, must therefore take the stance to fight all discrimination and hate, or none of it. There is little justification for asymmetry.
Do you seriously think Reddit's ownership is progressive? This is the same big tech firm:
The right-wing communities of reddit have been treated with kid gloves and continue to be, even after the bans today. As for the others, Twitter lets Trump say literally anything he wants, including endorsing white power, encouraging violence against protestors, threatening nuclear war, encouraging violence against governors in his own country, etc. Meanwhile an account that reposted every tweet of his got banned within three days.
Facebook won't even put some sort of disclaimer on Trump's lies, is sponsoring the RNC this year, Mark Zuckerberg had a secret dinner with Trump last year, allowed all sorts of horrible shit like the TPUSA group sharing racist memes, the CPB group sharing racist and sexist memes, etc.
Big Tech pays lip service to progressive social causes, but does nothing otherwise. They worship money above all else and only shut down the Alex Joneses and Milos when they start getting bad press about it.
Reddit's ownership these days is absolutely progressive. As I state in my comment above, my belief is that their new policies are firmly rooted in modern leftist theory. I accept that in the past the prevailing political undercurrent was what I tend to call 'Hacker News Libertarianism', which is probably best characterised as centre-right, but it's been some years now since those ideas have held significant sway at Reddit HQ.
Edit: a quick point with regards to this part of your comment:
Fundamentally, it is more important that world leaders are not censored than that Twitter applies their rules equally. I think Trump is stupid, borderline-psychotic, and genuinely evil - but I would be deeply, deeply uncomfortable with tech corporations having the ability to limit his speech.
Do you have examples of how they're progressive besides the announcement today? Because no progressive would let places rampant with racism, sexism, etc., like r/conservative, r/LGBdroptheT, r/kotakuinaction, r/thelastofus2, et al. exist, and those are all still active.
If we're gonna call out some really fucked up places, how about we talk about
/r/itsafetishand/r/neovaginadisasters(not linking because fuck those places)Can you Tldr, I'm mildly curious but also don't really want to go there.
itsafetish is a sub about the false idea that being transgender is actually just a sexual fetish.
neovaginadisasters is a sub where people post pictures of sexual reassignment surgery, typically focusing on outdated photos (older procedures), very early post-op pictures (before it's actually healed and accordingly doesn't look so hot), and the occasional botched operation.
Both are incredibly toxic and transphobic spaces.
/r/itsafetishwas a subreddit for documenting evidence to support the hypothesis that transgenderism is primarily a sexually-motivated phenomenon whereby trans women (IIRC it was pretty much exclusively focused on trans women) are aroused by the act of performing the feminine gender. It was quite a hateful community. I never went on the second subreddit but I would guess its focus is pretty self-explanatory.Edit: wrong wording
Do you mean trans women?
Yeah I do, my apologies to all. Edited.
Reddit is progressive because they push their thumb on the scales in the direction of progressivism - as demonstrated by today's actions. If they were to ban all non-progressive communities from their general purpose discussion site, that would make them authoritarian leftists, not progressives.
I get where you're coming from, but I think the problem with this viewpoint is that you seem to be treating inaction as "neutral". It's not, really, it's just a different choice that has its own consequences.
Reddit's ownership also hasn't meaningfully changed in a long time, so I'm not really sure what you mean by attributing progressiveness to it overall. For leadership, Steve Huffman has been CEO again for over 4 years now, and he was one of the original founders of the site 15 years ago, and stayed involved with it for quite a few years initially before leaving for a while.
In terms of actual ownership, it's still primarily owned by Advance Publications / Condé Nast and has been for almost its entire life—they acquired the site in October 2006. They've taken quite a bit of venture capital over the last 3 years as well, but major chunks of it are from organizations like Tencent (about 30% of the VC), which is associated pretty strongly with the Chinese government and so not exactly a progressive organization.
Alright, here's another perspective. I can't speak to the personally held opinions of Huffman, and unlike you I've never met him, but one thing that does seem apparent to me is that Reddit's sustainability is contingent on being able to rake in huge amounts of advertising revenue from big brands. The sorts of brands whose target demographics use Reddit are almost all deeply concerned with maintaining a progressive image - what you might call performative progressiveness - so by extension, Reddit is required to adopt a progressive image for brands to want to associate with them. This performative progressivism requires corporate grandstanding on an impressive scale - hence big pronouncements and policy changes like those we've seen today. You can argue the toss about whether this does or does not constitute genuine progressivism but the consequence is fundamentally the same - to produce a website that is hostile to, if not entirely inhospitable for anti-progressive ideas and communities.
Today's actions are nothing against the last decade of inaction. T_D was already dead and the only big non-progressive sub that was banned was r/gendercritical.
I disagree - its my understanding that /r/ConsumeProduct was among the most active and culturally relevant anti-progressive communities on the site.
You're right, although that doesn't change my main point.
What if Twitter decided not to allow accounts for any national leaders or CEO's of public companies? It seems like the world would be a better place? They have other ways to get their message out. If they want a blog, they can have an assistant set up a blog.
Twitter could say sorry, you're too important. Really, this is the best for all of us.
I don't hate this as a solution, but where do you draw the line? Are all MPs barred? Or just members of the cabinet? What about the shadow cabinet? Etc. Etc.
I do think Twitter does a lot of harm by encouraging snappy rhetoric at the expense of nuance. But then again, plus ça change. Politics has never really been about subtlety. Carthago delenda est!
Yeah, there would be issues with setting rules for each country. I was thinking of whoever is considered the national leader. Ideally you'd have people saying, hey, I'm too important to have a Twitter account too!
In my scheme, everyone's press spokespeople would be still allowed to have Twitter accounts and of course they could post quotes. It would be more a way to discourage late night, ill-considered tweets.
You would also have to deal with Musk creating an account named "Totally not Elon Musk" because that's exactly the sort of thing he would do. Maybe also prohibit parody accounts with the same names of national leaders or CEO's, and call it a day?
That makes sense, but they'll never do it. They get a ton of free advertising when the news picks up and talks about a leader's tweets. Not to mention the ad revenue from all the traffic to Trump's account specifically.
