And no one will be talking about that next week. Can we please avoid upvoting internet non-news/drama on HN?
EDIT: seeing the downvotes, if anyone followed what happened when they banned the racist subreddits and the backlash of the vocal minority: nobody was talking about it the next day.
EDIT2: plus the fact that this is totally bullying on the CEO. Why should we echo this?
> One of the largest sites on the internet had a large % of its content set private by moderators in protest of the firing of an employee.
Yes and there was already a post on that
edit: btw it's not exactly in the protest of a firing of an employee, and it's not either because of Ellen Pao. It was to show the admins the poor communication between them and them mods + bad moderation tools available to the mods. But a lot of trolls took this as an opportunity to put reddit on fire/blame Ellen Pao.
If you look at the topics of the subreddits re-opening (and they re-opened because admins answered in the positive in r/modtalk), you will see that everyone is insulting the mods for re-opening the subs and not going dark longer. There is no true argumentation behind this, it was just "fuck you for caving we need victoria back"
> Now thousands of people are calling for the CEO to step down
No, that's always been the case that there is some sort of a "meme" against Ellen Pao for different questionable reasons (although I'd have to admit I don't like the fact that she doesn't seem to use reddit). This "meme" is more than a "meme" actually, it has become true harassment filled with racists/sexists jokes, photoshops, doxxing on the CEO. This is bullying, I don't see why HN would endorse that (this sort of story should be ignored)
It's rather frustrating--the subreddit shutdowns had little to do with the "Pao must resign" crowd, but they're being co-opted by the same as validation of their crusade against her.
Reddit is part of the cause that no information matters in 2-3+ days. The best, most relevant, important story may hit the front page but after 48 hours good luck in finding it again. Social sites has made topical news have a really short half-life.
I think the fact that information is readily available contributes to the accelerated "half-life" of "news" more so than design. Every day there's some new drama or something to get behind.
I disagree with this comment but understand the spirit behind it. This incident just shows the immaturity of the reddit community. People get let go all the time. At the risk of sounding like a monster, it's just business. Nobody knows the reasoning behind it, yet a bunch of people happen to have 'power' in this instance revolt, despite how childish it is.
I seriously hope Reddit board does not fire their CEO. Group bullying should not work in this case. This is not a matter of life and death. If some users are upset with the Reddit way, nothing is to stop them from creating an alternative. If they fear most people won't follow, then perhaps their opinion is that of a minority.
When someone owns a platform, they can run it as they please. No one is being woken up at gun point and forced to use Reddit.
If the users win in this case (where we do not have the details to know whether they have treated others unfairly), it will simply be like paying a ransom and not expecting the receiver to come back for more.
> No one is being woken up at gun point and forced to use Reddit.
you can say that kind of things for ALL services out there. And even about the country you live in ("dont like your president? Just move somewhere else!").
There is a fine line between phrasing a demand and bullying. It's not because protests are led by minorities that they should be ignored altogether.
Are there examples in which any of Reddit changes have affected someone's well being? If not then Reddit can do as they please with their property. The market will decide whether they are right or wrong.
> The market will decide whether they are right or wrong.
There is no need to antagonize Reddit. It's a fine service that has many uses. Asking for improvements/changes is part of the normal process of having a discussion - if every single time we had a problem with something we had to create a new solution that would be a serious waste of time for everyone involved. Don't re-invent the wheel, just try to fix it first.
Side-point; there are many people who aren't actually allowed to leave their country. Its a very Eurocentric viewpoint to just assume everyone has complete autonomy and the resources necessary to relocate. "Don't like your President" isn't a valid reason for political asylum either.
> there are many people who aren't actually allowed to leave their country.
Sure - even from a Eurocentric perspective it's easier said than done (language barriers, etc...). Yet there's a number of people who always say this kind of things.
Changing countries takes significant effort that could require job changes, visas, citizenship tests, etc. Changing websites doesn't require anything more than a click. Comparing the two is idiotic.
It's not a comparison, it's a parallel. If you go down that line of thinking that's the kind of things you would say when someone complains about their country's ruler. And I have heard it many times.
The CEO is doing the board's bidding. Reddit just raised $50 million. The board is controlled by investors. They don't see the current state of Reddit as a good (profitable) thing.
Maybe reddit or social networks are inherently hostile against any corporate sponsorship or making money because it brings censorship and lowers trust of the content.
> Maybe reddit or social networks are inherently hostile against any corporate sponsorship or making money because it brings censorship and lowers trust of the content.
Other social networks are certainly profitable (ex. Facebook).
I'm not doubting you but can you please tell me how you know this? Also, is there a canonical source of info about reddit's finances and BoD details? The only info I seem to find is in random reddit and HN comments with no links to back it up.
What I'm most interested in is whether reddit has finally managed to get in the black and who's on the board.
Reddit isn't publicly traded, so they have no obligation to discuss their financials or leadership makeup, which is why nothing but their funding is public.
the worst is the admin of /r/crappydesign shutting down his sub and all of its content just because he believes in "the cause". The teenager part of reddit is destroying reddit for all the rest of us...
well according to a former employee who was also recently sacked when asked about that she replied ""You'll have to pry this position from my cold, dead hands!!!"
What a tempest in a tea cup. Reddit users have a far too high opinion of themselves. We're all getting tired of their angsty drama leaching over into real life.
It's not much of an effort to not click those stories.
I see your attitude as damaging. "Let's remove content which makes me uncomfortable discussing even though it's very popular and a lot pf people want to discuss it" thinking.
I mean, reading one sentence (topic description) and moving your eyes one row down isn't much of an effort even if you were to do that for 2 weeks several times a day. Just do it and leave the topics for people how want to read about it and discuss it.
It's a vocal minority. Most of people browsing reddits don't have an account OR couldn't care less about these stories. And I'm not even talking about the good part of reddit who unsubscribe from default subs to get in touch with more interesting smaller subs.
That's interesting because it mirrors Ellen Pao's attitude:
> But Ms. Pao says that the most virulent detractors on the site are a vocal minority, and that the vast majority of Reddit users are uninterested in what unfolded over the past 48 hours.
... yet here we are with over 100K signatures and quickly rising. When your largest subreddits and influential content creators take a big chunk of the site down, it's not a vocal minority with zero ramifications - it's you about to become the next Digg.
This isn't an issue for Reddit to take lightly. If content creators pack up shop, Reddit becomes just another cat photo and yesterday's news dump like your facebook feed (read: low quality content). Users will end up where ever your cool content creators defect to.
Could you please explain why you think it's hypocritical?
I'm guessing it's related to the anti-bullying campaigns of the Reddit site, but I thought those were spearheaded by the company and not the community.
Many are against bullying in the community, yet have no problem bullying the CEO and trying to get her fired simply because they don't agree with her decisions. We don't even have all of the information, yet this doesn't seem to matter.
Should gays be bullied simply because we don't agree with their lifestyle?
I shouldn't be surprised as this seems to be the way our society now works: anyone that doesn't agree with you, bully them into submission and ruin their lives, business, or reputation (sometimes all 3)..punishing them for their disagreement. The new catholic church from the middle ages.
I've seen the same thing on Facebook with the passing of gay marriage: Anyone saying they disagree with the ruling gets destroyed and called a bigot, yet those same people can say horrendous things about religious groups and people with no repercussions.
It's this sort of backward thinking that makes me realize how much smarter I am than anyone else.
What's wrong with being hypocritical? I'm pretty sure we all are. Nobody likes bullies, and we all stand up against them, but we also probably inadvertently offend someone every day.
CEOs, celebrities, etc put themselves in a highly visible position with some responsibility attached. I think they can understand they won't win everyone's support all the time, otherwise they would not be there. The thing to do here is move forward, focus on getting all the facts out, and answer any community questions so they are not left in the dark.
I know this is about the firing of a reddit mod, but I can't shake of the feeling that the people behind this petition care more about the banning of hateful subs. This is a retribution for them.
I really feel disappointed when people think free speech is more important than anything. Yes, it is important, but we defend it for a reason. Because it protects the weak. But when I see people defending it so they can harass or otherwise spew hate speech about minorities, I wonder where did we do wrong. Maybe, just maybe, we treated it like a dogma and then it backfired? It should've been a means to an end, not the other way.
The problem was that /r/fatpeoplehate was banned while other "vile" subreddits continued to exist. Censorship is weird. In the US we can't show breasts on TV, but someone can get their head blown off. On reddit, you can't hate on fat people, but you can watch someone's face get ripped off in a car accident. You can also still hate on black people or deny the holocaust.
I think sites have the right to censor what they want, but reddit has to tread carefully when dealing with it. The free organic growth it enjoys can also turn into organic backlash. The massive energy exerted into managing and creating the content that fuels reddit can also go in the opposite direction, with reddit being the platform of it's own destruction.
reddit has a history of problems, from technical stability issues in the past, to now more managerial/executive issues. reddit needed help and a guiding vision, but Ellen Pao has the reputation of being a professional griefer, and was probably the worst fit possible to fix reddit's problems. Removing Pao seems like a difficult proposition given the lawsuit at her previous employer. The firing of the only admin who was proactive with the community seems to indicate more tone deaf action on management's part.
