First, it admits they didn't vet her before hiring: "We did not adequately vet her background before formally hiring her."
Apparently, a basic google search is too difficult for HR.
Second, it says this:
"On March 9th, we added extra protections for this employee, including actioning content that mentioned the employee’s name or shared personal information on third-party sites, which we reserve for serious cases of harassment and doxxing."
OK, and they _still_ didn't check why people were opposed to this person? Still no Internet search or, oh, reading the comments people were posting?
Notice that this "protection" was two weeks ago, not recently.
Why did they even hire such a controversial person in the first place? It's baffling how they're doubling down on defending her after her previous actions. I wonder if this'll all cool down in a couple of days with everyone forgetting about this or if there'll be a new established rhetoric in inflammatory communities like 'reddit admins are confirmed pedophiles'.
From wikipedia Aimee's accomplishments seem to be resigning in disgrace from a couple of minor political positions and convincing a transportation department to stop using the phrase "ladies and gentlemen".
Even as the product of a dysfunctional home, Aimee's actions and political positions are unacceptable, and should be swatted down - if only to teach her that they are not okay.
Who really needs to be taken to task for this: Anyone who participated in the hiring and then covering for this creep. Hiring Aimee Challenor in a well-supervised manual labor position would be commendable. Hiring Aimee Challenor as an moderator of an online forum, based on her history of moderating an online forum aimed at children, knowing her political positions (and there's no argument to be made that they didn't, as the whole thing came about because they had instituted special protections based on those) should result in jail time.
I think the decision makers at Reddit are fully aware of the Streisand Effect but they don't care because they know the userbase has a short memory and things will go back to normal within a week or two.
They'll remember, but still keep coming back. You can't even blame short memory for it. They literally don't care more than the inconvenience they'd face in going elsewhere for forums.
And as long as that's true, the things they dislike will keep happening.
Setting up an alternative to a huge platform is hard to do. It's not the early days of the social internet any more, there aren't really any "killer features" that might attract users that haven't already been integrated into the big platforms, and "better management" is not the kind of thing that inspires mass adoption.
And if you don't have a killer feature, then you've just made a clone, and you suffer the fate of all social media clones from 8chan to Voat to Vidme to Gab and Parler. As observed by Dan Olson:
> when you compete with a monolith, the first people to jump on board will be the people that were thrown off the other ship, and most of them were thrown off for a reason... before you know whats happened, toxic users will have become your core userbase, and then you're never going to recover.
The problem with those clones is they weren't made with pure intentions. Most of them are "the original site except we hate their admins" or "the original site except you can do crimes on this one". This isn't the kind of mindset you need to have a good mod team.
Digg died when they rolled out v4 for this exact reason. Reddit was there when people got salty and they left and never went back.
Haven’t been to digg in probably 10 years. Just cracked it open and it’s basically buzzfeed now.
There are plenty of alternatives out there. Reddit has become a huge echo chamber for pretty much everything but doubly so for politics.
I abandoned political reddit years go, and now I find myself finding less and less use for technical reddit as well
the last vestige of reddit now seems to be for the lol's and meme's but even for the base level content that started redit it is becoming less funny, and more and more cringe
I hate references to the Streisand effect, because in the age of digital censorship, you have absolutely no idea which stories are _failing_ to invoke the Streisand effect.
I'm absolutely sure a lot of news is completely successfully censored, and calling out the effect on the ???5%??? of stories which break through does nothing except hide that fact from us.
One way reddit is strange is that the users and mods seem to hate the admins. Every reddit post I read from the admins the comments are full of people raging at them.
Well effects do not systematically happen. I'd say that as a general rule people don't care, even if they should. So if a Streisand happen it would mostly be because of a tini active and loud minority and maybe a medium sized passive community of "retweeters", the vast majority being as always passive and silent.
However they seem to be denying the accusations that admins (possibly including the individual in question) were manually editing contents containing her name.
This whole situation is incredibly bizarre to me. In the first place, why would reddit hire a 23 year old admin whose greatest accomplishment is being forced out of politics due to her connections to multiple pedophiles? Why did they taking such extreme steps to hide the admin's name, when they don't offer the same protections to mods or other users of the site? Does reddit have any audit trail or safeguards when admins edit comments? It would be interesting if they did a postmortem on the situation, but so far they seem reluctant to say that anything went wrong on their end.
I agree, but a minor nitpick: Aimee was forced out not just for being connected to pedophiles, but also for lying about and/or endorsing them (among other issues). A massive failure of safeguarding from the Greens and Lib Dems, and now from Reddit.
It's astonishing to me that a person like this can become an admin on a website used by millions of teenagers. We already know that admins can access private messages and other personal information.
I have seen allegations on reddit that Aimee also moderated a number of subreddits, specifically ones pertaining to minors, before, during, and after her fathers' rape and torture of a 10 year old in the house she lived in.
Allowing a person who willfully ignored pedophilia and torture be in a position of power near/directly engaging with minors, and then hiring that person, is despicable.
I deactivated my reddit account and blocked reddit domains on my devices this morning as a result of the censorship. So now I'm cut off from any more reddit interaction and can't provide anything further. Also, Challenor and other admins deleting evidence and permabanning people is like, the whole issue.
Odd, was it critical of Reddit or the appearance of being anti pornography (I’m just extremely anti child porn and other things like sex slavery/trafficking).
Sex trafficing is not a real thing. It's more common to be trafficed as a low-wage worker, sometimes partially with your own participation, eg as a servant or working at an extended family restaurant.
Sex trafficing is just something police like to bring up at press conferences when they arrest women for prostitution. Often they don't actually charge anyone with it though, it just sounds cool to say so they do it.
My information on the topic comes from actual sex workers or women who know them (eg aminadujean, Naomi Wu) whose experience is that anti-trafficing is usually used to try to criminalize their work for their own protection.
> anti-trafficing [sic] is usually used to try to criminalize their work
I understand you have anecdotes from 2 women which describe non-coerced criminalized sex work, which is not sex trafficking.
My information comes from decades of global, publicly available and verified data. Sex trafficking is a real thing, and you delegitimize its victims when you say otherwise.
(you really don't have to put the emphasis on how much you dislike their spelling of trafficking, everyone can see it's a direct quote and it distracts from the rest of your post)
It's astonishing to me that a person like this can become an admin on a website used by millions of teenagers
Unfortunately not so astonishing, people like that are drawn to and commonly inhabit exactly the kinds of places you wouldn’t want them. There are some fairly recent public examples you could easily find.
Absolutely. These people actively seek out access to children, and many of them are extremely clever in the way they do this, and the way they manipulate good-natured people around them.
The only part that astonishes me is that Reddit hired the person. It suggests they are either not performing proper background checking (terrible), or they are and decided to overlook what they found (even worse).
Anyone that would seek power should not have power, and the best way to guard against that is to ensure accountability, objective based rules enforcement where an individuals subjective beliefs are not a factor
unfortunately all of these platforms focus almost exclusively on subjective "We know bad things when we see them" type of rules
I am 100% convinced that the rate of pedophile is higher in:
- positions of power (we have had a few in france who were judges / party representatives etC...)
- any job close to children, which includes in particular schools, but also..
- church
Why ? Because if you woke up tommorow as a pedophile, without any morals, and wanted to maximise the "chances" to satisfy your sexual attraction, where would you go ? Exactly.
I had a colleague with a theory that a lot of pedophiles are really in love with the power aspect. There is no bigger power than that what an adult can have over a child. Both physically and mentally.
And therefore, they will try to get those positions where they are in power. I don't know if this was ever investivated, but it makes sense to me.
Edit: when you look at the dad in this story, raping and torturing a child seems more like the power aspect than the sexual one.
interesting idea. that said there's a lot of power aspect in basic "adult" sex with bdsm etc...
and in that case the father was dressing as a child when he was torturing the girl according to an article so i'm not sure he was looking specifically for power more than being downright crazy.. but why not
Church is far from being the biggest offender in France for jobs close to children, there is a whole generation of public educators that were openly for it (for some overlapping with your first point like Cohn-Bendit).
Ecxept that the church has constantly been trying to cover up the stories and constant sex scandals. All the fucking time.
At sone point "if you are not a groups of pedohpiles covering each other, dont act like a group of pedophiles covering each others".
If i was pedophile i would absolutely go to the church, also because so many people have their faith blind the truth. The "cant even imagine" its possible this "respectable priest" can do that.
And yes you are right, i also forgot sport trainers.
The Catholic Church has covered up many other things.
It has nothing to do with child sexual abuse per sē, but simply that it's modus operandī, and that of many other organizations seems to be silence money to protect it's brand.
> Church is far from being the biggest offender in France for jobs close to children
Surprisingly that's all I hear about in the media. I've been looking for hard data and haven't been able to find any, especially for things like priests vs teachers vs other people. Do you have any data on that?
Well, there are a lot of people who want positions of power, like working as a judge, or having a high position in the government. Undoubtedly, some will turn out to be pedophiles, and / or abusers.
We likely hear a lot of places like Churches, hospitals, and schools, because historically people were pretty quiet about what went on there, and now all these horrible historic revelations are coming out one after another.
I can imagine access to children being a factor too, although actual pedophiles have an instinctual emotional closeness with children which might influence them towards those positions. If any are in those positions and see this, I really hope you don't do anything to anyone there.
The highest frequency of abuse actually happens in none of those places but at home. It is usually a family member who does it. Sometimes, it may even involve drugs, rather than a sexual interest. I'm not very fond of the War on Drugs, as it destroys lives, but I really hope people use drugs responsibly, when / if they do. And we may need better mental health services to reduce the perceived need to rely on alcohol / drugs.
From what I know, pedophilia is a spectrum, which goes from very weak (insignificant and easy to ignore for most intents and purposes) to the exclusive type. There are some sub-types, like ones who are only interested in infants, rather than older children. Pedophiles aren't synonymous with abusers. Many don't abuse.
What I am convinced of is that the ratio of those that break the law in crimes that typically involve abuse of power, are more commonly found in positions of power.