I'm not saying Twitter is more powerful than Trump, but I am saying that Twitter does have some power over him and his ability to broadcast his ideas. And yes, despite being quite libertarian, I am coming around to the idea that we need to start having serious conversations about the role that internet forums play in our societies and our democracies. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, and even Reddit are the modern public sphere and it troubles me that people (especially leftists) are on-the-whole untroubled by private tech corporations dictating who does and does not have the right to participate in the conversation because it just so happens that the people who are getting banned are nearly all conservatives.
The people who are getting banned are advocating for violence and intolerance against minorities and others. The fact that they are also conservative is irrelevant to why they are being banned.
I'm not sure that's true. Katie Hopkins got banned and while she's just about the last person in the country I'd want to have a pint with I don't think her ban was due to her advocating for violence. Regardless, it's not a matter of why people are getting banned, but rather that tech corporations have the power to de-facto shut people out of the public sphere. Now, I'm obviously not saying that people should never be banned from internet forums, but my gut feeling is that we should all be at least a little concerned that these decisions are in no way subject to legislation or the democratic process - at least in the case of the megasites.
She has a long, long, no seriously I mean an absurdly long wikipedia page detailing just some of the nasty intolerant shit she's tweeted. It doesn't matter whether the final straw was over advocating violence or not, she's done it in the past.
Katie Hopkins is not a good person. I don't dispute that one bit. And yet...
It really kinda does. Because this is a discussion about what gets people banned from internet megaforums, and whatever the final straw was, it was presumably what got her banned from Twitter, an internet megaforum. Actually, the fact that Twitter doesn't disclose the reasons for their high-profile bans is in and of itself problematic.
No, actually it doesn't.
When someone is repeatedly an offender, and you tell them to stop, and they don't and you repeatedly ban them, it doesn't matter whether the last offense was the worst or whether it was 15 offenses ago. They've been repeatedly slapped on the wrist. Should they have been permanently banned after 3 offenses instead of 30? Maybe, but they're banned now, and they're banned because they've repeatedly been a terrible human being.
(JGB: early morning and I have a thundering headache - please read this as if I am smiling writing it. Not at any single point am I feeling hostile towards you. Not saying you think that but want to be clear AF at the start that this whole thing is written with total respect and love - since this is internet, often things can be read as a conflict seeking or backhanded argument)
First off "racism" is a very very new idea on its own. On the one hand its as you say, assuming people have certain qualities defined by the way it looks - but that on its own haven't been the sole definition for the huge chunk of the time "racism" has been a common term. "Race" on its own for example is in many areas not a quality used (since humanity is a race, the subdivisions are not) and for most of the 20th century its been defined as "ethnicity" not "race".
Second, the issue is when it becomes a problem. For example was out at a local festival with some people from my local library group (yes I am a boring person) and one of them, an elderly woman in her 80's watched as some Nigerian-Swedish kids did some dance thing on stage and she happily proclaimed "Oh they do have rhythm in their blood". The looks me and all the others gave each other as we all thought whether we should inform her of the exotification she was slathering the kids with is a massive "no" and all came to the same conclusion to ignore it. Sure it was racism pure and simple - further it was exotification (which perhaps isn't an English term I now realize, basically to round people down to something different and exciting but nothing else) but it was comparatively non-problematic and this woman was old enough that "next summer" is a doubtful term.
Racism is relevant the more problems it brings to the table. Just like anything. Not as some strange tit-for-tat system.
Being objectified sexually, for example, is horrible when it comes with actual fear of assault, minimizes your capacity to be taken for a real human etc etc - but being objectified is also wonderful! We all want to be a bit objectified at times when we want to be objectified.
Racism without problems is basically a friend of mine going "Oh you Swedes are so damn emotionless!" for example. No one gets offended, no one suffers. Had the same phrase been said in say Minnesota around 140 years ago by a non-Nordic it would have been problematic. Buuuut if racism is nothing but a tit-for-tat system of points then its as horrid as going "black people have no emotional restraint" no matter when in time or place. Which obviously isn't true.
The point is that this isn't a new thing. Its not like racism is redefined by some longhairs at Berkeley during the BLM protests - its been like this for around 40 years now. Racism as a sociological term first and foremost is far from new. The idea that this is somehow a sudden new concept is I know very common in the US as a political thread currently - but I don't understand why it isn't challenged?
We've talked about positive racism for decades, where the racial stereotypes are positive, BUT can still be used to push people down (like "oh you're black, that means you're good at sports") same as any stereotype.
I can understand how it comes about though with "woke culture" (really, call me boomer but I wanna kill that whole ideal with fire) - where singular words, terms and lack of academic insight is equal to the counter-ideal of those terms. (I always talk about a foreman at a job I had decades ago who was my LGBTQ-supporter hero and one of the people who helped me the most by sauntering up in to my closet at work going "Look I know you're a cocksucker, and I think most here do too now, but if any of them give you a problem tell me and I'll fuck em up" (he did btw) - the dude didn't know what words to use and wouldn't be woke if you strapped alarm clocks on his head, but he was and still is one of the best ally's any LGBTQ person can have). The idea of reducing racism to a tit-for-tat system is natural when the same concept of simple point-taking is used by the people claiming to be antiracists.
My core argument is that racism without it being a sociological theory, and including oppression and power as part of it hasn't been relevant since the 70's. Or not AS relevant (there are still value in looking at how people interact with each other as racial prejudice is part of it - but racial prejudice isn't born magically, it is always in relation with the social surroundings we all exist in)
Sidenote about Zimabwe: shortest shortest - I think that scenario is way more complex than its described in western media. The whole interplay between white landowners, the Rhodesian deals, and the English Crown is a mess of epic proportions
But to end on a high note involving racism and Zimbabwe, my husband proclaimed in the shops recently when we where buying coffee and the tag line of the coffee I picked up was "A dark and complex blend": "Ah like Robert Mugabe!"
Also "to end on a high note involving racism and Zimbabwe" is probably not something I ever thought I would write in text.
By what measure?
That there was an issue with prejudice and collecting the action of doing so under a term is comparatively new. Not the actual racism of course.
I disagree with this on the same premise that I pointed out earlier in another comment. If a group of individuals is advocating for hate and discrimination towards another group, it is self defense for the group that is being discriminated against to fight back.