This is probably the biggest crisis reddit has ever faced, and it could be it's demise. The snowball seems to keep getting bigger.
I think the issue was the activities escaped the subreddit and surfaced other places. Say you disagree with the Healthy at any Size crowd in the subreddit? Fine. Start harassing them on their Facebook pages, tumblers, etc and it was deemed (in my humble opinion) going too far.
The irony is not lost on me that to make Reddit a "safe place" for all some ended up booted off the site for activities outside the site itself. Same as the fact that the primary object of fph's disdain got far more attention and perhaps even sympathy than she would have otherwise.
While reddit stated they weren't banning an idea, only the subreddit, alternative subreddits that popped up on the same topic were also shutdown. The belief is that the idea leads to negative unacceptable behavior, and thus they have actually banned the idea, not just the subreddit.
A more community minded approach may have been better, along with threats of working with law enforcement on matters of real-world harassment. This segues right into the next issue of poor community management and oversight. Poor tools & poor admin oversight of subreddits until they are too big to handle in a graceful fashion. Instead of working on these issues, they fired more staff.
All of these actions may have actually been completely justifiable, but were communicated and implemented very poorly.
> The problem was that /r/fatpeoplehate was banned while other "vile" subreddits continued to exist.
But that's not a problem at all. Anyone who is making that claim either seriously misunderstands why those subreddits got banned, or is being disingenuous.
There are plenty of vile subreddits that I wish didn't exist. But as long as they're not breaking the law or reddit's rules (the relevant one in this case being about harassment), then they're allowed to exist. r/fatpeoplehate and the other banned subs broke the rules by harassing people, and by having their moderators refuse to do anything about it. That's why they got banned. It had nothing to do with the content being objectionable and everything to do with the behavior of the subreddit.
> I know this is about the firing of a reddit mod, but I can't shake of the feeling that the people behind this petition care more about the banning of hateful subs. This is a retribution for them.
Most people signing seem to be doing so because of the firing (or firings [1]). We can infer this from how slowly the signup count was growing before the firings, and how fast it is growing now.
Edit: it was at 10000 three weeks ago, and 14000 a day or two ago. It was over 100000 9 hours ago, and now is at 125000.
[1] Also fired was the women who ran the Reddit gifts and secret santa programs, which were very popular.
This is a response to you, and not a commentary on what's happening at Reddit right now.
The ACLU would disagree. One of their landmark cases involved defending the constitutional right of a group of Nazis to hold a peaceful demonstration in a town populated with more than a small number of Holocaust survivors.
I am a Jew, and I support the ACLU defending the rights of people that hate me beyond reason.
Not because I agree with their point of view. But because I believe that everybody deserves the same rights, no matter how much of an asshole they may be.
We, or at least Americans, care deeply about free speech, not because it protects the weak, but because it is a fundamental human right.
Agreed and to preface, not a comment on Reddit: Usually the defense of free speech means defending the less worthy of using it for those times when for when its truly worthy, there's just really no middle ground.
Your sentence is a bit muddled. I'm not sure if you're in agreement with the above comment or not. You say "there's no middle ground" but you are also saying people usually only defend free speech at certain "times ... when its truly worthy".
There certainly is no middle ground. You must defend it all the time or defend it not at all, because once you lose free speech you will not get it back without a fight
I read the sentence to mean that you have to defend free speech for the less worthy so that free speech is still there for the truly worthy. Seems like he is in agreement with you.
> We, or at least Americans, care deeply about free speech, not because it protects the weak, but because it is a fundamental human right.
Thanks for recognising that this level of free speech is pretty much an American cultural thing and that most of the rest of the world doesn't see it that way.
English mewspapers talk about how important it is for them to keep their freedoms when they operate under, to Americans, restrictive laws.
And "we're a bit worried about the unpleasant parts of the Internet" is something baked in from the early 90s when commercial providers of Internet started offering services. See the various swearing filters; or Compuserve carrying but delisting a range of porn Usenet newsgroups.
And see also the AUPs of some ISPs that provide restrictions on top of US law about not harassing users (in some but not all AUPs) or not sending unsolicited bulk email (in most AUPs, even before there were laws about spam).
A blog post about the early AUPs of different services would possibly be useful.
Your mention of fundamental human rights is a bit odd; the US (for constitutional reasons) has not fully signed up to the UDHR. The freedom of speech bit is article 19.
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
But the US trashes articles 3, 4 (arguably), 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16(3)(arguably), 17(2).
I'd argue that being allowed to write about the fact a police officer took your house and there's no real recourse for you to get it back is less important than the officer just not taking it in the first place.
I have lived in more than a few countries over the past ten years, which has helped me to understand my own country better, both in terms of what we do wrong, and also, what we do right.
> Your mention of fundamental human rights is a bit odd; the US (for constitutional reasons) has not fully signed up to the UDHR.
Eleanor Roosevelt helped to draft the UDHR, and the United States voted in favor of its adoption in 1948.
That said, we have many problems in the US. Civil forfeiture is one of those, as are privatized prisons -- and the general barbarism of our penal system.
But none of those are caused by free speech, and none of them would be solved by eliminating it.
> I'd argue that being allowed to write about the fact a police officer took your house and there's no real recourse for you to get it back is less important than the officer just not taking it in the first place.
The fact that you can write about it IS your recourse. If you're not allowed to share your issues with others, you'll never get any weight behind them. Places like China and North Korea know this and clamp down on any groups rallying around a cause. Meanwhile, their laws go unenforced and an "every man for himself" attitude prevails, as they know they don't really have protection from the state.
Is America perfect? No. But freedom of speech is the one open door we have towards making our country better. Remember the Boston Tea Party, the I Have a Dream speech, Women's Suffrage, Antiwar movements, Gay rights, labor movements...
None of these are possible in places that do not have free speech.
Right, countries define it differently. England's in a different part of the world, I can understand that.
My response was to your comment that having the correct laws in place is more important than giving people freedom of speech. And I'm saying having freedom of speech IS your path to enacting just laws.
As donw pointed out, civil forefeiture laws were not created as a result of free speech in America. The two are unrelated
> I'd argue that being allowed to write about the fact a police officer took your house and there's no real recourse for you to get it back is less important than the officer just not taking it in the first place.
But free speech is more powerful because it's a generic tool. You don't need to anticipate every possible injustice with specific laws when you have an open forum for criticizing the government and appealing to your fellow citizens to support change. Free speech is vital to let liberty, justice, equality grow organically alongside evolving technology & society.
Nope. Because it protects everybody, regardless of how the state or the Powers That Be are classifying you - weak, strong, black, white, conservative, liberal, poor, rich, male, female, or neither, or both, any category and any classification - you get free speech. Everybody gets free speech. Once we start choosing - this guy deserves free speech, because he's "weak", but this guy is better shut up, because he's "strong" enough, it's no free speech, it's privilege of speaking for whoever you like.
Now, many people can't handle freedom - freedom means people can do things that you don't like. I mean, really don't like, I mean, things, that positively infuriate you so much you see a wall of red. I can appreciate that, and I can understand - not condone, not agree with, but understand - people that don't want free speech and other freedoms to be around for that reason. It's hard sometimes. But please - if you don't support free speech, don't call whatever privilege structure for avoiding crimespeech and crimethink - "free speech".
P.S. I hope everybody reading this is smart enough so that the above does not need a disclaimer "within the bounds of not using speech to commit actual crimes, such as ordering a hit on somebody", etc. But just in case it's not so, yeah, I know about that.
Looks like this headline has been removed from the front page, despite being only 2 hours old and having a lot of votes. It's marked as "DEAD" on hckernews, whatever that means: https://archive.is/8RxuV
I can only imagine reddit investors (PG?) do not appreciate the heavy defense of free speech making its way into HN forums
The mods keep saying that they do not do stuff like that. If you search for user dang (who is a mod) you can probably find him saying that.
When a post is killed or dropped off the front page it is normally as a result of user flagging. I'm not a mod so I don't know, but I suspect that's what happened here. Many users flagged the article; it drops rank.
If anything HN works to avoid censoring these topics: mods often unban / unkill these types of articles. (Again, a search of dang's comments will probably find examples.)
Debating whether free speech should be upheld, and to what degree, on the biggest online forum that exists, is a pretty interesting topic to me and many others who upvoted the article. And I do think building a successful social network ought to be of interest to HN. While the topic may not satisfy everyone, it's a single extra headline on a page with 20 others and is easily ignored. Right now there is NOTHING about reddit on the front of HN, which is pretty odd given its origin as a YC project and the number of people interested in recent news about reddit.