The average pædophile will live his life without ever breaking any such laws, by either lack of willingness, or lack of opportunities awarded by such power.
You don't join the greens or lib dems to gain political power
The Greens control Brighton unequivocally. There are Greens and LibDems in the House of Lords. The LibDems forced through a referendum on PR. They may seem like a harmless joke but they do wield power in their own way.
> - any job close to children, which includes in particular...
Schools! Oh...you went a different route. Right, we don't acknowledge the widespread sexual misconduct and cover-ups in the schools for another 5 years in this timeline because the church story was just so juicy.
I don’t remember where I heard it but I recall some stat that child sexual abuse reports are just as common in public schools as they are in religious organizations
Normal rules of balance can be twisted or broken in this case, depending on your desired outcome.
On the one hand, you've got the (reasonable) rule "always condemn and distance yourself from pedophilia". On the other hand, you've got the also reasonable rule "never discriminate against someone because of their gender". If the Greens, Lib Dems, Reddit, or anyone else involved had chosen not to hire her, she could stir up outrage against them for gender discrimination. If they did hire her, the public could stir up outrage against them for their connection to pedophiles.
It's easy to agree that both pedophilia and gender discrimination are bad. It's harder to take action, especially when people have prior agendas.
>If the Greens, Lib Dems, Reddit, or anyone else involved had chosen not to hire her, she could stir up outrage against them for gender discrimination
We don't even need to hypothesize this specific "if", because that's exactly what she did[0] after being ousted from Green Party due to all the pedophilia-related concerns.
In a rational world, that wouldn't have happened, but we seem to have lost our ability to say behavior A (which has supporting facts) is significantly worse than behavior B (which is alleged).
Preying on children, or advocating for those who want to, is a significantly bigger problem than the _accusation_ of bias based on preference.
Do such allegations really hold any real water to achieve political ends?
I find that every time I read about such matters, it is from some Anglo-Saxon place where emotions about such matters seem to run high.
I cannot think of any Dutch occurrence of someone being dismissed from a party alleging any gender discrimination, and I would to what extent such arguments are truly something that sways the Anglo-Saxon, because every time I see them made, publicly or privately, they seem to be coming from an Anglo-Saxon source, in particular the U.S.A., but the U.K. is not very far behind.
But perhaps, it is simply a function of district-based politics where one votes for the man, rather than the party, so the personal life and identity of politicians takes a far grander scale than in other systems.
Is a claim of discrimination as much of a superweapon of discourse in Dutch culture as it is in the US? From what I've experienced, Europeans are a bit less prickly on such matters.
I cannot remember any such counter claims made when similar terminations of politicians occurred in the Netherlands, discrimination or otherwise.
The most similar situation that comes to mind was the situation of Philomena Bijlhout in 2002, who was terminated after having lied about being a member of the Bouterse Militia when the December Murders occurred.
That was that; — he was terminated without any further drama or allegations that it was political gamesmanship, sexism, racism, xenophobia, manipulated evidence or anything else when the pictures that proved his word false surfaced.
I find that U.S.A. and U.K. politicians often have what I would consider petulant blame shifting when such matters occur that I feel are not strategic and only serve to bury them deeper, so I wonder if they actually are strategic in such a political climate of districts which creates far more extensive tribalism and voter loyalty, whereof I wonder if it contributes to actually making such claims worthwhile.
I have noticed that the U.S. and U.K. population seems to be very loyal in general and often unreasonably defend a cause, product, and man to the death, even when flaws are apparent.
Except as I understand it her accusations didn't stick at all. Did anyone buy that it was gender/trans-discrimination? Certainly the party did not hire her back. So it seems as if, by this minor measure, the world can still be rational.
What? This makes no sense. If you refuse to hire someone because of their (alleged, I have no idea) implicit support for pedophilia, it has nothing to do with refusing to hire someone because of their gender.
The fact that someone could pretend you aren't hiring them because of their gender is moot when you can simply point to the real reason you're not hiring them.
If I'm faced with the question of whether to hire an unrepentant serial killer, I'm not going to let their gender inform my decision. That's not "balance" in any way.
This person was probably hired because they have great trans advocacy credentials, which seems well aligned to the political orientation that Reddit is converging on. It’s easy to imagine how safeguarding issues were overlooked in a rush to hire an ally.
Reddit administration seems pretty ad hoc, undisciplined, at times weirdly disconnected from the community, and uncoordinated as it could possibly be.
Then again so are all its subreddits, and the volunteer mods are about as opaque and strange as the admins, with the added excuse that they're doing it for free.
The fact that the ecosystem has survived seems more like happenstance.
It'd be interesting to see demographics on moderators. My perception is that they must skew young because who else has time to do all that work for free?
Volunteer moderation is one of those things that must baffle economists. Here you have people putting in a lot of work for free for a profit seeking enterprise.
>Here you have people putting in a lot of work for free…
I'd wager it's either a perceived, or in some instances, actual, power that motivates a few few of these folks. I don't doubt there are do-gooders out there who want to see their artisan needlepoint subreddit do well, so they volunteer their time to the community... but I also believe that once a community reaches a certain size, the folks motivated by power start to seep in.
Some economists maybe? Perhaps, if you think the only thing to gain is money? Some people do silly things because of other reasons (fame, ego, obligation, greed, retribution, etc). See recent 'stonks' as a good example of people actually spending money for non monetary gain. It is these other factors which feed into many economic models unknowingly. When those variables move they can radically change a model and cause it to do funny things.
There’s an economic concept called “psychic profits”, and it encapsulates exactly those non monetary gains one gets from volunteering like power, recognition, respect, status, and so on
I think they’re very coherent, connected to reality and mission driven, except their mission being clearly far from that of users or what user think it is, deliberately.
It's not entirely different, but at least in a democracy a politician still has to mingle with their party members / tries / does, maybe even try to get some votes. Admins, sub moderators, don't have to at all.
Not that I think there's a way to force that, but the disconnect is still there.
Agreed about the folks who want power. When I moderated a large forum and we picked new moderators we had a rule where anyone who lobbied 'too hard' to be a moderator was automatically out. What is funny is that if you followed those users they often ended up banned later on ...
TBH it was one of the things I liked about Slashdot. Essentially everyone was thrown into a pool and was expected to moderate, but it was completely random. You also got thrown into a pool to meta-moderate. Those whose meta-moderation scores were good and didn't let the tokens expire too often were thrown into the moderation pool more often. It was pretty difficult to game without a lot of sock-puppet accounts.
Don't they have to mingle with whoever decides who's going to be promoted to admin or moderator? For indirect votes via party lists, I think it's quite similar, isn't it? You don't have to convince the public, you just have to convince the tiny amount of people that decides who's placed on the list.
At least as far as some subs goes there's a lot of batches of mods who seem to be copy and pasted of sorts across subs... regardless if they post across them. So I'm not so sure they have to do much at all, just know each other.
Granted its a trust thing, I get it, but it's also a disconnect.
> Does reddit have any audit trail or safeguards when admins edit comments?
No, and despite being told multiple times over the years they have not made any attempt to develop anything like this, despite it being an obvious step to prevent admins from controlling group think on the site.
My theory is that the company is worried that if they start letting people see under the covers that all the users will realize how much the site is used to manipulate them... deletions of "wrong think", bot posts, etc.
Well, there is also the fact that Ellen Pao, former Reddit CEO, is linked to Partys by Epstein.[1]
Also, there was a lot of circumstantial evidence alleging Ghislaine Maxwell was a powerful mod on reddit, with a very disgusting collection of "evidence"[2]
Ellen Pao's tweetstorm about Epstein was so bizarre. I honestly viewed her as a good ally and champion for a lot of my values. Seeing her casually divest that she mingled with Epstein and co. completely shattered that.
How can you advocate for women's rights and inclusion while fraternizing with Epstein and not seeing anything wrong with that... man, it bummed me out.
Even assuming that Reddit learned nothing from the /u/spez-debacle and that admins can still edit comments, it would be a problem in its own right if she already had such far-reaching permissions when just getting started.
> why would reddit hire a 23 year old admin whose greatest accomplishment is being forced out of politics due to her connections to multiple pedophiles?
Hiring trans people gets you a lot of Virtue Credits. The incentives are clearly there.
It’s ridiculous, of course. And I say this as a trans person.
I suspect they are circling wagons and presenting a united front but this person will be fired or "resign" in the next day or so. She must not have told them about her history. You would think a network savvy company like Reddit would have HR department that can do a google search on someone's name though.
> However they seem to be denying the accusations that admins (possibly including the individual in question) were manually editing contents containing her name.
According to the r/UKpolitics moderator that got banned, one of their comments was manually edited multiple times (first to change the content of the comment, then to fix typos in previous edits)[1]. Reddit hasn't refuted this.
From context I've seen elsewhere, my guess is that the mod posted the text of the Spectator article in its entirely as a comment on their submission. Then, someone edited out the sentence which contained a passing mention of Aimee, but in a nongrammatical way. Then someone went back to fix the edit, and a little while later the comment was full-on deleted (so now it shows up as [ Removed By Reddit ]) [2]
According to the r/UKpolitics moderator that got banned, one of their comments was manually edited multiple times (first to change the content of the comment, then to fix typos in previous edits)[1]. Reddit hasn't refuted this.
It seems to me that the biggest problem with that specific situation, assuming the description is indeed correct, isn't that the admins of a forum have the power to edit content on their own site, but rather that if the content has been edited by the admins then this isn't necessarily being disclosed transparently to others, and by extension the original author might still be held responsible for something they did not in fact write.
You might expect that, for legal CYA reasons if nothing else, a forum of Reddit's prominence where controversial subjects are sometimes discussed would at least keep some sort of irrefutable log of any changes made by its admins and clearly mark any content that has been edited by admins to avoid misrepresenting the original author. However, going by various other comments made over the past couple of days, it looks like this might not be the case, which seems dangerous for both Reddit and the people writing the content that gets changed.