There is a fundamental difference between a nazi advocating for the elimination of black people and for someone else to advocate for violence against nazis. I believe it is possible to take the stance to fight discrimination and hate and treat these two instances differently. The world does not operate in black and white and your laws and enforcement of said laws should not either.
I agree with all of this. That said, there is no reason why the aggressors and defenders in such a confrontation need align with the conventional perception of oppressors and oppressed groups. Black supremacists are likely fewer in number and certainly vastly less influential than white supremacists in the anglophone world, but they do exist and this rule would give them carte blanche to be the aggressors in advocating for hatred and discrimination.
That's like being worried about the existence of a couple of people who hate brown-eyed folks.
Imagine looking for work, and stumbling across one of these people. They would try to act civil, but you would see them looking down on you, not-so-subtly insulting you and, of course, denying you that job.
That would only be a problem on an individual scale. You would be harmed, sure, but that harm would be equivalent to the harm caused by someone who only hates you, personally. It would be an exceptional event that would be unlikely to happen again. You would be denied a job once, but you would still have access to the rest of the job market.
The same goes for housing, or getting service at some store/restaurant. You could rarely be denied it, but you won't have to stay homeless, and the activities whose owners don't hate brown-eyed people are the majority.
Imagine them being willing to go even further, insulting you on the street, spitting upon you, and attacking you physically. You would be hurt, but they wouldn't be given a pass on that attack: the rest of the world doesn't hate brown-eyed people. You would be able to find people to sympathize with and support you, and it would be extremely unlikely for such an attack to happen again, or to be more than one-on-one. Hell, you probably wouldn't even realize that you were targeted because of the colour of your eyes: you'd write it off as a random attack by an unstable, maybe drugged up individual, because there isn't a pattern for you to recognize and learn to fear.
In short, it lacks the weight of systematic discrimination, and it's barely comparable to it.
Even if actual black supremacists - which I frankly doubt are as poisonous as white supremacists - were to be given carte blanche to advocate for hatred and discrimination against white people, their impact would be insignificant.
In any case, I find that interpretation to be ridiculous. That rule was clearly added to head off the whinging about /r/BlackPeopleTwitter "discriminating" against white people, or LGBT+ subs "discriminating" against cis-het people, and besides that rules are always interpreted, never applied to the letter. Mods, admins, judges are not robots, and they will apply rules as they understand them. Considering that most belong to some majority group, well...
Edit:
s/\(harm\) of/\1 caused by/If the crux of this argument is on the majority/minority portion of the new reddit guidelines, I agree this shouldn't be in there.
If your argument is more general in how we should approach intolerant ideals, I disagree.
Well, my argument is with regard to Reddit policy, but of course I feel that the new Reddit policies would be equally unreasonable on pretty much any other general-purpose forum site.
This isn't really accurate. If you ever actually interacted with any Black supremacists you would realize they spend at least as much time being aggressive towards women and Jews as they do being aggressive towards Whites. Actual existing hate-groups are rarely all that laser-focused in who they're being hateful towards so I think this fear of yours is unfounded.
I'm of the stance that it is strictly immoral to do anything but advocate for violence against Nazis.
The paradox of tolerance is very real, intolerance is not to be tolerated.
To educate someone, they must be first willing to listen, and you must have someone who:
The last one requires both a good knowledge of a large swath of topics (as they oppose multiple groups, going from Jewish people to black people to LGBT+ people to people with disabilities), and the capacity to argue about those topics in a manner that can get through the dummy t h i c c skull of Nazis/the alt-right.
Further, you pretty much need to separate them in some manner from their usual haunts, or that will slow the de-radicalization process down in the best case.
As such, allow me to cast
(X) DoubtonThat could even be true in theory, but it's misleading because "redeeming someone" (again, they must want to redeem themselves) has a cost. It's not insignificant. It's massive, because it must be paid with the time, mental health, and possibly physical health of an ally, over a long period of time - during which they'll still contribute to the spread of their poisonous ideology - and the payoff is very much not assured.
They might be theoretically redeemable, but practically? You are much better off sinking that time on swaying the fence-sitters, shutting down your enemies to prevent them from doing the same.
That is, by excluding them. You can't do that via the official channels, though, because the platforms they use to recruit - cough Reddit cough - are known for their extreme laissez-faire towards hate groups. Governments, too, will refrain from stepping in until they are blatantly threatening - they certainly won't help de-radicalize anyone - and they have long since mastered the art of playing the victim.
Violence, when you can mete it out, works. It works against the bullied - it imposes a cost on them in the form of pain - but it is also one of the only languages that the bullies themselves understand.
Would it be better to take care of them in a non-violent way? Perhaps. I am not convinced that even trying to de-radicalize most of them is worth the effort.
Can we take care of them in a non-violent way? Can we exclude them from the public square, refuse them a platform, stop them from escalating - from following through on their violent ideology - without harming a hair on their head? No, we just don't have that power.
Personally, I have zero problems with wishing violence upon nazis, the alt-right, gender "critical" people and whatnot. I have the moral high ground, after all, and I gained it by standing on the pile of corpses of those like me that all these people have created.
To add to your argument, intentionally harming others to inflict pain and suffering is flat out wrong. Especially for the sake of ideology.
It is easy to destroy and tear down. So easy a toddler can do it. The suffering we can inflict on each other transcends beyond our 6 foot social distancing circles and affects friends, family, and any other person you can encounter.
It's a lot harder to pick up the pieces of whatever you have left and make it whole again. I would argue that if you are at the point where you feel like you have to harm others to make your point, you are no longer in the business of the greater good, but rather engaged in an act to grasp whatever perceived control you can get. It's tyrannical. Make no mistake, the ones that would make you feel pain and suffering because of the way you are different, also feel that they are getting a sense of control over "what's right". There are discernible moral platitudes in these scenarios, only people who have their egos wrapped around their eyes and can no longer see the humanity of the other human being they are trying to convince. There is no compassion, or empathy, or love, in violent actions. Only after you destroy the other person do you get to begin to pick up the pieces and try to construct your moral platitudes.
So I agree. I believe 99.999% (have to account for psychopaths) of the human population has the capacity for empathy and to learn and grow. We have to do our best to create the conditions that will help people overcome their irrational beliefs. We cannot be like toddlers who throw temper tantrums when things don't go perfectly. We will always have to fight prejudice and inequality throughout our lives in many different forms. But we will win these battles on the wholesome path.