This is exactly why I don't participate on HN often. If the mods want everyone to hold the same opinion, great, but don't expect much real growth or interesting discussion from that policy. Shutting down debate is childish
"The mods" probably haven't done anything to shut down discussion. The reason the reddit articles don't stay on the front page is probably a result of user flags (and the karma threshold for flagging is low so many people can flag articles).
So people can "flag" in addition to downvoting? And too many flags can result in an auto-removal? I don't see the point of that. Flagging should send it to a moderator. If you want to automate removal of articles, voting should suffice, otherwise you're just giving more power to people who don't want to see some topic.
Regardless of how this topic was removed, I think it was an interesting discussion that was silenced prematurely, and that's too bad.
Well, I will say they changed the title to be somewhat less damaging. It was "Over 100,000 call for the resignation of interim reddit CEO" - Now it reads as "Petition: Step down as CEO of Reddit Inc"
I can't figure out if you're merely objecting to the idea that it "protects the weak", or if you're trying to actually justify the position that free speech means you're allowed to harass people. Because that's what the banning was really about.
Free speech, at its core, really means the freedom to express any idea. That's pretty much it. It does not guarantee you a soapbox upon which to express the idea, and it does not mean that the community around you cannot react negatively to what you say. All it actually guarantees is that the government cannot restrict what you say. As long as you don't commit a crime. Which harassment is. People can and do get charged with harassment and related offenses, but nobody tries to claim that charging someone with harassment or a related offense is a violation of their free speech. They recognize that there are in fact limits to what you can do and say, which in general are when what you do and say starts violating the rights of other people.
But this is the internet, and on the internet, the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[1] comes into play. Because it's the internet, people think that they're free to say whatever the hell they want, even if it very clearly amounts to harassment of other people. And that's just plain wrong. Reddit is absolutely correct to ban subs that are harassing people, and I wish they'd be even stricter about it.
>Reddit is absolutely correct to ban subs that are harassing people, and I wish they'd be even stricter about it.
You're never going to stop all online harassment by fighting fires like this. It'd take a paid army to monitor. Reddit had a free army taking care of that and they're slowly dismantling it.
But that's kind of the point. The subreddits that got banned are ones in which the moderators refused to take any action to stop the harassment That's why Reddit had to step in and deal with it.
Hmm, I read that there was no notice given. Either way, I agree with you that personally identifiable information should be forbidden and censored by mods, admins, and the community as general policy. I may have misunderstood your meaning. I read that you support blocking offensive speech.
I'm not convinced that removing/blocking the old content (as much as I did not think it was funny) is a good idea. It stokes a fire. Giving notice to the moderators, and then either replacing them, or closing submissions to that sub, and cleansing old data of personally identifiable information seems more appropriate. Under the current circumstances, it's really difficult for the community to verify that what was claimed happened actually happened: we're blocked from seeing it all. There could be more transparency, and I think that's what folks are clambering for. The firing of Victoria, santa, and the leukemia boy with no notice point to the same issue, and these were just the final straws that broke the camel's back for many people. Reddit still has an opportunity to be both an awesome community and a monetizable business. It just depends what steps are taken from here and if they're consistent with old policy, or if managers will really get introspective and work with the community to make some changes, even if they aren't the exact ones demanded in this petition. The way I read this saga is, each time something happens that demonstrates a lack of transparency or oversight in how the community operates, more people get upset: it is more evidence that the lack of communication was not a one-off mistake. Rather, it's habit and deeply ingrained.
Why go to great lengths to preserve content in a subreddit that was found to be in significant enough violation of the rules to warrant banning? There's nothing sacred about that content that demands it be preserved. And trying to preserve the subreddit itself such that people can still participate, while merely attempting to replace moderators, would not solve any problem. The toxic community that engaged in the harassment would still exist, and there's no good way for reddit admins to appoint new people as moderators anyway, because they didn't form the community in the first place.
> There could be more transparency, and I think that's what folks are clambering for.
In the case of the banned subreddits, there was actually plenty of transparency, and a plethora of various posts explaining what happened. But a lot of people spread a lot of FUD about (whether by accident or deliberately I don't know) and in general did their best to obscure the reason for the banning. It really feels like there's a bunch of users who are doing their absolute best to try and stoke up the fires and create a witch hunt, which is why you get a lot of this misinformation being spread around and a lot of discredited claims being repeated over and over again.
I do agree that the firing of Victoria was handled badly, mostly in that there was no notice given to the subreddits and moderators, and no plan in place for how to handle the AMAs that she had been responsible for. As for whether the act itself was justified, I have no idea, because we don't know why her employment was terminated. And we probably never will, unless she publicly states the reason herself.
I don't think it's great lengths. And why? Well, because you want your userbase to trust you and increased transparency helps that. I don't care about that sub but its complete removal lends credence to the FUD you mention, or at the very least leaves it as an open question. Many people don't trust Facebook, but it's irreplaceable. It's a great way to communicate with your friends and share photos, there's no easy way to migrate your contacts list to another system, plus user adoption of a new interface would be difficult, etc. Reddit doesn't have any of those leg-ups, and as you mention the users are more technologically able. The only thing going for it is the existing architecture and userbase, but as we've seen, given sufficient alternatives, users will move.
At the end of the day, EP said Reddit should not be a free speech platform, and that's something with which I'll never agree. If she had instead said, "We ARE a free speech platform, yet we also remove personally identifiable information and ban those who post it" then it would be an entirely different story. As it is, it looks like she's trying to enforce Europe's definition of free speech, which limits hate speech, and that brings more hate than it limits (see: Muslims trying to sue Charlie Hebdo, failing, and then killing them 7 years later). The scale is much different but the concept is the same.
> It really feels like there's a bunch of users who are doing their absolute best to try and stoke up the fires and create a witch hunt
That may be. I think there's an opportunity here for management to be proactive and more open about what direction they are taking the website. Right now I don't see that. "Wait six months, I'll give you useful tools" is not something I could say to my manager at work about my software architecture plan, and it's not something Reddit should be telling its users.
EDIT:
> Why go to great lengths to preserve content?
Also, because this should not be a great effort. If it is, then you are admitting that the job of a moderator is difficult, and therefore they should be given more support. This is the realization reddit management is now making. I suspect the truth over what happened to FPH is both what Reddit Inc says and what the moderators say. Moderators say they have inefficient tools to tackle doxxing, and Reddit says moderators aren't doing a good enough job. Whose burden is that? The banning of FPH clearly demonstrated that admins felt it is the moderators' burden. The blackout showed the mods feel it is Reddit Inc's. I'll side with the mods as they are unpaid and don't need to do any of this. I personally don't need to see FPH, but I can see that Reddit Inc does not understand the needs or wants of its user base, inside or out of FPH.
> As it is, it looks like she's trying to enforce Europe's definition of free speech, which limits hate speech
You're still confusing the issue. Are you doing this deliberately or do you really not understand the difference between "we're censoring speech we don't like" versus "we're cracking down on people that are harassing other people"?
> I don't think it's great lengths. And why? Well, because you want your userbase to trust you and increased transparency helps that.
Ok, let me rephrase. Why preserve the content at all? The sub flagrantly violated the rules by harassing other people. Therefore it's banned. We all know what happens to a sub when it gets banned. I see no value whatsoever in trying to preserve the content of a sub like that.
> Moderators say they have inefficient tools to tackle doxxing, and Reddit says moderators aren't doing a good enough job. Whose burden is that? The banning of FPH clearly demonstrated that admins felt it is the moderators' burden.
The banning of FPH says absolutely nothing about whether the moderators' tools are sufficient to track doxxing. The issue was not that the moderators were incapable of doing their job with the tools provided. It's that the moderators refused to step in. The moderators of FPH and the other subs were willing participants in the harassment campaigns being waged by the subs. Hell, FPH put information about Imgur employees right in its sidebar as part of the harassment. And the only people that can do that are moderators.
I appreciate the spirited debate prior to this comment but your tone is now more harsh than I want to engage.
I understand you have a different viewpoint on this and I don't think either of us will convince the other. It's been real, have a good one.
PS. I'm not doing this to annoy you. I have given this subject a lot of thought over the years, and I genuinely believe everything I wrote to the letter. Maybe there is some miscommunication due to not being face to face but I tried my best to be as clear as possible.
Harassment is awful and I feel individuals do better at dealing with it than policies or enforcement. We do not need police to protect people's feelings as long as comments do not contain PII. The imgur photo is borderline as that came from their staff page anyway. Policing it covers the problem in the short term and does not expose the violators to other communities' reactions. Reddit is segmenting populations and reducing diversity, destroying the whole point of the site to begin with, which is a place where everyone, however you define them as good or bad, can come together to communicate. And this, because they fear that hatred will spread. That is the real FUD and it is coming from Reddit Inc
I think you are confusing two (or more) meanings of the word "harassment" - unless you can provide an example of somebody convicted for saying something not nice about other person on the Internet, at least in the jurisdiction where freedom of speech is not completely dead yet (e.g. not New Zealand where they just killed it this month).