It appears that reddit prefers that people believe it is the original author's words when they edit someone's post:
> "I messed with the “f*** u/spez” comments, replacing "spez" with r/the_donald mods for about an hour," Huffman said, indicating that the only thing he secretly altered was the target of the insults.
I'm asking myself the same question. There many LGBT+ activists out there; hiring this particular person is just asking for trouble. And the current censorship situation simply makes no sense.
I am aware of it, it was a bad joke I guess. I wanted to say censorship (done by this site's users) was a thing. I would expect them doing the same if they were admins on reddit. I am doubting that this is a moderation tool going haywire
One can be forgiven a lot of one's politics are correct, especially if one has the mitigating status of minority status, even if it's a minority status that one grants oneself and no one is allowed to question.
We've just witnessed two celebrities on the same show, make tweets comparing a political situation to Nazism. Only one was fired for it.
One was conservative, the other liberal. If you immediately knew that one kept their job based purely on that description, the question of why Reddit would hire such a disastrous individual becomes much less mysterious.
The CEO himself admitted to going into The_Donald subreddit (before it was banned) and editing user comments. I don't think this guy is leading the charge to admin transparency.
This gets brought up a lot. And it's a bit of a doozy to make sense of.
First, consider the context: the CEO (spez) was an easy punching bag on the_donald subreddit, in fact it was a bit of a meme there to attack reddit's admins (and those in the know do know that the attacks were often crossing a line, like accusing them of being pedophiles and things of the nature). The change that spez made was a bit of a joke itself, it was turning an attack on its head. If the edit had been made in the early early days of Reddit, especially in the jokey context it was made in, I don't think anyone would have batted an eyelash. But in the last few years, right around the time these things happened, it became clear that Reddit is a big deal.
I think what I'm trying to say is, whatever may be your feelings of Reddit and its stature, this particular act by spez was pretty insignifiant in the grand scheme of things. Indeed the subreddit that this happened in actually no longer even exists, the_donald and similar subreddits were banned to make Reddit a friendlier place such that it's now an easier decision for corporate America to put ads on there.
> pretty insignifiant in the grand scheme of things.
It was super significant in that it was evidence that Reddit employees have the ability to edit messages with no audit trail and no governance.
So while the individual edit was not important, the fact that it happened was. And there is an unknown number of other edits that were never disclosed and is unprovable. So Reddit broke the one thing it’s supposed to do- allow users to talk to each other.
Important for this article too because Knight claims her boyfriend’s Twitter account was hacked and someone else posted about fantasizing about kids. If it was Reddit we wouldn’t be able to know if it was Knight’s boyfriend, hackers, or some Reddit admin.
> It was super significant in that it was evidence that Reddit employees have the ability to edit messages with no audit trail and no governance.
Yeah this is an issue, but let’s be real here, this matters to you me and a few other people here, and outside in the real world no-one cares. Even this expectation is new, any admin who was hosting phpbb forums or whatever else had this freedom to change a few entries in their Mysql Db, heck there was an engineer who was able to go inside people’s private gmail (https://www.wired.com/2010/09/google-spy/) — and Google is a company we expected to have better safeguards. Better security measures, sophisticated software architecture to prevent this, these things only happen after a startup reaches a high level of maturity in its timeline, Reddit hadn’t quite reached that point when this happened. I would be concerned if such a thing happened now though. Now these safeguards do exist on Reddit so there’s that.
It mattered a lot to the people in the subreddit who were upset enough about that and other things to create their own website and move their community off reddit.
I think it's less about the technical aspect and more about the expectation that people with the ability to change your comments won't do that. If you wrote an opinion letter to a magazine, and they published it, but only after changing a few words in your letter to make you seem dumb, everyone would understand why you were upset even though nobody would doubt that magazines have the technical capability to do this.
One of the things I first set up in systems like this is to really lock down who can change and do stuff like put content into immutable read only stores so it’s hard to change.
And I also set up audits and alarms so if someone does change things that shouldn’t be changed then alerts get pushed out to the right places for review. Even if it’s simple stuff like putting a trigger on a column that shouldn’t change so it’s logged and reviewed when someone changes it.
This is just a reasonable thing for an admin to set up. Decades ago, I got really pissed when sysadmins were just reading email and worked to set up controls so people could only do this with the right controls and reading a users’ content was a big deal that was super hard, hopefully impossible to do inappropriately.
There are situations where this has to happen right- HR investigating a complaint, laws, audits, etc- and that’s still possible. But casually browsing and changing without anyone knowing should not be allowed in any serious business. It’s not that hard to set up.
>Reddit employees have the ability to edit messages with no audit trail and no governance.
How did you come to this conclusion? It is entirely possible that there was an audit trail and governance, spez simply ignored the governance, and he would have been fired after an examination of the audit trail if he was anyone else but the co-founder/CEO.
I'm not going to defend Reddit's corporate culture, but you are making a much more nebulous complaint here than OP did when they stated rather definitively that there was "no audit trail and no governance".
I realize that and it is why I referenced “OP” in that comment. They made a specific and direct statement which was in my opinion unsupported by the evidence. You countered my response with a more general and vaguer complaint that I can’t really disagree with but isn’t directly related to the original complaint I was refuting.
If someone can ignore the governance process then it’s not an effective governance process.
If there’s not auditing to identify when someone bypasses governance, then that’s not effective auditing.
Assuming effective controls are in place without any description of them and evidence that they fail is foolish, I think.
Reddit could have shown off their governance and audit process, but didn’t. I’ve worked on similar systems where someone can just edit the db records and there have been places with no and decent governance. It’s more likely that anyone with admin rights can change stuff. This is bad for a company as big as Reddit with as many users.
> If it was Reddit we wouldn’t be able to know if it was Knight’s boyfriend, hackers, or some Reddit admin.
Sorry I don't see your point, I work in systems in very large e-commerce multinationals and I have been given the production database credentials many times allowing me to change anything of any user or any product using the mandatory company VPN and the admin account. What are you going to track? The VPN IP and and the general admin credential that can be 100 different people not including hackers that could have compromised any of our PCs?
The only important thing is that she doesn't stand behind the comments, she denies them. So that's it. She clearly doesn't support those statements, end of story.
Whoever with the intent to kill, injure, harass, intimidate, or place under surveillance with intent to kill, injure, harass, or intimidate another person, uses the mail, any interactive computer service or electronic communication service or electronic communication system of interstate commerce, or any other facility of interstate or foreign commerce to engage in a course of conduct that causes, attempts to cause, or would be reasonably expected to cause substantial emotional distress to a person described in clause ...
>that Reddit employees have the ability to edit messages with no audit trail and no governance.
Help me understand this. Reddit is a private company. Is there some sort of contract somewhere that says they won't edit messages and will maintain an audit trail? I mean, I might not like that they are doing it, but I'm also not paying a dime for Reddit (and I have all ads blocked, so they doubly aren't making any money off of me) so I don't see where I can be upset if Reddit does this. You get what you pay for.
If we want governance and audit trails, it either needs to be maintained as a public resource, paid for out of tax dollars, or needs to be a fully paid for product that involves entering into a 2 way contract. Otherwise, I think they are free and clear to do whatever they want to do with any subreddits, posts, or comments.
> Is there some sort of contract somewhere that says they won't edit messages and will maintain an audit trail?
Legal contract? No. Social contract? Yes.
> Otherwise, I think they are free and clear to do whatever they want to do with any subreddits, posts, or comments.
I'm surprised this is where you went with your rationale. The parent was clearly saying that the intent of the communities is the ability for people to freely speak each other. Any function, especially by authority, to undermine that will erode confidence and thus eventually cause people to use the site less.
Social contract? Seriously? Who in the world is using Reddit because they have confidence in it? That is insane. It's an anonymous black hole of posts and comments and come and go like dust in the wind and have no lasting permanence or value. It's not social. There is no contract. Nobody in their right mind should have confidence in Reddit or believe that anything on there is real or authentic.
> dust in the wind and have no lasting permanence or value
You mean like the massive russian "troll farms" that have effectively coerced people into political beliefs, or places like /r/RedPill that have galvanized young males to be ant-feminine, or WSB where thousands of people have placed savings into Gamestop. Want me to go on?
So yes there is most definitely a social contract. Just because you don't believe the information, doesn't mean others don't as well.
When you go to Disneyland it involves losing a lot of money but people usually enjoy it. Same thing here. People are not being quoted in the news or testifying to Congress that they lost their retirement and Mr. DFV has not lost his SEC broker registration.
You are right up until you end the sentence with the wrong cranberry. A vast majority of content on Reddit is shockingly real (going by Occam's razor), it is one of the reasons why in light of this whole debacle I'm considering never setting foot on that platform ever again.
The content of Reddit comments have been used in legal proceedings. It's a huge deal that the CEO has edit permissions in the main Reddit site database, they simply shouldn't have that access at all.
It's like Mark Zuckerberg personally (and invisibly) editing your facebook posts, for which you're legally culpable. I don't really get how people here just brush it off.
The fact that Reddit comments are admissible in a court sounds insane to me. I can't believe people actually take Reddit that seriously. It's like taking preschoolers yelling at each other seriously, but with anonymity thrown in. The fact that adults can take it seriously enough to use it in court cases is crazy.
Just because you don't know the reddit user in real life doesn't mean other people don't know each other in real life. If someone says they're going to kill someone for a comment, and then that user ends up dead, I don't see why it would be shocking that might be used as evidence in a court case.
It was a pretty common occurrence on Twitter back when people posted their gang crap everywhere.
> It's a huge deal that the CEO has edit permissions in the main Reddit site database
Surely you jest! Do you know how programs work? You don't think HN comments can't be edited by anyone with access to the DB and permission to make changes?
Frankly the idea that people on HN thought that people who run a website can't edit the content on it is one of the most bizarre, disingenuous things I've read on here.
You all know it can be done. Why is everyone pretending otherwise? Is it performative?
I think the expectation is that spez (and, ideally every other Reddit employee) would not have credentials to the prod database. Definitely not _write_ credentials.