I totally get that it's possible to reform bigots, and even support doing so, when people's lives aren't at stake. You can take your time reforming your racist grandma, or your well-meaning but ignorant neighbor. Even so far as reforming Nazis.
But, when push comes to shove, violence must be used to shut down violence.
It's preferrable to de-escalate nonviolently, to break them of their bubbles and reform. But when they cross the line, they must be shut down quickly and violently if needed.
I would also point out there are degrees of violence. Maybe not to kill on sight the way at least one politician has called for against antifa. But a 'respond in kind' violence is definitely in order.
If Nazis are permitted to advocate for violence, we must be permitted to do the same against them. And when they follow through on their rhetoric (as they tend to do, because they're Nazis), respond in kind until they cease to be a problem.
We'd probably have a lot less violent racist cops if we allowed the survivors (or their families) to act with the same level of respect and restraint that the cops showed their victims.
I think the "redefining of the -isms" that you mention is generally a good thing. Racism looks a lot different when it evolves from the myopic "white guy thinks X about black person" to "systems in society that were created by the white guy who thinks X about black people are biased against black people." It reveals silent and systemic discrimination that isn't the white guy thinking X.
The way I unpack it is, in the direction of white --> minorities, you've got the superficial racism of a white person being prejudiced toward minorities, and you've got the societal systems of racism (from housing to employment, etc.) influenced by that prejudice that discriminates on a far deeper level. From this lens, the racism really only goes one way, because the societal racism was created by the majority group.
My big fat HOWEVER, is that the superficial stuff that goes in all directions is clearly cut from the same cloth. It's the same form of racial prejudice, regardless of how reflected/amplified it is in society at large. I am genuinely bothered, rustled even, that the effort to redefine this prejudice as "not racist" by virtue of power imbalance has in many ways excused it in public discourse. There is a genuine double standard, and it's a bridge we're going to have to cross at some point in the future.
They need a way for sub-reddits run by and for marginalised people to be able to exclude others.
BlackPeopleTwitter needs a way to say "this is a place for black people to post about the Black experience". They've already tried letting anyone post, and it ended up as a racist hell-hole.
Anecdotally I can tell you from a reddit mod slack which includes a lot of prominent mods that they more or less ignored the input from mods.... or perhaps more accurately, they took in the impact and weighed it against the financial drive of the investors and decided who has more sway.
You don't need the anecdote: They even write out that every single mod split-out group they discussed this with in some form or other pointed out that the term "vulnerability" was bad in various ways.
It's not that I doubt they ignored all mod feedback and checked the box "got community feedback!" without embracing any of it, as admins have done many times with various policies in the past. This time they just said "screw it!" and even spelled out that they'd just ignored all the feedback.
I think the admins must have asked this question as an opener. It's much too coincidental that it came up as a talking point in each individual group. It also seems like they weren't able to get a consensus on a better term. Some suggestions were "disenfranchised" and "protected classes", but those present their own difficulties.
I imagine this is about weird ironic anti-white quips. Only a false equivalence exists between anti-black slurs and whatever passes as an anti-white slur. Stuff like anti-white comments largely doesn't reflect a systematic oppression of white people, so as a white person, I don't feel particularly offended at that sort of thing. I imagine attacks against your background impact a lot more when they correlate to bigoted positions held by society that have kept people of that specific background down for generations.
This rule doesn't counteract other general rules about harassment that apply more universally.
I mean the skin check to be white will likely just be because people are trying to share white supremacist ideals while the skin check on /r/blackpeopletwitter is to stop all the brigading by the former.
That is not what I said at all. If you don’t want to feel alienated, maybe read the comment properly or don’t purposefully create strawman arguments.
Read it again: I said if you’re in a group that verifies the skin color of the participants is white, what else kind of group would you think does that?
Also to the point of the double standards: again: the bpt verification was because moderating the sub was hell whenever a controversial post hit the front page. Not to mention that white people could still get verified there.
I don’t know if you’re trying to argue in good faith or whether you want to argue semantics right now. Maybe I did phrase it wrongly.
But if I lock my bike, and I say ‚this is against bike thieves, this area has some‘. You can’t just turn this around to claim I said ‚everyone here is a bike thief‘. It also doesn’t mean I assume everyone will steal my bike.
I am 100 percent not saying all white people are racist or white supremacists. I do think locking everyone unverified out will keep the discussions sane.
I agree, I also only got verified on bpt recently because I had mixed feelings on sending a photo of my skin in. In the end i felt like joining the discussion was worth the ‚sacrifice‘. And I think blocking out a few people because they don’t want to be verified is a worthy sacrifice, if it keeps the moderators sane by keeping the wrong people out too
I mean this (not being fully open) is what tildes does in a way as well. Instead of requiring a skin color check it requires someone else to invite you though.
/u/dubteedub can explain the white ally verification process. I don’t think it entails sending a picture. I sent one as a poc
BPT was full of racist comments from people who saw threads in r/all and decided to hop in and be racist. They were in there every single thread. The subreddit has been way, way better since they put in the new system.
The difference is that barely anyone who says "kill all cis white men" has attempted to do so, while there's a laundry list of people who say "kill women" or "kill black people" or "kill Jewish people" who have done so.
Edit for rephrasing
While I agree with the sentiment of this comment, this is just inviting someone to come in with the one instance of this happening and attempting to derailing the point you are trying to make. It might be better to rephrase.
Good call, I fixed that. There are more people like that in this thread than I like to see.
I need to be clear before I type up a big ideological paragraph for a misinterpreted strawman, are you implying it's okay to post "kill all cis white men" onto any sort of moderated forum whatsoever? I can't think of a single instance where that shouldn't also be removed, regardless of whether someone will actually do it.
I could seriously be misreading this.
I think feeling threatened by some rando posting "kill all white men" is overblown because it almost never happens. I don't think it's in good taste and I'm not opposed to it being removed, but to say "kill all white men" and "kill all black people" are equivalent is ignorant at best.
I get where you're coming from, and while the results are clearly different in the real world they come from the exact same place of hatred.