> which in general are when what you do and say starts violating the rights of other people.
Somebody saying something that you won't like does not violate your rights. You do not have a right to control what everybody else is saying and demand them saying only things that are pleasant to you.
> And that's just plain wrong
Being an asshole may be wrong. But if you want to ban people from being assholes, and in general from doing anything wrong (by your definition of "wrong", or anybody else's), please do not call it "freedom".
Of course, Reddit - or any private forum - has no obligation to maintain freedom of speech, and can impose any restrictions they like. I have no objection to it. I just have an objection to hijacking the term "freedom" to describe it. Find some other word, this one is already being used to describe something else.
> Reddit is absolutely correct to ban subs that are harassing people
I'm not sure I understand reddit enough, but how you can harass somebody with a sub if said person never visits the said sub? The mechanism of harassment is not clear to me here.
> I'm not sure I understand reddit enough, but how you can harass somebody with a sub if said person never visits the said sub?
You can't. The whole problem here was that those subs were not restricting themselves to posting within the sub. They were harassing people outside of the sub.
According to one of the Reddit admins[1], all of the banned subs had "numerous complaints that they were harassing people both on and off Reddit".
The problem here was not that they were saying mean things on the internet, as you seem to be claiming. The problem was that they were very legitimately harassing people outside of the subreddit. The people being harassed did not have to visit the sub in order to see it, and didn't even have to visit Reddit. And that's what makes it harassment, and what makes it against the rules of Reddit.
Expression is one of those things where either you have freedom, or you don't have it. You can't compromise it. There are a few things that are not allowed because of the possibility of immediate bodily danger. But otherwise once we start veering into accepted and non-accepted speech/expression, we're getting into subjective territory (who feels or gets insulted by what -the pope, the fairy god mother, your doctor).
But none of that matters much in this case where the ultimate arbiter is the company itself. We can argue all we want what should and should not be, whether realistically or ideally speaking, in the end, it's what the company allows. And if they want to ban the word 'water' well, they can do it and it's perfectly legal. That's not to say people should just go on and accept it. No, they can protest online or whatever, maybe build their own community -where they can one day establish their own mores and ban the word ice instead.
That said, a civil community is much more pleasant, though somewhat sterile, to participate in. That's to say, I prefer engaging in cites where people have strong opinions but have a modicum of comportment --however, at times, I can feel they don't reflect daily life where insults are hurled unexpectedly, so, from that standpoint, it's a bit sterile and stiff.
Anyhow, It'll be interesting to see how this works out.
I think you're generalizing about people's reasons for supporting free speech. I, for example, don't defend free speech so I can harass people. I never posted or contributed to FPH, or any other hate group. Like you, I don't believe in it. But I believe in free speech enough to tolerate those small groups. I believe WBC has a right to protest, as do other hate groups, because I firmly believe that their disgusting views, when expressed openly, weaken their cause. It's worked well for America, and the government sets an example for its people and businesses.
That said, reddit can do what it wants. I think people do use each new event as a platform for replacing who they see as the root cause, the CEO. However I can't shake the feeling that the issue is deeper. As alluded to in these comments about reddit acting like children, large communities are very difficult to satisfy. Protests will happen now and then, regardless of whether you as a country (China vs. USA) or company support free speech or not. So you can embrace that, expect it and deal with it, or try to make everything perfect. I think Alex and Ellen are trying really hard to make everyone happy. I imagine it's stressful for them and I personally don't feel that's the right approach for reddit. Getting rid of illegal things like jailbait was a good idea, and consistent with American values.
> Yes, it is important, but we defend it for a reason. Because it protects the weak.
Is that why we defend it? I strongly disagree with this idea. There is a lot of distasteful speech that I think we should defend, and much of it doesn't concern disenfranchised or weak groups.
I find it hard to articulate an exact reason for defending free speech. But a large part of it to me is that we grant an _enormous_ amount of power to whoever we let define what ideas and speech is allowed, and disallowed. In an ideal world, you would let free speech be the absolute rule; since truly distasteful things would be seen as such and just be noise.
Pragmatically though, free speech often has real consequences, and in some case real, actual victims and that must be balanced. But understand that if you defend free speech in any venue, you have to accept some level of speech you find distasteful. I think you get to draw the line at showing actual harm or damage to other people; and that harm needs to be more than "It hurt my feelings".
Go through the comments left on the petition, and you'll see someone posting under Pao's name with the message "I'm a cunt."
I don't think Reddit's management is the undoing of Reddit, its the immaturity of the community and the loudness of its most extreme elements. It's disheartening that so many people are getting behind such racist and shortsighted comments.
Every community has a few trolls and some immature members, but this doesn't characterize the community as a whole [necessarily]. I think your comment is a big generalization.
120,000 people have signed that petition. I'd wager the same number posted comments, up-voted or posted similar threads about the topic on Reddit, Twitter or HN over the last few days. That's not to ignore those actually trying to have a proper discussion about the matter.
If you look at the press that this has generated I would say that, even if they are a minority of Reddit's active users, they have been successful in strengthening an immature image for Reddit as a whole.
Many of those who signed aren't trolls.
It's clear that current Reddit management is doing 180 turn on the policy/principles the site was built on and which attracted a lot of people in the first place.
From "safe space" nonsense through being clueless about Reddit itself to failing at communicating with very people who build the value of your site.
She is a terrible person for the position. In every unhappy crowd you will have uncivilized part making fun of her appearence or what not but it's more than that minority who feel deceived by recent Reddit policy changes.
It's very unfair from you suggesting that anyone calling for her resignation is a troll.
I signed the petition. I don't care about FatPeopleHate being banned. I don't care about censorship & I don't care about trolling. Although I did troll a few FPH users after the fattening event.
Sacking your most prominent staff member that is essentially the only one that happily & directly helps moderators.. with nary an explanation? Even if this push is actually coming from senior management beneath her, she's obviously oblivious to how her company is being run. I doubt that, Ellen Pao is basically pushing to make Reddit in her own image, you can bet she believes she's going to be more than "interim" CEO.
Reddit deserves a better CEO. Or it deserves to fade into obscurity.
Racism? Everyone loved Yishan, who is Asian as well.
People feel threatened Pao is determined to bend Reddit's culture in ways Yishan was committed to leaving open. It kind of angers me as well, out of principle, since this narrative appears to have some truth.
I don't go to Reddit that much (practically never unless there's AmA with somebody I really interested of hearing from, which happens about once per 2-3 months), but isn't "the immaturity of the community and the loudness of its most extreme elements" kind of what the thing is for (not solely, but partially) and kind of how it got that big?
Of course, I'm in no way defending the idiots who post vile comments, but I think beyond these idiots there's a legit disagreement about limits of what is allowed, and the broadness of those limits was one of the major attractors to Reddit, or so I heard. Was is a wrong impression?
Also, why "racist"? I don't see anything racist in the petition.
Any arguments that it's racist? I mean one of the problems with silencing/censorship people talk about is that racist card is played too often when any criticism is directed towards someone who isn't white.
The "Chairman Pao" comments, and all the imagery comparing her to the current Chinese government. Generalising and making comparisons based on a person's race is racism. Particularly so, since she was born in America.
No it is comparing her to Chairman Mao, father of the communist party in China, which is notorious for censorship. Pao herself said it is not her goal to make the site be a free speech platform. So the comparison is quite apt, since her actions are similar and even her name is similar.
You're right, it's not racist, and to be clear let's just define racism,
"a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race"
Nobody is saying that a white person would make a better CEO at reddit, nor are they saying all Asians are unsuited for it. Just that she's not the right person for it.
What's shocking to me is that she has a JD and an MBA from Harvard and does not realize the value in the American definition of free speech. Her parents migrated from China, perhaps to get away from Mao's authoritarian rule, and here she is enacting it again, albeit on a much smaller scale. It seems like she's trying to implement the European definition of free speech, which limits hate speech. But having seen how that's worked out for Europe (e.g. the Charlie Hebdo attacks), and given the way Americans are raised to tolerate others with differing opinions, I can't imagine the majority of Americans would agree with her proposed values which limit insulting speech. What is and is not insulting is too subjective to be defined by law or website policy, nor is it necessary to make laws or policies to protect people's feelings. Life is f*ing difficult Pao. Grow up
The criticism didn't start because of race. Yes, the most offensive images refer to her being Asian and a woman but that would happen with anybody (if CEO was white Russian male you would see Putin/Stalin buddy memes). Even now you see many with Nazi Germany, Hitler etc. which has nothing to do with her race.
It's not racist because she is not treated differently because of race and criticism towards her didn't start because of her race.