In a system as large as Reddit, there's rarely a good reason for a human to be running hand-written SQL commands in prod.
There's a large amount of process in place at traditional companies to prevent this kind of tampering. Commonly, it involves separation of powers, with an "Operations" team that runs the software and an "Engineering" team that runs the software. This way, theoretically, nobody who has the knowledge of how to abuse the system would have access to abuse it. Making "unwanted" changes to software would require the consent of two parties at odds - One on Ops, one on Eng.
In practice, it was impossible to debug software if you didn't have knowledge of how it ran and it was impossible for teams to cooperate when designed as antagonistic. "Operations" people needed to know enough programming and SQL to be able to audit engineering access, or they became blind drones parroting the actions that the Engineering team took. A useless layer of signaling that added no substance. And it was easy to align bad actors in Ops and Eng, at least in places where it mattered - Usually with money.
My career in DevOps has been breaking down these barriers, promoting a "shared ownership" model where it's devs are directly oncall and have production credentials to their services. Still, there are serious protections in place: The passwords to the production databases are stored securely, not typically visible to devs - They have to jump through hoops of using a auditable bastion box to run SQL commands directly on the production databases. Not that it's not possible, not that it's not done (Though good engineering practices make it an uncommon task, I think we've actually used the ability half a dozen times in the last year), but as the commands are being typed they send out logs to a third-party service that's instructed to archive them. It's not hard to get access, but it would be easy to see the trail.
That said: This is on a mature team. That doesn't come out of the box and we didn't get there easily. Many teams, even with all of that protection, don't actually audit the logs, and do generate a lot of logs because of poor system behavior.
Knowing the engineering talent at Reddit, I doubt that it's a concern. Whether by malice or naivete, it has likely never crossed their mind that anyone would break protocol and access databases directly for anything other than legitimate debugging purposes. I'm convinced that the SF bay has some of the narrowest focused minds... and also many of the most malicious.
At a technical level it is always possible somehow but the point people are trying to make is that there should be access controls and protocols in place. The CEO should not have absolute unconstrained access in all matters.
The person I would trust the least to run raw SQL at (easy to find if you care) has the most privilege to do so: The "Growth Hacker" business operations person. Probably reddit is among the few companies where the CEO is technical enough to be doing raw SQL queries themselves, but it's trivial for a CEO to generate a purpose for credentials to be stored in their remit: Business reports. The bizops people with direct ties to the CEO will do whatever they're asked.
Still, agreed - The fact that they've now shown, multiple times, to have insufficient auditing and repercussions for the administrative abuse is sobering.
C* executives are normally prevented from accessing these systems directly for accounting reasons. I'm certain the person meant that it was inappropriate for the CEO of Reddit to have the ability to edit the production database, not that they didn't understand how DB ACLs work.
I've worked on production DBs that have had these kinds of restrictions- like, an alert gets sent if an SVP accesses a system. There are a lot of good reasons for this but most of them come down to avoiding fraud.
Yes, like many people, I use my real name on HN. (But not on Reddit, of course.) And people frequently identify themselves on HN by linking to their blogs or projects. I wouldn't call those people stupid.
You're missing the point. No one is saying that they're not legally allowed to do it. The issue here is that it's possible, and that it was done at least once.
What if it was done constantly all day long every day? How would that be any different than having been done once? This is reddit, the bastion of anonymous inanity.
There is really no excuse for what he did and most other businesses would have fired him immediately. Reddit simply has a very immature corporate culture. Post-IPO (if they get that far) I would expect a massive clean-out.
What's the harm in such a pointless joke? It was silly, but it's not like the meme subreddit he did it to was a super serious one like AskHistorians is.
Personally I don't think that action in itself is a big deal, but it shows that Reddit has a lack of internal security i.e. reddit employees are admins in the old-school CMS/forum software sense: they simply can do anything. (Edit: Reply points out that spez says not all admins can do this)
For comparison, I don't expect that a Google employee, or C-level executive, has an "Edit" button next to every single post on Google Groups.
Being able to silently change the content appearing under a user's name is a big deal. It's a more significant capability than being able to e.g. take down content.
To be fair, nobody has an edit button on any Google Groups post anymore. Nobody has any buttons on them, in fact. Also, when it happened, he also pointed out that most reddit admins weren't able to do this.
> Also, when it happened, he also pointed out that most reddit admins weren't able to do this.
That’s worse though, right? Why does he have this special functionality the other admins don’t have? Why would the CEO ever legitimately need to personally edit a reddit comment? Surely he has many better things to do.
I'm sure he could just connect directly to the database if he wanted to. At some point people have enough access to systems to bypass any security checks put in place.
This is the guy who created reddit, by default he can do anything physically possible. The only way he wouldn't have this functionality is if one of his employees specifically added something to block him from being able to do it, and this addition could not be reversed.
And there are many very legitimate reasons to have the capability to modify entries in a database, but honestly even if there weren't, making a system where it's impossible for anyone other than the originating user to modify an entry is a challenging task.
People have been arrested over reddit comments, and what he did showed that there are employees at reddit who can go in and edit your comments to say whatever they want, with no oversight.
It is rather fascinating isn't it. Not that long ago I remember reading FBI agent documentation describing to the judge how he got the information and publicly available comments were a big part of this. It throws a serious wrench into validity of such submissions by LEOs now.
Is this a joke? Why would anyone think that any post or comment on a place like Reddit is real or authentic? The entire thing is an anonymous black hole. It is as far from real and authentic as I can imagine anything being.
The clear harm is that Reddit posts have been used in court cases. People have and will go to jail based on that content.
The unclear harm is they use “we’re being professional business” as an excuse to do unpopular and unfriendly things and also “it’s just a prank bro” when stealth editing posts... no dude. Can’t have it both ways. No one should trust this company at all, and they’re proving why.
Yes. You're the one who chose to use their platform to broadcast your words, if you don't believe they will do so with fidelity use a different platform. You're not paying or otherwise offering them anything in exchange for a guarantee of fidelity, nor are you under any obligation to use their service.
So by your logic, it would be okay for a twitter employee to modify a tweet from of the president's account to declare war (or to any number of things that would have very real repercussions in the real world)
I take no issue with the modification. Trying to start a war is wrong, but that's true regardless of method. Giving someone food isn't a problem, giving someone food you know they are deathly allergic to on the other hand is. They would certainly be responsible for any damages they caused through malice or negligence, but they have the right to face those consequences.
I get where you're coming from, but to the users of the_donald, it wasn't a meme subreddit. They thought they were the main reason he got elected in 2016 and were looking forward to playing a similarly pivotal role in 2020.
It was so close they could have made an impact. The Clinton email address / wikileaks dumps were being mined as a collective in the forum. That probably brought to light some emails the press would have ignored.
> I get where you're coming from, but to the users of the_donald, it wasn't a meme subreddit. They thought they were the main reason he got elected in 2016 and were looking forward to playing a similarly pivotal role in 2020.
That sounds exactly like what a Donald Trump meme subreddit would say.
> I think what I'm trying to say is, whatever may be your feelings of Reddit and its stature, this particular act by spez was pretty insignifiant in the grand scheme of things.
In court there’s a concept called “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus”[1]. If you’re shown to have lied to the court once, then anything else you’ve said can be considered to be a lie as well. You lose the assumption of good faith of the judge and jury.
It might not be a courtroom, but the same concept applies to a so called “bastion of free speech” platform like Reddit.
Sorry to be so cynic, but why do you assume good faith on the part of Reddit? It's a free product, you are not paying for it, they don't owe you a damn thing. If they don't care about their reputation, they can do whatever they want with your comments, including changing them or deleting them.
This is the problem of free stuff, you have no leverage and little to no value to the company as a single user, and if you are the kind of problematic user such as the ones in The Donal, you have negative value because you scare away the ads and ruin the companies reputation, so they actually have a very powerful incentive to push you away and make you leave the site.
if I recall correctly, he edited the comment outside the official moderation workflow. there was no indication that the edit was not made by the user themselves. imo, this is a pretty big deal. if it were done in a way that clearly showed the edit was spez's, it would be a harmless joke. instead it raised questions about how many admins are able to silently edit comments and how often it might happen.
I couldnt disagree more. If Zuck was found out to have been manually changing posts that criticize him would that be insignificant? Not enforcing some moderation policy but manually changing posts.
Like is that really the most important thing for any CEO to do? It's incredibly stupid and worse it kills user trust. I think Reddit should have banned TD early on but I still think this act was awful.
The CEO of a social media company going and personally making political edits to user messages to push their agenda sounds about as bad of a thing as I can imagine. I have a hard time imagining something more wrong for a social network to do. Imagine the CEO of YC editing posts and comments with no way to prove it, people would be rightfully furious. I guess promoting child pornography is worse, but that's also something Reddit and their admins did in the early days. People can say all they want about Facebook and Zuckerberg, but if he had done any of dozens of things Reddit has done and continues to do, he may have literally been crucified. Reddit gets away with way too much crap just because there is no alternative. Reddit is one of the most toxic social networks with the most corrupt leadership but it generally gets ignored because of their political leanings.
The problem isn't just that spez had an act of weakness - it's that reddits admin tools have built in features to modify comments. Meaning they're using that feature more than just this singular time.
Do we know for the a fact that those tools exist? I work on a website that has a database backend. It is trivially for me to go into the database and make any edits I want. How do we know that he doesn't have that kind of database access?
Just replace spez and reddit with Zuckerberg and Facebook and you'll immediately understand why it is bad. Just imagine Mark editing your posts. CEOs shouldn't be monkeying around without a transparent changelog with user content.
Why not? Is their company and you are not paying them a damn thing. Why the entitlement if you are not paying for the service that you are enjoying? That's not how the world works.
If you are not paying don't complain, just move to another site or pay for the service so you are under a different contract and relation and you are no longer the product and are the customer instead.