The reason one is worse than another is due to the different power dynamics held by the members of each group making the threat. Should those power dynamics ever change due to geography, demographic shifts, even cultural power, then those ideas become just as dangerous (eg. places like South Africa or Zimbabwe).
I don't think ideas of that nature should be allowed to grow at all, even saying something like "kill all *insert race*" in jest only serves to increase racial tensions on both sides even if it won't be acted upon directly. On top of that I think that with the internet being a global community you need to remember you might be exporting that racism to somewhere where it could genuinely be acted upon.
I know you say you're not opposed to removing it, which is good, but I can't think of any logical situation where you shouldn't remove it.
I think in both cases people are very, very unlikely to act on those sentiments.
I think it should be allowed for underrepresented groups to make limited spaces online explicitly for themselves depending on the circumstances. Excluding others is an extreme move, but it can be hard for underrepresented groups to find spaces of themselves to discuss their issues or culture, and it's important for groups to be able to have that. It can be hard for minority groups online to find spaces to discuss their perspectives on predominantly-white sites like Reddit without being absolutely overrun by well-meaning numbers of majority groups or even actively pushed back or subverted by hateful people. Majority groups like straight white men largely do not have that issue online, so the extreme move of exclusion would serve more as a statement about excluding for exclusion's sake rather than that benefit.
I'm not operating from some absolute principle of "either exclusion is absolutely right or wrong in all circumstances" here, and I think it's harmful to do so. Whenever there's large negatives to exclusion, like especially if political power, influence, or networking opportunities were overwhelmingly concentrated in the exclusive space, then I don't think the space should be allowed to be exclusive.
These rules aren't here to protect feelings but to protect against genuine harm and political trends with history.
I had to click your link and this post kinda says it all. This is right beneath a twitter reply to a BLM poster that features a smirking SS soldier saying "how compelling, please face the wall, now". Equating this and especially the frequency of cases is plain cynical.
The "actual or perceived" applies to everything in the sentence, not just race. I think it's meant to deal with cases like... I guess as a common example, a lot of people call Michelle Obama the t-slur even though she is not trans. That's still unacceptable anti-trans speech, and this rule could be invoked to protect her on the basis of gender identity even though she is a cis woman. It is... phrased awkwardly, but I think I understand the intent here.
Additionally, I assume the regular rules regarding harassment still apply to everyone.
The rule regarding majorities is clearly meant to allow criticism towards hegemonic groups, not necessarily literal statistical majorities. This is not penal code. I’m okay with it.
I guess misogyny is fine then...
I’m curious what you see as the issue with this point? Is it that “creed” is ambiguous and poorly define, or something else?
Let's say I don't believe in a religion, but am a humanist, an atheist, or whatever else I define myself as: That isn't protected, but any religion, however violent that religion's message is is indeed protected.
It's just an early 20th century western understanding of what this entails. Reddit clearly hasn't considered countries where people can be vulnerable and persecuted because of other beliefs, even if that belief is simply the belief in science-based medicine.
If the admins had just listed out US protected groups, they'd have veteran status in the mix. They don't, so they've clearly thought about adding and removing different groups but landed on a really bad conclusion that betrays that they haven't spoken to anyone with a current understanding of the field, even in the most basic United Nations or Universal Human Rights terms.
I am religious and I agree that religious groups should have no special protections whatsoever.
It seems like they're reacting to the problems and criticism they faced specifically. It's not obvious to me that those are the same exact problems the US had when it listed out protected groups. I haven't seen or heard the case of anti-veteran biases being a large problem on Reddit, so the lack of a rule about them isn't surprising.
What is the difference between my actual and perceived race? That’s some really poor wording
Race isn't really real beyond people's perception of it. Ethnicities sort of exist, but races bundle up a bunch of/parts of ethnicities in ways that don't really make sense or carve reality at the joints.
I think the "actual or perceived" is also meant to apply to all the traits.
I actually think that was a fortuitous choice of words. Race is largely as social construct with great cultural input. If you’re perceived as black, you’ll be treated as such. This is less about genetics and more about perception.
I believe the point that the commenter above you is making is that there is only perceived race; since race is a social construct there can be no such thing as 'actual race' as that would imply some sort biological truth that simply doesn't exist.
It was still a good choice of words even in that context, since it covers more ground and takes into account other definitions—correct or not.
Maybe it's something similar to "female presenting nipples" on Tumblr, where something went through legal, pr, and community outreach so many times it loses all meaning?
I think that 'perceived' is meant to be how the comment or post percieves your race, while 'actual' is how you might be perceived in real life. So if a post makes an anti-black remark against you it violates the rule, even if you would never be considered black in real life. This way I cannot call you racial slurs and claim that "it turns out that isn't even your race, so it isn't racism".
I think this is a good thing, and I’m surprised at this step for once. Closing /r/the_donald comes too late as that forum has mostly migrated off site, but the other closings are good. I am sure there will be outcry from the free speech crowd over there though.
I think a huge chunk of the /r/the_donald crowd just opened up shop in /r/conservative and less directly political subreddits like /r/unpopularopinion
By reddit's very design, it was always going to be hard for /r/unpopularopinion to be filled with anything other than "very popular opinion among redditors that is less popular in the average person's social group". They probably didn't go with the latter as a subreddit name because reddit has a character limit for subreddits.
I haven't seen anyone mention this, but I feel like people really misunderstand the action taken against /r/the_donald
I have a strong guess that this was their end game the whole time. The sub was dead because they created a set of demands for new mods that simply couldn't be met, and locked the sub until a new mod team was set up. But I think they just wanted to cool things off before banning the sub, because they were worried about the backlash.
Probably figured if they let it die off first people wouldn't care as much, which seems to mostly be true seeing as how many people regard this move as late and ineffectual. Not really sure I can fault them either, given how unhinged some people are these days.
Yep. I didn't realize that the sub was mostly dead already as I've had it blocked for a long time, but I still think most people will think or /r/the_donald when it comes to online forums for Trump, so while the sub may have been dead, it still would redirect people to their new location, and at least that road sign is gone now.
I have been seeing this comment a lot, as I haven't been following along so I feel out of the loop. I'm guessing they didn't just disappear, did they migrate to another sub/website/ did Russia stop funding the bots?
