I promised to do a Reddit article, and it kept getting pushed back due to other stories, live streams, etc. But, it’s Saturday, so I figured an update of the last few days would be a good idea. We’ll start with Pao’s laughable editorial, moving into the new rules announced Thursday, and examine the SJW response to them. Wrapping up, we can talk about some media reports and examine the future outlook for the company.
As I said, I wanted to discuss the Pao editorial first. This woman is unreal. She has been working the PR angle hard as fuck since she left. We saw former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong spreading what turned out to be bullshit about the new rules announced Thursday. He also tried to position Pao as some kind of last hope for the free speech advocates on the site. It was delusional. Pao herself wasn’t much better, writing in the Washington Post:
I have just endured one of the largest trolling attacks in history…. POOR ELLEN 🙁
What happened to me while head of the popular online forum Reddit for the past eight months is important to consider as we confront the ways in which the Internet is evolving. Here’s why:
The Internet started as a bastion for free expression. It encouraged broad engagement and a diversity of ideas. Over time, however, that openness has enabled the harassment of people for their views, experiences, appearances or demographic backgrounds. Balancing free expression with privacy and the protection of participants has always been a challenge for open-content platforms on the Internet. But that balancing act is getting harder. The trolls are winning.
It’s hard to feel to sorry for the woman, I gotta be honest. I’m starting to doubt the story that she wasn’t actually the one who fired Victoria Taylor as well, given that the rest of what Wong has said turned out to be bogus. “The trolls are winning.” No, shitty management is losing. You were controversialized from the start due to your spurious sex discrimination lawsuit and flamboyantly gay husband. Weev speculated the other day that you’re actually fucking Wong and that’s why’s he’s doing your dirty work, but who can say for sure. It does sound about right, though.
https://twitter.com/rabite/status/621537646884581376
https://twitter.com/rabite/status/621543428699111424
Speaking of the new rules that Wong oversold, here’s a rundown:
Therefore, today we’re announcing that we’re considering a set of additional restrictions on what people can say on Reddit—or at least say on our public pages—in the spirit of our mission.
These types of content are prohibited [1]:
- Spam
- Anything illegal (i.e. things that are actually illegal, such as copyrighted material. Discussing illegal activities, such as drug use, is not illegal)
- Publication of someone’s private and confidential information
- Anything that incites harm or violence against an individual or group of people (it’s ok to say “I don’t like this group of people.” It’s not ok to say, “I’m going to kill this group of people.”)
- Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people (these behaviors intimidate others into silence)
- Sexually suggestive content featuring minors
There are other types of content that are specifically classified:
- Adult content must be flagged as NSFW (Not Safe For Work). Users must opt into seeing NSFW communities. This includes pornography, which is difficult to define, but you know it when you see it.
- Similar to NSFW, another type of content that is difficult to define, but you know it when you see it, is the content that violates a common sense of decency. This classification will require a login, must be opted into, will not appear in search results or public listings, and will generate no revenue for Reddit.
We’ve had the NSFW classification since nearly the beginning, and it’s worked well to separate the pornography from the rest of Reddit. We believe there is value in letting all views exist, even if we find some of them abhorrent, as long as they don’t pollute people’s enjoyment of the site. Separation and opt-in techniques have worked well for keeping adult content out of the common Redditor’s listings, and we think it’ll work for this other type of content as well.
It’s not ideal, but it’s still well short of what Wong was promising. He said they were gonna go in and clean house. That’s not happening. /r/coontown is staying, for example. GamerGate’s bastion KotakuInAction also seems to be good. Many other controversial subreddits are staying as well. That’s a good thing. I’m not co-signing the ideology behind them in the slightest. What I am doing is upholding the free speech absolutism that I believe is integral to a free and open Internet, not to mention society.
As you can imagine, many social justice warriors were less than pleased with this turn of events:
#FullMcIntosh on Salt Patrol after the new Reddit guidelines were announced…#GamerGate pic.twitter.com/q4EFYYYNHn
— Ethan Ralph (@TheRalphRetort) July 16, 2015
And of course his sockpuppet had to chime in as well:
Outlets like the CBC were also pissed that Huffman didn’t go far enough. The New York Times had a more balanced view. All in all, I think Huffman had a pretty good week. Now, we’ll see how these policies are actually put into practice. They seemed to be going over a lot better than folks had been predicting. But as I said, most of that was based off Wong being a liar. We’ll see what happens in the future. I think that if the powers-that-be there at Reddit keep a light touch with enforcement policies, things will be OK. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start using other sites like Voat as well. We should also continue to be weary. But I don’t think the end days are here just yet.
25 comments
I could say reddit should ban all the feminazis, but I wont, because I believe in free speech and they are entitled to their religion.
I do however find it hilarious that Yishan managed to burn down all future career options in just a few angry rants over Pao being sacked.
They don’t seem to realize that on the internet, there must always be a place to discuss things that “can’t be” discussed. Not having a place to talk about it causes it to leak into everything else, not vice versa.