You are not the customer of Facebook, Reddit or Google, the ads buyers are, and the customer is always right. If they don't like your post, it makes all the sense in the world to change it, censor it or kick you out because you are making them lose money and they are not a non-profit existing to serve you. They exist to make money for their share-holders like any other corporation.
Thats a lot of mental gymnastics and whataboutism to give him a pass. At the end of the day he did what he did. And they lost trust through his actions which is the currency of their platform. As CEO, he made a stupid decision and then joked about it more than he apologized after. If they're doing that type of thing on the front-end, what do you think they're doing on the back-end?
I barely even use Reddit anymore because I simply dont trust it for an accumulation of reasons. Its ~50% astroturf for political and commercial reasons, you can somewhat easily game the votes, and I don't think they care because they make money.
It's been interesting to watch the community actually grow (it was thedonald.win, but there was a difference between moderators - aka the domain owner wanted to make money).
You left out some context: he did that in a (failed) attempt at lulz. It was a long thread where (IMHO) he was fielding tough questions pretty frankly and honestly, as one might hope he would, but he ruined it by editing someone's post to troll them. In context, it was obvious that he did it, he wasn't trying to be sneaky.
I'm not justifying it; obviously it was dumb, given that people are still using it to denigrate him years later. But the implication that this means he is more likely to have edited other peoples' posts surreptitiously is (again IMHO) not true.
I can't imagine Twitter/Facebook/etc. actually changing what a user wrote, in any context. This does reveal something about Reddit and I would be less surprised to learn they are editing other posts.
On the flip side, administrators can and do directly edit user posts on a lot of web forums I've used, some of which make it more obvious than others. I think the Facebook/Twitter position is the more unusual one, and it's tied up with those platforms' obsessions with real names and verified identities...
> this means he is more likely to have edited other peoples' posts surreptitiously is (again IMHO) not true.
In what way can you support this claim? We’re you provided any indication or proof that this is the first this has happened? Or is the first time they were caught?
IMHO means "in my humble opinion". The reason I hold that opinion is that when someone is using their power surreptitiously, they generally don't call attention to it.
More subjectively, none of us can know for certain, but this line of reasoning just isn't supported by an honest reading of the thread in question. The Reddit leadership was in between a rock ("this sub is full of white supremacists and if you don't ban them you're racist!") and a hard place ("we're being persecuted for being conservative and white and if you ban us you're racist!"). Spez isn't perfect, but he seemed to be at least trying to engage honestly and field questions about what he had done and why. After many hours of arguing with people (and, it goes without saying, taking a fair amount of insults and abuse) he did this thing where he edited some posts in a way that seemed pretty clearly to be an attempt to blow off steam.
Now, was that wise? Clearly not, and I'm not defending it. But neither is it defensible to selectively pluck the fact that he edited some posts out of its context and use it to push the idea that Reddit leadership is in the habit of editing peoples' posts surreptitiously to push a viewpoint. AFAIK that's never happened, and I feel like Reddit is under enough of a microscope that we'd know if it had.
It was a single time, and in a way that was an obvious joke (literally just regex to switch his name with mods' names). It's not exactly heinous, what he did.
He's been remarkably open every time he's changed user content (once with a post in 200...7? I think, and the single time he edited comments).
I don't like reddit, and I don't like spez for other reasons (downgraded from Lisp to Python), but what he did was literally just a harmless joke. All reddit posts and comments are publicly archived by services like pushshift; we'd know if they had a habit of doing this.
> remarkably open every time he's changed user content
Are you sarcastic? This is logically a very useless statement due to the nature of trust. Once trust was broken it’s hard to obtain because does clearly lied about other things, why should he be trusted now that he’s been caught.
“I’ve been remarkably open about all the extra marital affairs where I’ve been caught, please trust there are no others.”
“I’ve been remarkably open about all the robberies where I was convicted, please trust that there are no others.”
Etc etc.
I would feel foolish even presenting any unsound logic and can’t even think of a situation where it would be relevant to trust. Officiated lie detector? Sodium pentathol administered by an adversarial government? Testimony under oath?
The trust was never broken. He neither denied nor tried to hide that he changed the post. No one caught him, he did it in broad daylight.
If you have extra marital sex right in front of your spouse, that is no indication that you are hiding secret affairs.
If you walk into a police station and tell them you robbed the bank across the street, there is no reason to believe you have secretly robbed many others.
The obvious answer is they probably didn't, this is probably a pseudo QAnon/Pizzagate conspiracy theory where people were "censored" for the harassment of a random person.
You mean, her own father? The article says her fiancee also had been accused of saying he feels attracted to children but they claim his account was hacked, which may be true as no one in their right mind would tweet something like that.
Stop defending pedophile apologists before you know the full facts of the case.
Her father raped and tortured (a car battery was involved) a ten year old. This happened over multiple days whilst the child was tied to the rafters in the attic of the family home. This is the same house Aimee Chancellor was living in at the time. But she claims she didn't know and she was not on trial. Regardless, during the trial photos of Aimee with the victim were discovered on Amiee's phone.
After her father was arrested and charged with 22 counts of sexual violence, she forged documents in order to hire him as her election agent. This is a position where he would have had contact with children. She was kicked out the Green party when this came to light.
She then joined another political party, and was kicked out of that after her fiance was found to have tweeted:
"I fantasise about children having sex, sometimes with adults, sometimes with other children, sometimes kidnapped and forced into bad situations."
They were both contacted by the media about this, she claimed he had been hacked, he claimed that these were only fantasies, and would never act on these urges... She later married him.
Amiee Chancellor is a despicable human being who can only be viewed positively if she is compared to the people she chooses to surround herself with.
Some have hypothesized that Reddit was trying to increase their diversity numbers but it seems more likely that she's friends with someone or has a group of friends at Reddit and that's how she made it though whatever hiring process they have. Reddit doesn't strike me as the type of place that's very rigorous when it comes to process so knowing the right people might have been enough. Of course this is all conjecture.
I mean, at some point, the folks who do background checks during hiring would have flagged this as a risk, and I can't see the company proceeding to the offer stage once they were aware. I mean this purely from a corporate risk-avoidance perspective. But, I guess reddit might not adhere to this approach.
My question was answered by the CEO of reddit (well, I didn't ask him, but he answered it) in a post just 15 minutes ago:
"As of today, the employee in question is no longer employed by Reddit. We built a relationship with her first as a mod and then through her contractor work on RPAN. We did not adequately vet her background before formally hiring he"
It's exactly as I thought. They thought they had a good employee and failed to vet with due diligence.
But, in their response, they absolutely failed to convince anybody: by banning a bunch of people for posting things that are in mainstream external media. Even if it doxxes your employee, once it's in the mainstream, you can't control it.
I'm confused. Your comment talks about her father and her fiance. What did she do?
"Amiee Chancellor is a despicable human being" is pretty heavy, but the only thing related to her in your comment is that "she forged documents in order to hire him as her election agent." Not cool, but is there more here?
She lied to protect a known pedophile. I have limited myself to facts which have been proven in court. As a UK citizen, I am unable to make any statement which I cannot prove, less I be sued for libel. However I'll point out again that she lived in the house, the child was there for days, and there were photos of Amiee and the ten year old victim found by the police on Amiee's phone. There are plenty more facts available about this case which might cause you to question the decision making process of the CPS.
EDIT: I would link sources but the only sites which have properly covered this story are highly transphobic so I will refrain.
Hire her father after the allegations were known (to her and the public) as an election agent which put him into contact with vulnerable people[1], which is arguably both very reckless and borderline crony.
I don't know anything about the case that's not covered in this article... but I have the impression she's being judged by what her father did, which I find despicable. She deserves to be treated independently of that as I am sure it was not easy to live her whole life in the shadow of what happened.
Though I have no idea, I suppose her father couldn't get a job (I suppose he has paid his 22 years in jail now) so she might have felt like she had to step in to help?? I don't find that a huge problem, though if she did indeed forge documents , then of course she should be held accountable.
EDIT: I am sorry, I hadn't read the details of the case, so I assumed the crime had happened 22 years ago (as the father was free to work, I assumed he had paid his time)... but it seems he was on bail (!!!) from the crime, which happened in 2016!!! How does one get bail after such a crime?! I withdraw my comment above, this story is far too horrible and I don't want to be on the wrong side.
I think bail before conviction is fine if the person is not a flight-risk. (Innocence before being proven guilty, etc.) Far too many stories of people who are denied or unable to post bail (usually people without power or means) and get stuck in jail for months before ever seeing trial.
I'm sceptical about that detail because the UK is pretty zealous at paying attention to and prosecuting women believed to have been actively supporting the sex offences and there dont appear to have been any charges, or even any insinuations from the press.
Her partner posted content about being attracted to children as far back as 2015.
A five year setup followed by a Twitter hack seems incredibly unlikely.
Edit: The unique name used for her partners keybase account is associated with similar content posted in 2004. The evidence appears concrete that her partner is a self-confessed paedophile.
>no one in their right mind would tweet something like that.
You must be blissfully unaware of the child-oriented fetishes that exist online. I know kink-shaming is a no-no, but I find it hard to believe that adults who participate in these activities don't have any desire to include real children. Just like I find it hard to believe that someone who uses an "islamic terrorist" target at a gun range doesn't have any desire to shoot a real one.
EDIT: replace "islamic terrorist" with "gangster thug" (I don't like altering comments in this way so just pretend I did)
It is wrong to want to. To be clear, it is laudable to train for the situation. But to eagerly anticipate it, to hope for enemies to attack your country and community, is abhorrent.
it depends? when I was a kid, my tennis instructor used to prop up pictures of osama bin laden on hitting targets. a little odd to do with young children, but not a big deal I don't think. if "islamic terrorist" means a picture of someone wearing typical pashtun garb holding an ak, that's a bit less okay.
it's kinda like people who are really into home defense. there's nothing wrong with people who train a lot to defend against a home invasion. but with some of them, you get the impression they actually hope it happens. not a great look.