I've been looking for an answer to these more cynical predictions and found a study that concluded that their last wave of banning in 2015 actually worked. The definition of "worked", here, is that people apparently didn't just drag their hate speech to other subs, even if they stayed on reddit.
I've always thought that r/the_donald was used for 'A B testing' of campaign messaging. So I guess keeping the same structure makes sense.
I am morbidly curious how this unlocks the crazys and how they will moderate it.
Not at all, this move just serves to make users think that they're gone while they're just utilizing more subtle ways to influence people. I'm more convinced than ever that reddit is actively involved in coordinating psyops.
The poster on the_donald are about as subtle as a hammer against glass.
Now nation state actors sure, but that will never be confirmed any time soon.
Also I'm highly suspect of reddit's allowance of the constant tiktok marketing on their platform
Damn, wasn't expecting the bans on ChapoTrapHouse and Cumtown. Kinda happy they included GenderCritical though, that place was only inches away from being a full-blown hate sub.
I think part of it was to avoid criticisms of leftist favoritism, but tbh Chapo has broken numerous rules at this point so can't really argue about them being banned.
Part of it was certainly to promote an appearance of impartiality, but I’m not shedding any tears over CTH any time soon. I have never encountered any posts of value from that sub and they did frequently break rules.
Very happy that gendercritical is gone as well. My guess is CTH and cumtown had some sort of history with brigading or something questionable that while frankly shouldn't have gotten them banned, was done either out of retaliation for having to ban T_D or simply to try and equally enforce rules, rather than enforce rules with egalitarian mindset.
I think it's fair to have a "do not advocate violence" rule, but when a group of individuals is advocating that you be killed for any reason it's self defense to say that you should respond to them with violence. You should ban the aggressor, not the person on the defensive.
I'll miss /r/gendercritical, it's one of a couple dozen subs I'd check every month or so as a sort of cultural temperature check. Same with Chapo and The_Donald until they were quarantined. Reddit has had long standing personal feuds with chapo's community and leadership though, so it's not that much of a surprise. I've been on reddit long enough to notice an almost 1:1 relationship between telling admins to fuck off, and your subreddit getting brought down months after the flashpoint; it's almost tradition at this point.
How is an insulated echo chamber a cultural temperature check?
You check the temperature of that particular group of folks. What they are talking about, a=what their current issue du jour is, if it's very chatty at the moment, or if things have gotten pretty quiet due to world events. The fringes of the greater polity are always interesting to me, whether or not I find myself within them.
4 years too late, in my opinion. TD is responsible for the radicalization of a terrifying amount of young disaffected men coming straight off the heels of GamerGate. Instead of banning them when it was obvious they were toxic and breaking the site's rules every day, they chased the traffic it was driving and let it grow to a size where any action they took against it would be perceived as political. Any criticism Reddit receives here is entirely their own fault for fucking up.
It feels like some real both sides logic to ban both T_D and CTH, especially since T_D was already dead, but at least some other TERF / hate subs went down too.
Chapo was pretty dead for the last few months too (and generally post quarantine). /r/moretankiechapo gets just as much content in spite of having a small fraction of the subscriber count.
It should have happened a long, long time ago, but the /r/gendercritical ban still made my day.
hopefully that does something to stem the tide of terfs a little bit
Oh, it definitely will. Even if IAF, TrollGC & co are still around GenderCritical was, by far, the largest and most active sub in the "TERfsphere": I ran the numbers on some 70+ GC subs about a year ago, and GenderCritical proper was
They just lost their largest recruitment ground - it doesn't help that most of their other subs went private following the ban - and even if the users are still there, their userbase is now fragmented. It will take a long, long time for them to recover, if they will ever manage that.We will see a tide of TERs spreading hatred all over Reddit, that much was inevitable, but I doubt they will be able to keep at it for long.
You might be happy to hear that Reddit just banned pretty much every remaining GC subreddit.
If they keep at it like this, I might eventually have to take back what I said about them not taking hate groups seriously.
It's good, I just feel like if they actually cared about anything other than bad pr they'd have banned them earlier
NY Times coverage: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/technology/reddit-hate-speech.html
Ah, pre-coordinated media coverage, of course.
Other ones:
Uh, what? It's major news, whatever conclusion you draw from it.
Not sure you have any idea what it's like to be a journalist, but this has "drop everything and write about it" all over it.
All of them are full articles posted at exactly the same time as the announcement, and have quotes from "a call with reporters", which obviously had to be done ahead of time for that to be possible. It's clearly something that was coordinated with press, including a specific embargo for the time they were allowed to release their articles.
From your own experience, is that something Reddit frequently did?
No, but Reddit was a much smaller company when I worked there, and took a very different approach towards communication with the users and the media. For example, it would have been unthinkable to post announcements about Reddit on the separate blog site, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram without even posting them to Reddit itself, but they do that regularly now. The official subreddits like /r/blog and /r/announcements are rarely used any more.
Back then, the relationship with the media was often more like you can see in this Newsweek article, where Reddit's general manager sent them a random gif when asked for a comment, and didn't respond to follow-up questions.
The articles were all posted to the minute the same time as the reddit post. Look at the timestamps.
I'm frustrated by the uncritical repetition of the Reddit party line that 'The vast majority of the forums that are being banned are inactive'. Looking through the list on /r/reclassified that doesn't seem to be the case, even just going off the lower bound of subreddits that I had heard of prior to today.
For this particular action, it's hard to say until we see how they follow it up, but personally, I think it seems weak. The "headliner" bans were two subreddits that were both already quarantined a long time ago, and /r/The_Donald had even been completely locked by its mods with no new posts for something like 3 months now. Banning them at this point doesn't really make any meaningful difference to the site's culture, and feels more symbolic than anything.
The policy changes don't seem very significant overall, and as always, policies are completely meaningless unless they're actually enforced. There have been multiple previous times that Reddit has implemented "new, stronger policies" against hate speech or similar types of awful content, but after an initial set of obvious bans they don't seem to follow up with much enforcement, and things quickly slide back downhill to as bad or worse than they were before, just based inside different subreddits. I don't have much confidence that this is going to be the one that finally turns everything around.