I am not defending the hateful posts and I think they weaken the cause as it's too easy to dismiss the whole thing as "racist" or "bunch of teenagers" but it's important distinction. Comments as yours are a problem because you deride the main issue claiming racism which has nothing to do with the situation.
The thing that is kind of strange, but not surprising, to me is that the thing that they're using as justification for this is the firing of one of the admins, but these people don't know why that admin was fired, and also don't know who did the firing. Is Reddit the company primarily controlled by Ellen Pao or does she have managers that help her and therefore responsible for this kind of stuff?
I get the feeling that a lot of these people don't like is that Reddit is not what it used to be in that it's a "free for all" because it's now more business oriented, meaning that Reddit has to cater to its shareholders just as much as its community. They don't see past the fact that someone that supported them was fired and see the reality that these things happen, and it sucks, but it's a reality of a business. As an aside, if the moderators had such a problem with what was going on, they should have been much more vocal about it and raised flags before instead of acting like children and throwing tantrums by making subreddits private (I call it a tantrum because they made it private for like 12-24 hours, most of that time during the US night where there's not as much traffic).
I'm not saying Ellen Pao is the best person for this job, and while I don't have super high opinions of her, I don't believe all the stuff Reddit says about her either, and she's being vilified for something that could have been completely out of her control. If you want to give a justification for "firing her", at least use the one that she's not very connected with day-to-day of the non-business side of the site, the community and the volunteer moderators, and that she doesn't use the product she's the CEO of. But given they've raised a lot of money recently I'd guess she doesn't seem to be doing poorly to the shareholders/investors, or at least isn't doing a piss poor job.
> If you want to give a justification for "firing her", at least use the one that she's not very connected with day-to-day of the non-business side of the site, the community and the volunteer moderators, and that she doesn't use the product she's the CEO of.
To be fair the reasons you stated have been discussed endlessly on reddit.
I agree that petition could have been written better though. I didn't even think to read the description until you mentioned it. I doubt many others have either, they just read the headline (as usual...)
To be frank, I'd argue that this isn't really a petition and more of someone throwing a temper tantrum. I mean, when I read, "After Pao lost her gender discrimination case against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins she was appointed CEO of Reddit Inc and Reddit entered into a new age of censorship. A vast majority of the Reddit community believes that Pao, "a manipulative individual who will sue her way to the top", has overstepped her boundaries and fears that she will run Reddit into the ground. Alternative sites to Reddit.com have sprung up and have received vast amounts of traffic within the recent months," I wouldn't ever take it seriously, especially as Ellen Pao and the board.
Like, I understand that these people are upset, and I've said stupid shit when I've been angry, but really, this is a petition to try to change something. Use a little bit more eloquence, and back up your arguments with data. Like, if they're talking about voat.co, are they really trying to insinuate that Voat gets nearly as many views as Reddit? And, wasn't Ellen Pao already interim CEO before the trial concluded?
I think this petition was written by one person and is simply the one that got momentum behind a general idea. If it'd been better written it probably would've gotten more signatures.
100,000 + signatures should still count for something, and I imagine anyone with a vested interest could do a little investigative work to understand what's really going on.
Yeah I think that there's a lot of people pissed at the situation, but I think it would be better if they had at least proof read or had multiple less invested people read over it to make sure it didn't sound so childish. If it wasn't such a direct attack I'd consider signing it.
Given that this is Reddit we're talking about, and given the behavior of a lot of the people who are vocal about this on Reddit, it's probably fair to assume that a very significant chunk of those signatures are fake.
So what? No online voting system is perfect, and double-voting isn't unique to reddit.
The sheer amount of natural language written about the topic on reddit and elsewhere should tell you how many people are interested in the subject of reddit's management.
The petition was started some three weeks ago, but the number of signees hovered around 10,000 until the last few days. Also, over the last few days the number has risen at a consistent pace.
I assume change.org has some filter in place to attempt to achieve uniqueness. Regardless, the problem you're describing is a function of voting on the internet, not any particular community. Given interest and opportunity, there are individuals in any community that would try to rig the system. For example, competitions shared on Facebook, or even whole countries.
That's true, but my general point was that the very communities within Reddit that are most vocal about this and most critical of Pao are likely to have a lot of overlap with the subset of subredditors who are both willing and capable to try and rig something like this. Yes, internet voting in general is problematic, but there are a lot of groups on Reddit that explicitly set out to figure out how to rig stuff like this and encourage each other to do so (as opposed to isolated individuals, who are unlikely to have a big impact).
Like I said, there's enough natural language around this issue to convince me a lot of those signatures are real, mine included. It sounds like you don't trust some of the heaviest users of reddit. If that is your sentiment then I would not recommend investing in it. I personally would, given a leader who understood technology and the value of free speech, and who could communicate effectively. But I doubt they will IPO under Pao. The balance sheet may be looking better, but they are tanking hard on relations and she needs help. Perhaps she need not be the figure head and could instead fall back to other roles.
That's reddit for you. Over the past five years, the zeitgeist of the site has become increasingly petulant and entitled. A lot of people on the site seem to genuinely believe the entire internet gets their content from reddit and only reddit.
Remember when the genius sleuths of reddit wrongly accused an innocent man of the Boston Marathon bombing? Or all the ridiculously borderline illegal subreddits (jailbait, creepshots) Hell, there's an entire wikipedia article devoted to redditor drama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
If I had to guess, I'd say that's spun a little bit more to make it look like Reddit management is the bad guy. Having been fired from multiple jobs in the past, unless Reddit management is complete shit, she wouldn't have been fired so abruptly and would have had some inkling that she was going to be terminated. If I had to guess (and this is without knowing any more intricate details than the fact she's fired and that Quora screen capture), she probably didn't communicate well that she didn't feel comfortable doing what she was asked, so it looked like insubordination because to her boss, it might have seemed that she wasn't doing her job rather than she didn't feel comfortable doing what she was being asked.
There are some shit managers, but usually managers attempt to communicate when there's issues and give good warning before terminating except in cases where the company is downsizing or you pissed off the CEO since that happens from higher up. But even then, you'll hear it from fellow employees that the company is removing the dept. or the CEO hates you. I am hard pressed to believe that she was abruptly fired, no matter how well she treated the Reddit community.
> Reddit has to cater to its shareholders just as much as its community.
The unfortunate fact for Ellen Pao and the shareholders is that the value of Reddit - its intellectual property - is entirely supplied and moderated, for free, by volunteers.
That is the struggle here: between the people who want to corporatise and monetise Reddit and the people who actually supply the content. Unless lead by someone who is visionary, charismatic and genuinely interested in advancing the notions of community and free for all that attract the moderators in the first place (which Ellen Pao is demonstrably not), the moderators will rightly ask why they are doing all this work to greatly enrich other people.
In addition to this, as CEO, it is her job to get in front of the preexisting issues with important stakeholders of the site. She hasn't done so. In fact, relations have degraded to this low state under her watch. And where does the buck stop, if not the CEO?
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadEDIT: seeing the downvotes, if anyone followed what happened when they banned the racist subreddits and the backlash of the vocal minority: nobody was talking about it the next day.
EDIT2: plus the fact that this is totally bullying on the CEO. Why should we echo this?
Now thousands of people are calling for the CEO to step down. I'd hardly call that "non-news"... but to each their own I guess.
Yes and there was already a post on that
edit: btw it's not exactly in the protest of a firing of an employee, and it's not either because of Ellen Pao. It was to show the admins the poor communication between them and them mods + bad moderation tools available to the mods. But a lot of trolls took this as an opportunity to put reddit on fire/blame Ellen Pao.
If you look at the topics of the subreddits re-opening (and they re-opened because admins answered in the positive in r/modtalk), you will see that everyone is insulting the mods for re-opening the subs and not going dark longer. There is no true argumentation behind this, it was just "fuck you for caving we need victoria back"
> Now thousands of people are calling for the CEO to step down
No, that's always been the case that there is some sort of a "meme" against Ellen Pao for different questionable reasons (although I'd have to admit I don't like the fact that she doesn't seem to use reddit). This "meme" is more than a "meme" actually, it has become true harassment filled with racists/sexists jokes, photoshops, doxxing on the CEO. This is bullying, I don't see why HN would endorse that (this sort of story should be ignored)
When someone owns a platform, they can run it as they please. No one is being woken up at gun point and forced to use Reddit.
If the users win in this case (where we do not have the details to know whether they have treated others unfairly), it will simply be like paying a ransom and not expecting the receiver to come back for more.
you can say that kind of things for ALL services out there. And even about the country you live in ("dont like your president? Just move somewhere else!").
There is a fine line between phrasing a demand and bullying. It's not because protests are led by minorities that they should be ignored altogether.
There is no need to antagonize Reddit. It's a fine service that has many uses. Asking for improvements/changes is part of the normal process of having a discussion - if every single time we had a problem with something we had to create a new solution that would be a serious waste of time for everyone involved. Don't re-invent the wheel, just try to fix it first.