It is a big deal that your hatred for a terrorist was used to improve your performance at a sport, when you were a kid. I despise Al-Qaida, but hating Bin Laden to such a level was exactly his goal. Proper warfare against Islamic terrorists means shielding children from senseless hate, not embracing it. Preparing children for a difficult world with tough problems and impossible solutions. You were taught that terrorism could be solved by throwing things at its nominal leader. During tennis practice!
To be clear, the connection is not just that he is her father. He raped and tortured a 10 year old girl in his own house while living there with Aimee. Then after he had been charged but not yet convicted, she hired him as her campaign manager.
I hate to be the guy that point this out, but no one should be Shamed for admitting they have a problem. Context matters whether they Were admitting attraction or endorsing the molestation of children
I hope you don't get downvoted for this. If you care about childrens welfare, you should be 100% in support of pedophiles coming forward and seeking help.
Right, but the context here is not the guy seeking help. It's him explaining why he thinks it's okay for his girlfriend (now wife) to work with vulnerable children while he actively produces content fantasizing about raping children.
The report, carried out by Sexologisk Klinik, which is a part of Rigshospitalet, was ordered by the former justice minister, Lars Barfod (Konservative), after the Socialdemokraterne, then in opposition, demanded a ban on drawings and animations of children being sexually abused.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101130111326.h...
> The findings support the theory that potential sexual offenders use child pornography as a substitute for sex crimes against children. While the authors do not approve of the use of real children in the production or distribution of child pornography, they say that artificially produced materials might serve a purpose.
If the tweet was years ago, then I can easily imagine a kid tweeting something like that to be edgy/something else - I know I've said some stupid stuff as a kid
It's still somewhat difficult to find a clear explanation because the admins were banning people who mentioned her by name (despite the fact that she is a public/political figure in the UK). That had an extremely chilling effect on the discussions, but now the Streisand Effect is kicking in.
This all feels very witch hunt like to me. If there's any evidence that she's a danger to children, I feel like people should put up or shut up. All I've seen is people slandering her for the actions of her father (proven) and some comments that might have been made by her partner about his own interests (completely unprovable). It's kind of disgusting what conservatives are trying to turn this into without a shred of proof.
The accused internet accounts are all linked via Keybase. The usernames and content go back as far as 2004. Lots of this information is already common knowledge in the UK because of previous scandals.
At what point do you acknowledge that her partner has been doxxed as a self-confessed paedophile? The alternative would involve an incredibly elaborate plot targetting a random US citizen years before he happened to meet the person involved.
Right she didn't nothing more than reside in a house with a 10 year old girl who was being tortured by her father for 11 days, and the went on to marry another pedophile. What a coincidence!
The guy she married posted a lot of rape fantasies of children on his Twitter. Someone connected all the dots and circled around that it’s possible based on actions of known associations.
Someone also mentioned that she lived in the same house at the time her father locked up and tortured the ten year old. If you’re oblivious to someone being tortured under you’re roof, you’re either really naive or part of the problem.
Reddit as a whole is less useful since comment sections were demoted from first class citizens to something barely usable. I think they saw imgur as a threat and wanted to better replicate that experience.
The new UX on the site is unusable. I don't use anything except old.reddit.com and if they ever try to get rid of that, I'll surely stop visiting the site altogether. You have to wonder how long they'll continue to maintain two different web frontends for the site, though.
I'm exclusively on old.reddit.com too. The new interface was the start of the worst, and while we're not directly in the firing line in terms of viewing content and navigation on old.reddit.com we are at the mercy of the general winds of change over the site.
The problem is that all of the mega content creators and moderators use old reddit due to RES and the other extensions (and the better UX). I think they’ll build a equivalent to TweetDeck that can be used for more powerful content creation (automatic xposting, timed posts, performance stats) and sunset old reddit, maybe with a throwback theme on new reddit. And then I’ll finally quit.
What's the issue with it? I see nothing but hate, but I honestly don't mind the new design.
Edit: lol, I participate in a lot of contentious threads here, but this simple question where I am genuinely trying to understand something has generated the most downvotes.
It's slow and not very responsive. Everything from opening a thread, to expanding/collapsing a comment thread and pretty much all other operations are slow. Definitely a lot slower than old plain reddit or HN.
It wastes too much screen estates for no reason. On my screen about half the width is wasted on the left and right blank spaces.
It breaks a lot of subs' custom theming.
The comment section navigation is horrible. It only shows comment maybe 5-6 level deep and if you expand then you will have to "go back" later. When you first go into a thread, it also doesn't show all comments, and instead requires an additional click to "View entire discussion".
People who are used to it are mostly power users generating content for reddit and their subs. It's absolutely reddits right to ignore their preferences but also at their peril.
Digg had Reddit waiting in the wings to take advantage of their missteps. While other Reddit-like sites exist, none of them seem to be capable or even desire to be the next Reddit. The opportunity is certainly there but there's little interest most likely because Reddit has no good path to profitability. Anyone who invests in a Reddit killer would need to do it for reasons other than monetary.
for me personally, it's slower to load and seems to have more issues. There's a good chance if new reddit is struggling to load, old.reddit.com loads just fine
Reddit comments were doomed in the long run, anyway. The fact that most Reddit commenters are on mobile phones, and not proper keyboards, has led to ultra-short comments light on information or nuance, like Twitter. This is true even on special-interest subreddits for various hobbies, where rich discussion is wilting and image posts and memes have taken over.
Sure, you yourself can still write a couple of solid paragraphs about a topic (the norm on Reddit until just a few years ago), but you will very look out of place among the one-line comments. With time, you feel pushed out of what used to be your own community.
I've noticed some of the popular reddits like /r/interestingasfuck /r/nextfuckinglevel (there's a pattern here) have totally degraded in content. It's supposed to be amazing things like extreme sports but it's entirely Facebook-meme-tier pictures of a guy with some text on top about him recovering from cancer that seems made up.
I can't tell if this is organic or not. If so it might be people leaving Facebook who aren't capable of irony enough to be interesting, but I think it's mobile-optimizing karma farmers.
The new design collapses all responses below the second level (and then every two levels) while adding extreme amounts of visual distractions to gilded/awarded/... comments (personal opinion). This annoys me to no end and I presume the grandparent is referencing that.
> The new design collapses all responses below the second level (and then every two levels)
this wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that you often have to follow a link to expand the tree, that you then have to back out of to get back to the main thread. I have 16GB of RAM and a 27" screen. I can handle expanding a tree of text inline.
It also wastes screen space, as the whole page is about 50% narrower. Far less information dense, optimized for ads and engagement (about half of screen space is dedicated to recommended posts when a thread loads). Feels like commercialization.
> The new design collapses all responses below the second level
I don't follow. I just opened a random comment thread, and counted comments being shown up to seven levels deep (which was the deepest comment.) Is the behavior you describe only if you're logged out or something?
Do you have the old Reddit UI saved in your preferences? If so, you might be seeing the site as it used to be, and not as it now is for the vast majority of users.
Your screenshot shows old reddit. Either you're using a link to old.reddit.com, or (like me) your user account has set the option to always use old reddit.
Try opening your link in an incognito browser.
If I go to the link posted above [1], I first see a much narrower window (careful, don't click on the black area to the sides, or you'll go back to the subreddit, the whole thing is basically a modal dialog now). Then I see one single comment, and it itself is half cut off. Below it I see a bunch of "related" content: https://imgur.com/a/tyaheDC
To see deeper any any thread, I have to click a link which doesn't expand the comments but takes me to its own link thread. To get back I need to use the browser back button and my context is lost.
They do not want users to engage with existing comments at all. The first comment is half cut off. The rest are hard to get to. They appear to want you to consume the posted content, and maybe post your own comment if you like.
I don't think this is right, unless there's an "old new" reddit and a "new new" reddit. Old reddit doesn't have the alien avatars, or the lines indicating the thread. Also, the usernames are blue, and it looks entirely different in numerous other ways.
What I suspect you are comparing is the logged out experience and the logged in experience.
No, I confirm that my screenshot uses the "new" Reddit.
The difference is that I open the threads in a new tab, instead of just clicking on them. Also I am logged-in (so no related content below) and I have an ad blocker.
Not op, pretty sure referring to the site redesign. If you force to stay on the old design, yes, you noticed nothing different. But the new design, holy shit, unless you want a Facebook's take on imgur experience, it's unusable.
I don't know the specifics of the HN submission filter, but if you spend any time on /new you'll see how often the same content gets submitted over and over again, which often results in flags. Additionally, new accounts and low-reputation accounts also tend to have their submissions flagged by default, and require a "vouch" to be unflagged.
In other words, HN's submission filter is fairly aggressive, I doubt anything nefarious is taking place.
Well, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26557175 was also flagged when the post was getting popular. HN has really been going on a censorship spree lately as well. What's even worse with HN is that sometimes your comments appears to have been posted, but if you log out or go in private browsing, your comment cannot be found at all!
I'm still shocked Reddit is allowed into the wider ecosystem of tech infrastructure. Between hosting explicit gore content and very extreme pornography with borderline legality at best (Including under Alexis's and Steve's leadership allowing a jailbait subreddit to continue for years) I would have thought they'd be booted from AWS etc.
They were removed strictly for (supposed) violations of law - what reddit hosts is, at the current time, unquestionably legal.
Gab/etc were accused of inciting violence, threats of physical harm, treason, etc. Reddit hasn't been accused of anything like that recently. Regardless of reality, infrastructure companies can make their own decisions on who is guilty and innocent.
Reddit without a shred of doubt has hosted and continues to host illegal content too. I bet you'd find a goldmine of illegal content if you scanned the smaller subs.
You're right about accusations though. It seems that accusation alone is the key factor in whether you remain on AWS. Doesn't aspire confidence in AWS, does it.
Photos of the Tiananmen Square protest, arguments that Mohammed was not really a prophet of God, arguments that God doesn't exist, and maps that claim that the actual boundary between two countries are on one or the other side of disputed territory, are also illegal in many districts and countries.
Probably it would be bad if the only speech allowed on popular web sites were speech that wasn't illegal anywhere, or illegal in only a few places.