In terms of overall opinion of Reddit, they're going in a very different direction than I would have liked to see (and that's a lot of why I left). When I worked there, we talked about Reddit in ways like "a platform for creating communities" (I wrote that post). But the way they run the site now gives me an impression far more like "a meme app that also hosts some vestigial discussion boards". The most popular "communities" on the site now are closer to hashtags than communities, they're mostly just vague groupings of low-investment, quick-entertainment content, and the design/mechanics are all being tuned towards that.
In my opinion, the biggest issue is that instead of recognizing what made Reddit special and emphasizing it, they decided to look at what every other popular site was doing and try to copy all of it. That is, instead of focusing on "what are we doing that nobody else is?", they went with "what is everyone else doing that we're not?". That's why the site has so many Twitter-like aspects now, chat rooms, a streaming service, image hosting, video hosting, emoji reaction awards, and more and more that they just keep adding.
There was also a huge shift in the company/business culture—when I started working there, they didn't have any venture capital investors and the site was just left to run fairly independently with limited resources. Then they took $50 million in venture capital in late 2014, and now they've taken $500 million more in the last 3 years, so they really, really need its traffic and advertising revenue to keep growing until they can IPO or get acquired to give those investors a large return. The things you have to prioritize when your goals are major growth and selling the site for billions of dollars are very different from the things you'd do if your goal was making it good.
Does it? I feel like I've heard more people say "delete your Facebook" than "delete your Reddit" and it's still very much a strong presence on the internet.
When it's good enough for "most", things tend to stick around for a long time, even if they're not the best products, services, companies, etc. because people enjoy complacency.
I mean hell, I know I should switch from Chrome for a billion reasons but I've been lazy to do so for another set of reasons. When there's no obvious competitor for the specific niche it fulfills it's hard to convince people to jump ship. It's more likely a much longer process as people get fed up and slowly migrate to other platforms.
This is disappointing. Not the bans/crackdowns -- it's the ambiguity I don't like.
The wording in the new content policy is vague and confusing, and currently /u/spez has only half-answered four of the hundreds of questions in the announcement thread. Nobody is sure exactly what the new rules imply, and administration is leaving its users to fuddle over the semantics and speculated intent of the short-form doctrine they've contracted.
The murkiness of this situation is already enabling the construction of agenda-laden narratives 'explaining' the policy, which Reddit's sects will adopt and use as conflict fuel in their flame wars. In sum, this looks like another decision that will exacerbate the widespread polarization of online communities.
Reddit could mitigate the impact of these events by engaging with its user base and defining a few of the terms the policy uses. There's a chance they want to perpetuate the conflict so right-wing users leave the site, though. I've seen Ruqqus and other alt-Reddits popping up in the comments, which will probably be hit with yet another wave of conservative refugees. The echo chambers are getting louder.
Also: I saw someone mention (unfortunately I lost the link) that this could be prep work for Reddit going public -- I doubt it, but I don't know enough to say more. Anyone know anything about this?
Ambiguity is often incredibly beneficial, as it helps prevents people intentionally breaking the spirit of the law but not the letter, and prevents rule lawyering defenses of said actions which force the administration to endlessly debate and justify every action. For the rationale behind it, see: On a technicality, and Tildes own Code of Conduct, which is based on similar principles.
As for reddit going public, I think that's inevitable. They have taken hundreds of millions in venture capital funding, and those investors need to see returns eventually, which is likely only going to be possible if reddit launches an IPO or gets acquired. And it should be noted that preventing that inevitability is the reason why Tildes was founded as a non-profit, and will not take on any investors or advertisers.
Thank you for the reality check, I hadn't even considered that aspect of ambiguity. I tend to forget just how hard it is to manage large communities (especially online ones).
I was mostly thinking of the "majority" clause when I wrote my comment, which I would still say is 'confusing,' regardless of how ambiguous it is.
NP. And yeah, there are definitely a few confusing parts which probably could have been worded better, even if the goal was to be slightly ambiguous and give themselves leeway in enforcement. But if the goal was to be ambiguous, they even sort of failed at that by getting so specific in certain areas, IMO. I guess we shall just have to wait to see if they modify their wording at all in the future, and see how they choose to apply the new policy, to figure out what they really mean by everything and what their intent actually was.
When they're banned on reddit, communities usually move to Voat... so I quickly visited their site to see what they were saying. Big mistake! What a toxic place.
It's good to see it hasn't really grown much (that I'm aware of). I don't think insular platforms like Voat can really sustain the hateful energy of its users like a dedicated subreddit could. I think being a part of a larger community to fuel argument, brigading, and attention is a big part of their success. Without that, only the most adamant of extremists will participate—something they'd do anyway.
Banning The_Donald has come about four years too late for me to give reddit any credit for doing the right thing. However, based on the other toxic communities that were banned, I do hope this is the start of reddit finally taking a stand against the proliferation of hate groups and bigots on their platform.
They did a Q&A today and addressed a number of moderator questions.
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/hunyxh/have_questions_on_our_new_hate_speech_policy_im/?sort=qa
Oddly enough they pulled out /u/Reddit to ask some anonymous questions. I wonder how that works.
The bans were speculated about late last week, source was a post on /r/conspiracy.
I think this post on /r/WatchRedditDie was the original: Reddit's largest ever banwave is coming Monday
But yeah, it's pretty hard to keep this kind of thing secret, between reddit having over 500 employees now and them pre-coordinating media coverage about it.
What scares me is that they keep trying too keep this sort of thing secret instead of doing what all well-functioning democracies do when they have hearings and incorporate feedback to improve ideas and rules before implementations to guide society.
Why not solicit feedback to get things right? Baffling.
But, it's not a democracy. It's not a government for that matter.
In a way it is. /u/Yishan used these words back in 2014.
https://redditblog.com/2014/09/06/every-man-is-responsible-for-his-own-soul/
Eh, that's Yishan though. He definitely had some... grandiose ideals about what reddit was and what it stood for (that blog post is probably the main expression of it). He's been gone for over 4 years at this point, and the site's not being run the same way any more.
That's very true. I guess I posted it mostly for historical value.
I think it's also worth pointing out that Yishan has largely walked back those views. The caustic realities of running an "anything goes" website eventually clashed with his free-speech philosophy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3dautm/content_policy_update_ama_thursday_july_16th_1pm/ct3n7hc/
He was an odd duck, but one thing I did appreciate about Yishan is how hard he defended Ellen after the site mercilessly attacked her. It's true that his own policies allowed such a hate machine to be formed in the first place, but it could have been interrupted at any point.