Sure - even from a Eurocentric perspective it's easier said than done (language barriers, etc...). Yet there's a number of people who always say this kind of things.
oh, you mean capitalism?
Other social networks are certainly profitable (ex. Facebook).
What I'm most interested in is whether reddit has finally managed to get in the black and who's on the board.
Reddit isn't publicly traded, so they have no obligation to discuss their financials or leadership makeup, which is why nothing but their funding is public.
https://i.imgur.com/cOw7LvF.jpg
I mean, reading one sentence (topic description) and moving your eyes one row down isn't much of an effort even if you were to do that for 2 weeks several times a day. Just do it and leave the topics for people how want to read about it and discuss it.
That's interesting because it mirrors Ellen Pao's attitude:
> But Ms. Pao says that the most virulent detractors on the site are a vocal minority, and that the vast majority of Reddit users are uninterested in what unfolded over the past 48 hours.
- (source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/technology/reddit-moderato...)
... yet here we are with over 100K signatures and quickly rising. When your largest subreddits and influential content creators take a big chunk of the site down, it's not a vocal minority with zero ramifications - it's you about to become the next Digg.
This isn't an issue for Reddit to take lightly. If content creators pack up shop, Reddit becomes just another cat photo and yesterday's news dump like your facebook feed (read: low quality content). Users will end up where ever your cool content creators defect to.
Also, if you're talking about /r/funny and other default subreddits content creator, I think they will easily be replaced.
I'm guessing it's related to the anti-bullying campaigns of the Reddit site, but I thought those were spearheaded by the company and not the community.
Should gays be bullied simply because we don't agree with their lifestyle?
I shouldn't be surprised as this seems to be the way our society now works: anyone that doesn't agree with you, bully them into submission and ruin their lives, business, or reputation (sometimes all 3)..punishing them for their disagreement. The new catholic church from the middle ages.
I've seen the same thing on Facebook with the passing of gay marriage: Anyone saying they disagree with the ruling gets destroyed and called a bigot, yet those same people can say horrendous things about religious groups and people with no repercussions.
It's this sort of backward thinking that makes me realize how much smarter I am than anyone else.
CEOs, celebrities, etc put themselves in a highly visible position with some responsibility attached. I think they can understand they won't win everyone's support all the time, otherwise they would not be there. The thing to do here is move forward, focus on getting all the facts out, and answer any community questions so they are not left in the dark.
I really feel disappointed when people think free speech is more important than anything. Yes, it is important, but we defend it for a reason. Because it protects the weak. But when I see people defending it so they can harass or otherwise spew hate speech about minorities, I wonder where did we do wrong. Maybe, just maybe, we treated it like a dogma and then it backfired? It should've been a means to an end, not the other way.
I think sites have the right to censor what they want, but reddit has to tread carefully when dealing with it. The free organic growth it enjoys can also turn into organic backlash. The massive energy exerted into managing and creating the content that fuels reddit can also go in the opposite direction, with reddit being the platform of it's own destruction.
reddit has a history of problems, from technical stability issues in the past, to now more managerial/executive issues. reddit needed help and a guiding vision, but Ellen Pao has the reputation of being a professional griefer, and was probably the worst fit possible to fix reddit's problems. Removing Pao seems like a difficult proposition given the lawsuit at her previous employer. The firing of the only admin who was proactive with the community seems to indicate more tone deaf action on management's part.
This is probably the biggest crisis reddit has ever faced, and it could be it's demise. The snowball seems to keep getting bigger.
The irony is not lost on me that to make Reddit a "safe place" for all some ended up booted off the site for activities outside the site itself. Same as the fact that the primary object of fph's disdain got far more attention and perhaps even sympathy than she would have otherwise.
A more community minded approach may have been better, along with threats of working with law enforcement on matters of real-world harassment. This segues right into the next issue of poor community management and oversight. Poor tools & poor admin oversight of subreddits until they are too big to handle in a graceful fashion. Instead of working on these issues, they fired more staff.
All of these actions may have actually been completely justifiable, but were communicated and implemented very poorly.
(I agree with your post btw. I don't think that's clear from my comment.)
But that's not a problem at all. Anyone who is making that claim either seriously misunderstands why those subreddits got banned, or is being disingenuous.
There are plenty of vile subreddits that I wish didn't exist. But as long as they're not breaking the law or reddit's rules (the relevant one in this case being about harassment), then they're allowed to exist. r/fatpeoplehate and the other banned subs broke the rules by harassing people, and by having their moderators refuse to do anything about it. That's why they got banned. It had nothing to do with the content being objectionable and everything to do with the behavior of the subreddit.
Most people signing seem to be doing so because of the firing (or firings [1]). We can infer this from how slowly the signup count was growing before the firings, and how fast it is growing now.
Edit: it was at 10000 three weeks ago, and 14000 a day or two ago. It was over 100000 9 hours ago, and now is at 125000.
[1] Also fired was the women who ran the Reddit gifts and secret santa programs, which were very popular.
The ACLU would disagree. One of their landmark cases involved defending the constitutional right of a group of Nazis to hold a peaceful demonstration in a town populated with more than a small number of Holocaust survivors.
I am a Jew, and I support the ACLU defending the rights of people that hate me beyond reason.
Not because I agree with their point of view. But because I believe that everybody deserves the same rights, no matter how much of an asshole they may be.
We, or at least Americans, care deeply about free speech, not because it protects the weak, but because it is a fundamental human right.
There certainly is no middle ground. You must defend it all the time or defend it not at all, because once you lose free speech you will not get it back without a fight
Thanks for recognising that this level of free speech is pretty much an American cultural thing and that most of the rest of the world doesn't see it that way.
English mewspapers talk about how important it is for them to keep their freedoms when they operate under, to Americans, restrictive laws.
And "we're a bit worried about the unpleasant parts of the Internet" is something baked in from the early 90s when commercial providers of Internet started offering services. See the various swearing filters; or Compuserve carrying but delisting a range of porn Usenet newsgroups.
http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/Compuserve
https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/hsv.general/5BiIjb...
http://www.ibiblio.org/pjones/ils310/msg00266.html
And see also the AUPs of some ISPs that provide restrictions on top of US law about not harassing users (in some but not all AUPs) or not sending unsolicited bulk email (in most AUPs, even before there were laws about spam).
A blog post about the early AUPs of different services would possibly be useful.
Your mention of fundamental human rights is a bit odd; the US (for constitutional reasons) has not fully signed up to the UDHR. The freedom of speech bit is article 19.
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
But the US trashes articles 3, 4 (arguably), 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16(3)(arguably), 17(2).
I'd argue that being allowed to write about the fact a police officer took your house and there's no real recourse for you to get it back is less important than the officer just not taking it in the first place.
> Your mention of fundamental human rights is a bit odd; the US (for constitutional reasons) has not fully signed up to the UDHR.
Eleanor Roosevelt helped to draft the UDHR, and the United States voted in favor of its adoption in 1948.
That said, we have many problems in the US. Civil forfeiture is one of those, as are privatized prisons -- and the general barbarism of our penal system.
But none of those are caused by free speech, and none of them would be solved by eliminating it.
The fact that you can write about it IS your recourse. If you're not allowed to share your issues with others, you'll never get any weight behind them. Places like China and North Korea know this and clamp down on any groups rallying around a cause. Meanwhile, their laws go unenforced and an "every man for himself" attitude prevails, as they know they don't really have protection from the state.
Is America perfect? No. But freedom of speech is the one open door we have towards making our country better. Remember the Boston Tea Party, the I Have a Dream speech, Women's Suffrage, Antiwar movements, Gay rights, labor movements...
None of these are possible in places that do not have free speech.
England has those. We don't have freedom of speech in the US sense.
My response was to your comment that having the correct laws in place is more important than giving people freedom of speech. And I'm saying having freedom of speech IS your path to enacting just laws.
As donw pointed out, civil forefeiture laws were not created as a result of free speech in America. The two are unrelated
But free speech is more powerful because it's a generic tool. You don't need to anticipate every possible injustice with specific laws when you have an open forum for criticizing the government and appealing to your fellow citizens to support change. Free speech is vital to let liberty, justice, equality grow organically alongside evolving technology & society.
Nope. Because it protects everybody, regardless of how the state or the Powers That Be are classifying you - weak, strong, black, white, conservative, liberal, poor, rich, male, female, or neither, or both, any category and any classification - you get free speech. Everybody gets free speech. Once we start choosing - this guy deserves free speech, because he's "weak", but this guy is better shut up, because he's "strong" enough, it's no free speech, it's privilege of speaking for whoever you like.
Now, many people can't handle freedom - freedom means people can do things that you don't like. I mean, really don't like, I mean, things, that positively infuriate you so much you see a wall of red. I can appreciate that, and I can understand - not condone, not agree with, but understand - people that don't want free speech and other freedoms to be around for that reason. It's hard sometimes. But please - if you don't support free speech, don't call whatever privilege structure for avoiding crimespeech and crimethink - "free speech".