While I can't really speak to this particular objection, it would be patently absurd for Reddit to be required to be compliant with all laws in all countries, that's just inane and a completely losing battle.
If a specific country outside of where Reddit's servers are hosted has a problem with it, then they're welcome to ban it.
Are you sure? I'm on quite a few anime subreddits and they all explicitly state sexualisation of characters that are even canonically adults but have the appearance that someone could mistake as being a minor is disallowed. They are/were so heavy handed about it that there were revolts on a few of the meme subreddits, but nothing was changed as it was global rule changes, not sub specific.
Moderators provide much less unique/irreplacable value than the current narrative suggests.
However, the philosophical positioning Reddit has taken historically is that the Moderators own the subreddits, so yanking one away wholly from the moderation group would mark a substantial shift away from that positioning.
Just like armies technically could curbstomp civilians during protests, but many countries realize that's a bad idea.
I don't doubt admins and "powermods" are often the same people, and I'm not defending the morality of reddit as an org. However, the etiquette is that mods have total control over their subs as long as site-wide rules and real laws are not violated.
Of course, but that would break some trust where as of now most seizures are of renegade subs. Here if they seize normal subs just because they protest a bad decision by management has the potential of alienating lots of people.
You would think that sort of behavior would be the final nail in the coffin for Reddit as a whole - but they've done a lot of things in the past that I would have thought would have been the final nail in the coffin, and they're still as popular as ever.
Reddit feels very Soviet lately. Everything is heavily manipulated and it seems like users are aware of that fact but are powerless to change anything.
I miss humor and authenticity from old reddit the most. E.g. the classic: "I also choose this guy's dead wife." or the AMA with the vacuum repair guy.
These days just about any popular thread that I wander into, I see wide swaths of "deleted" comments. I'm sure they were deleted for many good and valid reasons.
IMHO, reddit's aggressive moderation suppresses spontaneous comments and is off putting to lurkers. The wittiest comments are likely spontaneous. And lurkers are not likely to engage in a discussion if they feel it may be off topic.
So we miss out on spontaneous humor and the random insights of brilliant people.
Speaking of AMAs. I feel like these "Scheduled AMAs" broke the spirit of reddit very early on. I am referring to celebrity appearances where an account is created for the purpose of a two hour celebrity "appearance". I've always felt like if they aren't sticking around answering the long tail of questions then they shouldn't be doing an AMA. So I just don't participate.
I remember one of the things that attracted me to reddit back in the day was a lady who had been some character at Disney doing an IAMA. That was the beauty of IAMA with everyday people.
Then they changed the subreddit rules and only accept "Notable" people for IAMAs and r/casualiama was born. In the 10 years I've been at Reddit it has changed a lot, including some "niche" communities that I was at, as Reddit becomes more popular all it's subreddits degrade into Meme collections.
I've tried posting a few times but it just doesn't work. Absolutely everything is censored or sent to auto moderation immediately. And I'm not posting anything remotely controversial. E.g. one time I moved to a new place and wondered about banking in that location. Nope, can't post that. Even worse, messages look like they're posted when they're actually not visible. It's dishonest. They're orchestrating the conversation based on what they want you to see.
They also don't allow you to find posts that are beyond the last 1000 or so for that subreddit. Everything beyond that point gets memory holed. They've recreated the retention problem that usenet.
If you want to find older posts you have to use a search engine.
That old reddit was also a haven for near child porn and other sorts of immoral or illicit content. Reddit needed strong moderation to become a functioning business and probably for the good of society as a whole. Maybe their current approach to moderation is overzealous, but let's not look at "old reddit" through rose-colored glasses.
I have come to the conclusion that there is no real way to discuss The Donald in a politically neutral way so I think it is best left out of the conversation for the moment. There are plenty of less politically charged examples of Reddit's moderation or the lack thereof.
Hahahahahha. Reddit was a haven for literal child porn and is still today a haven for "jailbait" content. God I hope the "waiting"/"grooming" subs that were for lewding over pics of under-18s got banned.
Reddit might have cleaned their act up a bit but it still a gross wild west.
Nope. Reddit has never developed/deployed the tools to clean anything up... today (literally) it's virtually guaranteed that someone on the site is trading child porn, someone else is arranging the sale of illegal narcotics, and someone else is selling sex work in a location it's not legal.
I'd argue that it's not Reddit's aggressive moderation, but that Reddit is now so popular that the racist, illegal, fickle beast that can no longer stay on topic. If they weren't so aggressive, they'd have a much bigger problem of everyone thinking they're a cesspool of hatred.
Reddit is heavily moderated, curated, and gamed for advertiser friendliness. If you consider the popular reddit subs to be a "cesspool" the issue might be on your end due to lack of exposure. Just about anywhere else on the internet is worse.
Your phrasing could be a lot better but I think your main point holds some truth. Just like the conspiracy equation that models the difficulty of keeping a secret in terms of the number of people involved the same principal applies to online communities that have a significant number of hateful members but try to fly under the radar. It gets harder and harder for the community to moderate their members that /unjerk and then it snowballs once the seal is broken.
Reddit was great for a long time even when it was one of the largest most popular sites on the internet. Then it became a political platform for the US democrats.
/r/politics is extremely US "normie Democrat voter" (which does not align with the actual party, it's different and sometimes worse) but the popular financial subs like WSB/investing certainly aren't.
This is just a passing trend though, 10 years ago everyone on the internet was libertarian. Which is how you knew the internet wasn't real. Nobody's actually a libertarian in real life.
I'm going to assume what you mean is that nobody lives entirely by Libertarian ideals. While that may be true, it's true of every other political category as well, so I guess nobody is anything under that logic.
Almost nobody claims to be a libertarian or gets elected by the party. Justin Amash and Ron Paul are maybe the only famous politicians.
On the internet there's that political compass site that tells people they're libertarians, but it was made by libertarians so I think it's a recruiting tool.
But it's also true that people don't practice it in real life. Drug legalization, yes, that's going somewhere if slowly, but the right wing libertarians still tend to be NIMBY in local politics.
Is the point of libertarianism to participate in a community? (Maybe it is.)
They haven't, like, done anything though. Not many politicians elected, no drugs legalized, noone freed from prison, state control over people generally not reduced. I have heard of a few attempts to start libertarian cities that failed because you can't get a Walmart when your taxes are too low to construct a sewer line.
Kinda sorta. Reddit is an odd place on the internet. It's on average really really conservative but full people who distance themselves from the political identity of "conservative" or "Republican."
Reddit is where you go if you begrudgingly vote Democrat but think that liberals and progressives have gone too far.
I do wonder what the political landscape is going to look like in the next decade if/when Republicans realize that there's huge huge swaths of young and young-ish people they could easily convert if they just dropped all the gods & guns & murica branding and gave up on social issues.
Exactly this. The comment sections of all but obscure interest subs have been complete garbage for years. The only interesting content is if you sort by controversial but most don't even know about that.
Are we on the same Reddit? All of the comments in popular subs are off-topic rehashed jokes. It's a struggle to find on-topic discussion in anything but the smallest subs.
Discussion is almost useless in most reddits unless you know most people are using the old.reddit.com url. All of the reddits I used to follow have essentially died since the change a few years ago. It is very sad.
I agree. I probably see that "I also choose this guy's dead wife"-style comment dozens of times.
Admittedly, I think I see those more on obviously humor subreddits (r/jokes) or smaller subreddits. I'm actually happy that places like r/science delete comments that are simply effortless jokes.
I would LOVE to find a Reddit alternative, that is more in the vein of that early days spirit.
Unfortunately, it seems like the only options out there are either:
1) Reddit clones, that attract people who are angry about the worst subreddits getting banned at one point or another. Pretty much nothing but non-witty hate speech, and meta discussion about how much Reddit sucks.
2) Random phpBB bulletin boards, that are too small to have the critical mass of early Reddit. Of course, today's Reddit is WAY too big, and suffers from the "Eternal September" problem. A smaller, lesser-known alternative would be great. But it has to be large ENOUGH, or else it's not much different from a private Slack or Discord.
Me too. I found reddit when somebody posted a link to it on Digg when Digg was getting bad. Reddit has gotten bad IMO a few times, but I haven't found a better alternative. Every time it does, I adjust my usage (using old., carefully curating my subs) and it's been ok.
Today I'm out looking for alternatives again, which brings me to HN. There's something magical about early reddit, but I don't think it's unique, I think it existed on usenet and bulleting boards and other stuff before my time, I think it will exist again, but if it exists right now, it's a carefully guarded secret that I haven't stumbled upon yet.
The Grandpa Wiggly (PawPaw) debacle, and many other events from ancient-reddit-history, disagrees with your claim of "authenticity of old reddit". I think the allure of audience has always driven fakers though, but definitely not to the extent corporate-ness has currently taken reddit.
The subreddits I frequent seem utterly unchanged. Reddit is a big place. I understand that people refer to some ambiguous cross-section of "Reddit" as a shared space we are all aware of and can generalize about. But I don't relate to that concept at all.
I don't know. From my big subs to the smallest ones, it seems like the signal to noise ratio is at all time lows. Bots and spam really do pollute the site a great deal.
I'm literally afraid to even mention the subreddits I like because apparently they have been spared this fate and I'd hate to draw any attention to them!
Maybe there are some more niche more secluded "better" subreddits. But as far as unpopular goes DermatogoyQuestions is pretty niche, and is oriented towards doctors and patients. And yet the worst parts of reddit still get here, and are upvoted straight to the top.
Dermatology needs a lot of education and is presumably popular with US women, and the top comment is a normal opinion for a highly educated US minority woman.
Perhaps because you are a perfect fit for reddit's culture. Plenty of communities have left (part of the reason why discord is grown) . There is definitely a culture there, and it's getting narrower by the day
I recently retired (before this drama) a 12-year-old Reddit account with close to a million combined karma. This line, that individual subreddits defy any concept of Reddit identity, needs to stop. The overlaps between moderator groups and users, as well as the impact to ALL subreddits from decisions by the administrators, mean it is completely fair game to talk about Reddit as a singular entity.