The hatred against Ellen Pao was really nasty. But it's interesting to consider that these days the hivemind would probably be massively in favor of what she was trying to implement. I find that a curious reflection of how drastically the site culture and politics have swung.
The goals/values/policies of reddit change on a minute by minute basis if only via inaction/action and not by policy. Reddit also had a policy of "free speech" right up until it started getting them negative attention and potentially costing them money.
Follow their incentives - a few people being discontent doesn't matter unless those people have a direct financial impact or stake in their company.
But these seriously glaring mistakes, like asserting that there's such a thing as "a real race" that consequently must have objective (literally racist) characteristics is sure to cost them huge potential investment to any investor that actually cares about these types of rights and regulations.
It (and the other omissions I point to in the top-level comment) show that they have no idea what they're doing with these issues and clearly didn't care enough to have a single person in the field read through their rule!
They already have their investors, they're not looking for new ones. It's about the profits they give those initial investors.
Because they don't need to. It's their website, it's their userbase if they can keep it. If you think democratic oversight by the users is important, seek a platform that ensures this.
Curious about the rest of the censored 200. As far as i can tell there is no way to find out if a subreddit you were subscribed to was banned. The only named one i was subscribed to was consumeproduct but that quickly became a trash sub and was mostly meta posting and lazy pol stuff so thats no great loss.
e1. /r/reclassified currently has a fairly large list of banned subs.
e2. They also got classic4chan which is a shame.
There are also people saying they have banned all quarantined subs.Navigate to the subreddit page. If you're subscribed to /r/Cats and want to find out if it was banned, go to www.reddit.com/r/cats and see if there's a page saying "This community has been banned".
I'm a little sad about ConsumeProduct being banned too. Along with CTH, I think it was one of the few banned subs that I would actually sometimes read. It was admittedly a very alt-right community, but I think they were more right than wrong about some aspects of modern consumer culture and the normalisation of extreme pornography - though there was a great deal of the usual anti-semitism and racism that would put off someone with a weaker stomach for such rhetoric.
I sometimes browsed ConsumeProduct to fuel my need to read hateful stuff against the LGBT (why do I (and apparently a lot of other people) do this?) community, and I have to say I didn't really see anything going too far. It of course was fully infested by the alt-right community, and whenever anyone (who probably wasn't aware that it's an alt right sub) wanted to seriously talk about any topic they were downvoted to oblivion. So it probably isn't too much of a loss. But still. I am not sure if actually banning subreddits that aren't too terrible is the right solution.
I'm not familiar with /r/ChapoTrapHouse but I've heard of the Podcast, what sorts of things did the subreddit do to get banned?
Amusingly, /r/MoreTankieChapo seems to have survived the purge.
I don't consider myself left-wing but I did enjoy reading ChapoTrapHouse. I have a lot more time for them than I do for effete blue-tick tokenistic progressivism.
Chapo never really struck me as super tankie, more just edgelord left. But then again I didn't pay very close attention to them because they were annoying
The Tankieness used to come in and out like the tides. It would oscillate between Lenin LARPing and Bernie Sanders fetishism based on how the Democratic primaries were going. And then once Bernie Sanders lost it got stuck in Lenin LARP mode.
What exactly do you mean by "Lenin LARPing"? I'm not familiar with that phrase.
It's me being derisive. LARP is Live-Action Role Playing. Lenin is, well Lenin.
Many Leftist spaces online tend to get overrun with people who care more about tough-guy talk around vanguardism and destroying the structure of capitalism rather than actually doing anything concrete or practicable in the real world. They're LARPers because they enjoy the aesthetics of Bolshevik revolution but don't actually care about any of the actual interesting questions around what a just economic system would look like.
For me, this might be the last straw for reddit. I feel like I have also become too easily distracted by it. I'm gonna try to make tildes as my only social media.
I'm a bit confused, what's wrong with Reddit banning hate speech?
I think Tildes rules are much more strict (and strictly enforced).
Yeah, honestly I might spend more time on Reddit if they start to have better central administration. Their laissez faire attitude has led to the tyranny of the majority (and mods) on various subreddits, where the majority can be extremely unpleasant.
Nothing wrong with banning hate speech, I just think that Reddit seems very disingenuous. Furthermore, I just don't want to waste my time on the website anymore. It's very addictive.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks like you’re mistaken about the goals and philosophy of Tildes.
I'm not really sure what you mean. Care to elaborate?
I think his point is that virtually all the rhetoric and content that has been banned by Reddit today would almost certainly also be unwelcome on Tildes.
Ah! I understand. I think the difference between the two is that the operators of Tildes seem genuine. I trust them more. This move by Reddit is about 3 years too late in my opinion and it seems completely for publicity.
Tldr they/we think you're a free speech absolutist. This site is not for those people.
Oh I see. No. That isn't what I meant. Although, I now see how it came across that way. I actually think that this ban is about 3 years too late. My problem moreso lies in the fact that I don't believe the Reddit team is doing this for the right reasons. Spez is on record saying some shady things and I doubt he's suddenly seen the light.
Fair enough, that seems like one of the consenses here.
I don’t want to be a wet rag about this but: why do we keep posting about reddit’s major updates on tildes? It seems like many of the users are here because we didn’t like the direction reddit was going but then stuff like this is always on top. Is it jealousy? Envy? Wanting to see if you’re better off than your ex?
I don’t necessarily hate these posts, I just don’t see the point in compulsive updates on a separate site here.
It's major tech/social media news about one of the largest sites on the internet, and a lot of people are interested in it. There are articles about this on practically every major tech news site right now.
There's an "ignore" function on the post if you don't care about it, and you can also easily ignore all reddit posts by adding "reddit" here: https://tildes.net/settings/filters
I didn’t know about the filter, thanks!
I happily use both platforms, as well as Hacker News to aggregate media. I think both have unique value props, it just depends what you are looking for. I don't comment on reddit anymore because I don't value the discourse, but there's certainly a lot more content, and it's far more granular, than tildes just based on the sheer difference in scales at work.