P.S. I hope everybody reading this is smart enough so that the above does not need a disclaimer "within the bounds of not using speech to commit actual crimes, such as ordering a hit on somebody", etc. But just in case it's not so, yeah, I know about that.
Looks like this headline has been removed from the front page, despite being only 2 hours old and having a lot of votes. It's marked as "DEAD" on hckernews, whatever that means: https://archive.is/8RxuV
I can only imagine reddit investors (PG?) do not appreciate the heavy defense of free speech making its way into HN forums
When a post is killed or dropped off the front page it is normally as a result of user flagging. I'm not a mod so I don't know, but I suspect that's what happened here. Many users flagged the article; it drops rank.
If anything HN works to avoid censoring these topics: mods often unban / unkill these types of articles. (Again, a search of dang's comments will probably find examples.)
HN, after all, should be about building stuff, not the outrage du jour.
Debating whether free speech should be upheld, and to what degree, on the biggest online forum that exists, is a pretty interesting topic to me and many others who upvoted the article. And I do think building a successful social network ought to be of interest to HN. While the topic may not satisfy everyone, it's a single extra headline on a page with 20 others and is easily ignored. Right now there is NOTHING about reddit on the front of HN, which is pretty odd given its origin as a YC project and the number of people interested in recent news about reddit.
This is exactly why I don't participate on HN often. If the mods want everyone to hold the same opinion, great, but don't expect much real growth or interesting discussion from that policy. Shutting down debate is childish
Regardless of how this topic was removed, I think it was an interesting discussion that was silenced prematurely, and that's too bad.
Free speech, at its core, really means the freedom to express any idea. That's pretty much it. It does not guarantee you a soapbox upon which to express the idea, and it does not mean that the community around you cannot react negatively to what you say. All it actually guarantees is that the government cannot restrict what you say. As long as you don't commit a crime. Which harassment is. People can and do get charged with harassment and related offenses, but nobody tries to claim that charging someone with harassment or a related offense is a violation of their free speech. They recognize that there are in fact limits to what you can do and say, which in general are when what you do and say starts violating the rights of other people.
But this is the internet, and on the internet, the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[1] comes into play. Because it's the internet, people think that they're free to say whatever the hell they want, even if it very clearly amounts to harassment of other people. And that's just plain wrong. Reddit is absolutely correct to ban subs that are harassing people, and I wish they'd be even stricter about it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Arcade#.22Greater_Intern...
You're never going to stop all online harassment by fighting fires like this. It'd take a paid army to monitor. Reddit had a free army taking care of that and they're slowly dismantling it.
I'm not convinced that removing/blocking the old content (as much as I did not think it was funny) is a good idea. It stokes a fire. Giving notice to the moderators, and then either replacing them, or closing submissions to that sub, and cleansing old data of personally identifiable information seems more appropriate. Under the current circumstances, it's really difficult for the community to verify that what was claimed happened actually happened: we're blocked from seeing it all. There could be more transparency, and I think that's what folks are clambering for. The firing of Victoria, santa, and the leukemia boy with no notice point to the same issue, and these were just the final straws that broke the camel's back for many people. Reddit still has an opportunity to be both an awesome community and a monetizable business. It just depends what steps are taken from here and if they're consistent with old policy, or if managers will really get introspective and work with the community to make some changes, even if they aren't the exact ones demanded in this petition. The way I read this saga is, each time something happens that demonstrates a lack of transparency or oversight in how the community operates, more people get upset: it is more evidence that the lack of communication was not a one-off mistake. Rather, it's habit and deeply ingrained.
> There could be more transparency, and I think that's what folks are clambering for.
In the case of the banned subreddits, there was actually plenty of transparency, and a plethora of various posts explaining what happened. But a lot of people spread a lot of FUD about (whether by accident or deliberately I don't know) and in general did their best to obscure the reason for the banning. It really feels like there's a bunch of users who are doing their absolute best to try and stoke up the fires and create a witch hunt, which is why you get a lot of this misinformation being spread around and a lot of discredited claims being repeated over and over again.
I do agree that the firing of Victoria was handled badly, mostly in that there was no notice given to the subreddits and moderators, and no plan in place for how to handle the AMAs that she had been responsible for. As for whether the act itself was justified, I have no idea, because we don't know why her employment was terminated. And we probably never will, unless she publicly states the reason herself.
I don't think it's great lengths. And why? Well, because you want your userbase to trust you and increased transparency helps that. I don't care about that sub but its complete removal lends credence to the FUD you mention, or at the very least leaves it as an open question. Many people don't trust Facebook, but it's irreplaceable. It's a great way to communicate with your friends and share photos, there's no easy way to migrate your contacts list to another system, plus user adoption of a new interface would be difficult, etc. Reddit doesn't have any of those leg-ups, and as you mention the users are more technologically able. The only thing going for it is the existing architecture and userbase, but as we've seen, given sufficient alternatives, users will move.
At the end of the day, EP said Reddit should not be a free speech platform, and that's something with which I'll never agree. If she had instead said, "We ARE a free speech platform, yet we also remove personally identifiable information and ban those who post it" then it would be an entirely different story. As it is, it looks like she's trying to enforce Europe's definition of free speech, which limits hate speech, and that brings more hate than it limits (see: Muslims trying to sue Charlie Hebdo, failing, and then killing them 7 years later). The scale is much different but the concept is the same.
> It really feels like there's a bunch of users who are doing their absolute best to try and stoke up the fires and create a witch hunt
That may be. I think there's an opportunity here for management to be proactive and more open about what direction they are taking the website. Right now I don't see that. "Wait six months, I'll give you useful tools" is not something I could say to my manager at work about my software architecture plan, and it's not something Reddit should be telling its users.
EDIT: > Why go to great lengths to preserve content?
Also, because this should not be a great effort. If it is, then you are admitting that the job of a moderator is difficult, and therefore they should be given more support. This is the realization reddit management is now making. I suspect the truth over what happened to FPH is both what Reddit Inc says and what the moderators say. Moderators say they have inefficient tools to tackle doxxing, and Reddit says moderators aren't doing a good enough job. Whose burden is that? The banning of FPH clearly demonstrated that admins felt it is the moderators' burden. The blackout showed the mods feel it is Reddit Inc's. I'll side with the mods as they are unpaid and don't need to do any of this. I personally don't need to see FPH, but I can see that Reddit Inc does not understand the needs or wants of its user base, inside or out of FPH.
You're still confusing the issue. Are you doing this deliberately or do you really not understand the difference between "we're censoring speech we don't like" versus "we're cracking down on people that are harassing other people"?
> I don't think it's great lengths. And why? Well, because you want your userbase to trust you and increased transparency helps that.
Ok, let me rephrase. Why preserve the content at all? The sub flagrantly violated the rules by harassing other people. Therefore it's banned. We all know what happens to a sub when it gets banned. I see no value whatsoever in trying to preserve the content of a sub like that.
> Moderators say they have inefficient tools to tackle doxxing, and Reddit says moderators aren't doing a good enough job. Whose burden is that? The banning of FPH clearly demonstrated that admins felt it is the moderators' burden.
The banning of FPH says absolutely nothing about whether the moderators' tools are sufficient to track doxxing. The issue was not that the moderators were incapable of doing their job with the tools provided. It's that the moderators refused to step in. The moderators of FPH and the other subs were willing participants in the harassment campaigns being waged by the subs. Hell, FPH put information about Imgur employees right in its sidebar as part of the harassment. And the only people that can do that are moderators.
I understand you have a different viewpoint on this and I don't think either of us will convince the other. It's been real, have a good one.
PS. I'm not doing this to annoy you. I have given this subject a lot of thought over the years, and I genuinely believe everything I wrote to the letter. Maybe there is some miscommunication due to not being face to face but I tried my best to be as clear as possible.
Harassment is awful and I feel individuals do better at dealing with it than policies or enforcement. We do not need police to protect people's feelings as long as comments do not contain PII. The imgur photo is borderline as that came from their staff page anyway. Policing it covers the problem in the short term and does not expose the violators to other communities' reactions. Reddit is segmenting populations and reducing diversity, destroying the whole point of the site to begin with, which is a place where everyone, however you define them as good or bad, can come together to communicate. And this, because they fear that hatred will spread. That is the real FUD and it is coming from Reddit Inc
> which in general are when what you do and say starts violating the rights of other people.
Somebody saying something that you won't like does not violate your rights. You do not have a right to control what everybody else is saying and demand them saying only things that are pleasant to you.
> And that's just plain wrong
Being an asshole may be wrong. But if you want to ban people from being assholes, and in general from doing anything wrong (by your definition of "wrong", or anybody else's), please do not call it "freedom".