I’ll use an example…/mlp/ on 4chan. An entire board was made because when My Little Pony first got popular and really huge, people were getting annoyed that ponies were being posted fucking everywhere. There’s a site wide ban on pony pictures except for in /mlp/ of course. I’ve seen people say it before, but EVERY board on 4chan is a containment board, it’s so you don’t get a thread of people talking about Game of Thrones on the hentai board. A simple ban of the use of pony discussions, reaction images (or pony images in general) wouldn’t have been enough because people still would have done it regardless.
But that’s not what Josh and Anita and the rest of the SJWs want. They want to destroy the ability to have places to talk about things they don’t like. That’s why there was the powergrab at reddit, that’s why you hear talk about so many sites that were once good and allowed people to talk about shit have become the fucking pussified SJW shitholes they are now. These people invade and destroy. This is why I believe SJWs are like a virus, because they come into communities and destroy them. Get rid of anyone who speaks up and intimidate the rest into submission, bastardize as many people you can into the SJW mindset.
I’m pretty sure most people on the internet have their own stories of a friend or someone they like falling to the SJW mindset or having been a member of a website or community that is a shadow of it’s former self.
Just more whining from Twitter Dee and Twitter Dum. They consider disagreeing with a woman to be “harassment”, so anything short of throwing a man in jail for having an opinion a woman doesn’t like wouldn’t do for them.
Unless it’s a woman they don’t like, then it’s harassment to agree with her.
“I’m not co-signing the ideology behind them in the slightest. What I am doing is upholding the free speech absolutism that I believe is integral to a free and open Internet, not to mention society.”
Good for you Ralph. And just in case some people still don’t get it: Standing up for free speech means you also defend the free speech rights of racists, pedophiles and religious extremists, just like standing up for due process means defending the rights of murderers and rapists. It has nothing to do with approving of what they’ve done, and everything to do with defending fundamental rights that everyone benefit from.
And that’s exactly what the SJWs don’t seem to understand. “I stand for free speech, but you said a bad opinion!” So fucking what? Free speech entitles me to voice that opinion. That’s why the Westboro Baptist Church can spew their vile hatred and get away with it. As much as I hate them, if I’m going to stand up for my right to free speech, then I must as well stand up for theirs.
Picard says it best:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjJN08uqt70
Picard always says it best. Drumhead. Excellent episode. One of TNG’s best.
But..but…you said something that hurt their precious fee-fees! You must be never be allowed to express your opinion in public ever again!
Come now, Ralph. I know you’re not a bastion of journalism like Gawker is, but this kind of speculation on sex lives just burned them (probably to the ground, too…)
The more people go to Voat now, the lower the Reddit traffic sinks, the more the SJWs in charge get in trouble with investors. Fuck Reddit, it’s already dead, it just doesn’t know it yet.
Yeah I’m really glad I’m not a redditor, you don’t come back from a debacle like this. So now other companies/administrators have both Moot’s loss against GG and Pao’s loss against RR as examples of what not to do and how not to antagonize your userbase, makes you wonder how many more sites/companies are going to run this same losing play.
My guess is twitter will be the next site to meltdown, and probably the last big one before the lesson finally sinks in.
>Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people (these behaviors intimidate others into silence)
They should be having a field day with that one. Doesn’t “Harassment” basically mean anything these days?
“Yes” unfortunately…
Honestly those new rules look acceptable to me.
except that part:
“Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people (these behaviors intimidate others into silence)”
Looks really like the rule that’s gonna get abused to silence peoples that disagree with you.
Yeah, the wording is VERY vague and is open to abuse for sure…
Yep, that’s the catch all rule they’ll use to continue running the site into the ground.
This one will probably be abused like crazy too: “Publication of someone’s private and confidential information.”
As it’s written it’s an obvious anti-doxxing rule but it’ll be enforced incorrectly, used to silence people who re-publish relevant already available material on people the administration is sympathetic to, or to step on /cow/ style communities where the users analyze the bulk of information idiots have already made available about themselves through social media.
I can spot bullshit catch-all rules a mile off, the two biggest red flags back in the day were “don’t be a dick” and “be respectful to other users” both of which were always enforced downright whimsically on any board that ever had them.
^This^
Alright I’ve kind of been out of the loop for the past couple of weeks. What is the reddit situation now? Last I checked she had a second revolt on her.
Pao stepped down as interim CEO due to the negative response to certain Reddit changes.
Now she claims the “misogynist” trolls ran her off, are “winning” and destroying the internet.
Why am I not surprised. Did a shitty job? Don’t worry, cry misogyny and it will all be good. So I take it Huffman is the new CEO (permanent or temporary like Pao) if so how has that seem to be going?
Nor is Reddit required to provide a platform for the SJW hate mob.
Voat with your feet, er, fingers.
Sarkeesian herself is breaking Reddit’s rules by “abusing a group of people”.
Anything that pisses those two off is not all bad.
Listen stupid SJWs. Reddit doesn’t want to lose 3/4 of its traffic. That’s what happens when you let SJW censors run things.
I don’t think these people understand…or even CARE about free speech. “Free speech is all well and good EXCEPT….” doesn’t make sense. Speech is either free, or it’s not. Some things just are absolutes. You’re not 70 percent dead and you’re not “a little bit” pregnant..you are or you’re not. When you start limiting speech in the way Reddit is trying, it is no longer free. And of course these authoritarian loons are gonna get away with it.