Of course, Reddit - or any private forum - has no obligation to maintain freedom of speech, and can impose any restrictions they like. I have no objection to it. I just have an objection to hijacking the term "freedom" to describe it. Find some other word, this one is already being used to describe something else.
> Reddit is absolutely correct to ban subs that are harassing people
I'm not sure I understand reddit enough, but how you can harass somebody with a sub if said person never visits the said sub? The mechanism of harassment is not clear to me here.
You can't. The whole problem here was that those subs were not restricting themselves to posting within the sub. They were harassing people outside of the sub.
According to one of the Reddit admins[1], all of the banned subs had "numerous complaints that they were harassing people both on and off Reddit".
The problem here was not that they were saying mean things on the internet, as you seem to be claiming. The problem was that they were very legitimately harassing people outside of the subreddit. The people being harassed did not have to visit the sub in order to see it, and didn't even have to visit Reddit. And that's what makes it harassment, and what makes it against the rules of Reddit.
[1] ekjp, I think this was somewhere in the same thread where he posted https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/remov...
But none of that matters much in this case where the ultimate arbiter is the company itself. We can argue all we want what should and should not be, whether realistically or ideally speaking, in the end, it's what the company allows. And if they want to ban the word 'water' well, they can do it and it's perfectly legal. That's not to say people should just go on and accept it. No, they can protest online or whatever, maybe build their own community -where they can one day establish their own mores and ban the word ice instead.
That said, a civil community is much more pleasant, though somewhat sterile, to participate in. That's to say, I prefer engaging in cites where people have strong opinions but have a modicum of comportment --however, at times, I can feel they don't reflect daily life where insults are hurled unexpectedly, so, from that standpoint, it's a bit sterile and stiff.
Anyhow, It'll be interesting to see how this works out.
That said, reddit can do what it wants. I think people do use each new event as a platform for replacing who they see as the root cause, the CEO. However I can't shake the feeling that the issue is deeper. As alluded to in these comments about reddit acting like children, large communities are very difficult to satisfy. Protests will happen now and then, regardless of whether you as a country (China vs. USA) or company support free speech or not. So you can embrace that, expect it and deal with it, or try to make everything perfect. I think Alex and Ellen are trying really hard to make everyone happy. I imagine it's stressful for them and I personally don't feel that's the right approach for reddit. Getting rid of illegal things like jailbait was a good idea, and consistent with American values.
Is that why we defend it? I strongly disagree with this idea. There is a lot of distasteful speech that I think we should defend, and much of it doesn't concern disenfranchised or weak groups.
I find it hard to articulate an exact reason for defending free speech. But a large part of it to me is that we grant an _enormous_ amount of power to whoever we let define what ideas and speech is allowed, and disallowed. In an ideal world, you would let free speech be the absolute rule; since truly distasteful things would be seen as such and just be noise.
Pragmatically though, free speech often has real consequences, and in some case real, actual victims and that must be balanced. But understand that if you defend free speech in any venue, you have to accept some level of speech you find distasteful. I think you get to draw the line at showing actual harm or damage to other people; and that harm needs to be more than "It hurt my feelings".
I don't think Reddit's management is the undoing of Reddit, its the immaturity of the community and the loudness of its most extreme elements. It's disheartening that so many people are getting behind such racist and shortsighted comments.
If you look at the press that this has generated I would say that, even if they are a minority of Reddit's active users, they have been successful in strengthening an immature image for Reddit as a whole.
It's very unfair from you suggesting that anyone calling for her resignation is a troll.
Sacking your most prominent staff member that is essentially the only one that happily & directly helps moderators.. with nary an explanation? Even if this push is actually coming from senior management beneath her, she's obviously oblivious to how her company is being run. I doubt that, Ellen Pao is basically pushing to make Reddit in her own image, you can bet she believes she's going to be more than "interim" CEO.
Reddit deserves a better CEO. Or it deserves to fade into obscurity.
People feel threatened Pao is determined to bend Reddit's culture in ways Yishan was committed to leaving open. It kind of angers me as well, out of principle, since this narrative appears to have some truth.
Of course, I'm in no way defending the idiots who post vile comments, but I think beyond these idiots there's a legit disagreement about limits of what is allowed, and the broadness of those limits was one of the major attractors to Reddit, or so I heard. Was is a wrong impression?
Also, why "racist"? I don't see anything racist in the petition.
You're right, it's not racist, and to be clear let's just define racism,
"a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race"
Nobody is saying that a white person would make a better CEO at reddit, nor are they saying all Asians are unsuited for it. Just that she's not the right person for it.
What's shocking to me is that she has a JD and an MBA from Harvard and does not realize the value in the American definition of free speech. Her parents migrated from China, perhaps to get away from Mao's authoritarian rule, and here she is enacting it again, albeit on a much smaller scale. It seems like she's trying to implement the European definition of free speech, which limits hate speech. But having seen how that's worked out for Europe (e.g. the Charlie Hebdo attacks), and given the way Americans are raised to tolerate others with differing opinions, I can't imagine the majority of Americans would agree with her proposed values which limit insulting speech. What is and is not insulting is too subjective to be defined by law or website policy, nor is it necessary to make laws or policies to protect people's feelings. Life is f*ing difficult Pao. Grow up
It's not racist because she is not treated differently because of race and criticism towards her didn't start because of her race.
I am not defending the hateful posts and I think they weaken the cause as it's too easy to dismiss the whole thing as "racist" or "bunch of teenagers" but it's important distinction. Comments as yours are a problem because you deride the main issue claiming racism which has nothing to do with the situation.
But yeah, some people write hateful, stupid things on the internet. It doesn't mean we can just dismiss every page with comments enabled.
I get the feeling that a lot of these people don't like is that Reddit is not what it used to be in that it's a "free for all" because it's now more business oriented, meaning that Reddit has to cater to its shareholders just as much as its community. They don't see past the fact that someone that supported them was fired and see the reality that these things happen, and it sucks, but it's a reality of a business. As an aside, if the moderators had such a problem with what was going on, they should have been much more vocal about it and raised flags before instead of acting like children and throwing tantrums by making subreddits private (I call it a tantrum because they made it private for like 12-24 hours, most of that time during the US night where there's not as much traffic).
I'm not saying Ellen Pao is the best person for this job, and while I don't have super high opinions of her, I don't believe all the stuff Reddit says about her either, and she's being vilified for something that could have been completely out of her control. If you want to give a justification for "firing her", at least use the one that she's not very connected with day-to-day of the non-business side of the site, the community and the volunteer moderators, and that she doesn't use the product she's the CEO of. But given they've raised a lot of money recently I'd guess she doesn't seem to be doing poorly to the shareholders/investors, or at least isn't doing a piss poor job.
To be fair the reasons you stated have been discussed endlessly on reddit.
I agree that petition could have been written better though. I didn't even think to read the description until you mentioned it. I doubt many others have either, they just read the headline (as usual...)
Like, I understand that these people are upset, and I've said stupid shit when I've been angry, but really, this is a petition to try to change something. Use a little bit more eloquence, and back up your arguments with data. Like, if they're talking about voat.co, are they really trying to insinuate that Voat gets nearly as many views as Reddit? And, wasn't Ellen Pao already interim CEO before the trial concluded?
100,000 + signatures should still count for something, and I imagine anyone with a vested interest could do a little investigative work to understand what's really going on.
The sheer amount of natural language written about the topic on reddit and elsewhere should tell you how many people are interested in the subject of reddit's management.
The petition was started some three weeks ago, but the number of signees hovered around 10,000 until the last few days. Also, over the last few days the number has risen at a consistent pace.
I assume change.org has some filter in place to attempt to achieve uniqueness. Regardless, the problem you're describing is a function of voting on the internet, not any particular community. Given interest and opportunity, there are individuals in any community that would try to rig the system. For example, competitions shared on Facebook, or even whole countries.
Remember when the genius sleuths of reddit wrongly accused an innocent man of the Boston Marathon bombing? Or all the ridiculously borderline illegal subreddits (jailbait, creepshots) Hell, there's an entire wikipedia article devoted to redditor drama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
There are some shit managers, but usually managers attempt to communicate when there's issues and give good warning before terminating except in cases where the company is downsizing or you pissed off the CEO since that happens from higher up. But even then, you'll hear it from fellow employees that the company is removing the dept. or the CEO hates you. I am hard pressed to believe that she was abruptly fired, no matter how well she treated the Reddit community.
The unfortunate fact for Ellen Pao and the shareholders is that the value of Reddit - its intellectual property - is entirely supplied and moderated, for free, by volunteers.
That is the struggle here: between the people who want to corporatise and monetise Reddit and the people who actually supply the content. Unless lead by someone who is visionary, charismatic and genuinely interested in advancing the notions of community and free for all that attract the moderators in the first place (which Ellen Pao is demonstrably not), the moderators will rightly ask why they are doing all this work to greatly enrich other people.