The notion that individual subreddits mean Reddit Is What You Make of It is useful only to distract just like you’re (unintentionally) doing here. It helps deflect some of these situations by having folks who unsub all defaults saying “looks great here!”
"This line, that individual subreddits defy any concept of Reddit identity, needs to stop"
I can only speak to what I experience and I can't pretend my experience is something it's not. If that is unintentionally distracting from some greater purpose, too bad I guess. I'm not about to get on board with a perspective I have not experienced and do not understand.
I mean, that’s fine, but that exact sentiment is trotted out every time anything critical about Reddit comes up. “Having a bad time on Reddit? You must be subbed to the wrong places” and/or “I’ve not noticed anything on my carefully curated sub list” means it’s much harder to have a realistic discussion about the actual, sitewide problems like hiring someone uncomfortably close to realized pedophilia on a site chock full of young children (believe it or not).
I used to say the same thing you have here to say pretty much the same thing about Reddit. That’s why I cited my experience in response, as you say you’re sharing yours, to point out that beyond what you’ve experienced there’s some nuance you may not have considered (and learning it was valuable to me).
I think it's less about policing and more about the size/content of the subreddit. I check a few sports subreddits and some about fantasy books. I would never notice all this drama if it weren't on HN, because those subreddits are focused enough on a particular subject to avoid getting caught up in meta-reddit drama / politics / controversy.
Being unaware of something is orthogonal to being affected by it. I was similar to you - mostly non-defaults, which made me miss how bad the larger site had become over time. It’s easy to overlook.
I don't think that's correct. Certainly you're less likely to be aware of something if you aren't affected by it. I think maybe we programmers just overuse the word orthogonal.
But regardless, as concerning as these policing decisions are, it's not clear how any of this stuff affects a reader of only apolitical, non-default subreddits.
I’m not a programmer. I’m a statistician. I think your observation about orthogonality is correct from your industry’s perspective, though I’ve used it correctly from the context of mine (meaning statistically independent, or uncorrelated, variables). And I disagree that awareness is correlated to personal impact when it comes to sociocultural concepts like racism, or sexism, or the dynamics and behavior of an online community.
I appreciate the attempted correction despite it being wrong.
Edit: Sigh, HN being HN. I’m rate limited and can’t respond to persistent, sustained miscorrection over a single word choice in a much broader point, because I spent all my thought tokens defending the word choice, which matters approximately zero, instead of the point.
Being unaware of something is orthogonal to being affected by it.
You truly believe that being aware of something and being affected my that same thing are independent and uncorrelated? So if a bomb goes off, my awareness of it is not at all dependent on, or correlated with, whether or not I was in the blast zone (and thus affected by it)?
Edit: The parent has edited their comment since my reply to be more specific. I'm not sure I agree, but it's now not as obviously wrong as I outlined here.
the policy decisions of admins that affect the overarching site are not to be discounted of course, but other than a few 'common' connected areas that are heavily frequented and interconnected by either content or more significantly shared users, the site is basically a giant platform for hosting community forums. You can set up your subreddit for whatever topic/niche and exist in those. There's no reason to see /r/all or anything of the major things if you're hanging out in the your followed subs - you are basically silo'd from any of this drama, roving outrage etc. It's just a large site hosting a bunch of discussion boards. The other use being 'on the pulse' of new link sharing and topics because of sheer number of users surfacing up new content. Which is what Digg was until the exodus (that was mainly about a revolt against a redesign, which threw Reddit, an almost dead site at the time, a huge bone and set us on a course to today)
I was gobsmacked that The_Donald was banned because some users 'threatened police officers' and then a slew of ACAB and anti-police subreddits faced no repercussions during the summer riots. I shouldn't really be that shocked though, it was well known that the admins and site moderators wanted The_Donald banned for quite a long time.
I shouldn't be shocked people are trying to rewrite such recent history, but it still feels weird when most people here were there watching it happen. Reddit not only bent over backwards to try and keep TD up, they went to lengths they definitely don't go to when they ban other subs. TD stayed up past numerous warnings. They even tried direct intervention to get the mods to do their work.
"It is well known the admins wanted TD banned" is a direct lie. I doubt you have better insight than anyone else about what was going on inside Reddit.
They have a right to speak, they don't have a right to dox people, threaten people, break site rules, etc. Remember when they tried to frame a Clinton supporter for a school shooting? They're not good people.
I'm sorry -- are Trump supporters not able to speak any more? To my knowledge that is not at all the case. There's even one subreddit dedicated to asking Trump supporters questions, although posts have to be approved by the moderators.
> I'm sorry -- are Trump supporters not able to speak any more?
The subreddit was banned, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, a very popular conservative social media platform was kicked off of its hosting providers, etc. Regardless of your political views, it is abundantly clear that certain viewpoints and opinions are being suppressed, which is fundamentally contradictory to free speech and American values.
Political activity retaliation is a bit different from standard freedom of association concerns. You can plug your ears and go “not listening,” but there’s a real debate to be had about where it fits in the spirit of our country.
One subreddit was shut down. There are many other subreddits with pro-Trump users -- I visit them when I'm bored.
Donald Trump is a billionaire and a former president. He can and does call into Fox News, et. al and immediately has an audience of millions. The idea that his speech is being suppressed is absolutely ridiculous .
Why exactly should private entities be forced to host content that they choose not to host?
> Why exactly should private entities be forced to host content that they choose not to host?
Where did you get that idea? No one is forcing a provider to host content they do not wish to host, and my comment made no mention of such a thing.
Regardless, that's completely orthogonal to the fact that certain view points are being suppressed. How do you consider such an assertion to be ridiculous? Do you consider something suppressed only when all mentions, everywhere, of a particular topic, are erased? I don't think you do. Just because those opinions have not been _fully_ suppressed does not mean they _are_ being suppressed, as indicated by examples such as the bans and erasures previously mentioned.
> Where did you get that idea? No one is forcing a provider to host content they do not wish to host, and my comment made no mention of such a thing.
You previously said:
> a very popular conservative social media platform was kicked off of its hosting providers, etc
The hosting provider kicked off the social media platform. They didn't want to host that platform. Nor should they be forced to host it. What's more, your whole point seems to be that because Donald Trump has been banned from some platforms, that his speech is being suppressed. But those platforms, which are private entities, are choosing not to allow him to post on their platforms. So you seem to be complaining about private entities choosing what and what not to host on their platforms.
And the bigger point, Donald Trump is free to go out into the public square and voice whatever viewpoint he has. Some networks, social media companies, etc. will cover it (in fact, a lot of them will). No one is stopping him from doing this. Just because he can't tweet it doesn't mean his speech is being suppressed.
> I'm sorry -- are Trump supporters not able to speak any more?
Try it. You'll be censored, down voted (real votes or not), shadow banned and actually banned.
> To my knowledge that is not at all the case. There's even one subreddit dedicated to asking Trump supporters questions, although posts have to be approved by the moderators.
I doubt there are any left given that they can't post anywhere.
The issue for me is I don't know of other good places for long-form discussion and good link aggregation in general. Most of the time in smaller subreddits there aren't really any issues.
What alternative is there to /r/AskHistorians? Etc.
This is the saddest thing, in my opinion. Everything is a content silo. To get "genuine" opinions on anything relevant to the past six years I have to append "site:reddit.com" to all my searches. It seems that setting up independent phpbb communities has fallen out of favor with the convenience of starting off with a much larger audience. But the downsides of letting a single org host and moderate all of these communities are apparent.
I mean, their tagline "the front page of the Internet" screams arrogance to me, in the face of what Tim Berners-Lee envisioned the Internet to be, and yet it's probably not wrong at this point.
I think history has shown us that “too big to fail“ isn’t a real thing. That “big enough to get a bailout” is real, but I’m not sure if this would apply to Reddit’s future.
I have an idea that the future will not be in content silos and volunteer moderation by power hungry people... but I certainly don’t know how to get there so I’ll wait. I suspect the future will be “subscription lists” you join that block things people you generally agree with flagged, but this may bubble issue like we have now.
The "market" in this case is completely nebulous and demonstrably not zero sum. For example, the appearance of tiktok did not shrink YouTube, FB, reddit or any other big site.
People revolted against Digg because their redesign was a mess. Reddit's redesign is an equal disaster and viewing it on a phone is impossible because it employs dark patters to force you into an app.
Yet, there's no proportional response in this case.
They had somewhere better to go. Does reddit have any notable competitors in 2021? I know there are plenty of unsavory clones of the site for people who aren't welcome there, but is anyone actually lining up to take a shot at beating them?
a good place to check is who's investing in reddit for the last few years. spoiler alert it's not aaron schwartz.
i've been shadowbanned from r/news quite a while ago and started engaging in other forums like saidit. saidit had a couple waves, i was kinda the first wave, eavding various reddit bans. that's about a year or two ago. then during the election there was a second wave, and then when r/superstraight got banned, another wave (sigh.) then when gab got attacked, when parler got nuked, we got more and more people.
Not having lived in Soviet Union, but having lived in a communist system, and am old enough to very much remember it, I think you have a very mistaken idea of repression of free speech in those systems post-Stalin.
So how did it work? It worked by intense social and governmental pressure, whereby expressing a thought that was "forbidden" led to incredibly overexaggerated offense and incredulity that someone could think WRONGLY like this (pro capitalist, anti worker, bourgeois, etc).
In fact, I have to say that over time, living here in Canada, I feel increasingly like that sort of totalitarianism lite is increasingly becoming familiar, where any even very minor dissent in thought is quickly shouted down as racist / transphobic / insert-X-phobic / anti immigrant, anti-whatever, even if said thought may bear no reasonable resemblance to supposed offence.
Not the OP, but a person born in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and with personal recollection of the late Soviet Bloc.
Obviously Reddit has no possibility to throw you in prison or execute you with a shot to the neck, but regarding the things that they can do against free expression of their users, they do not seem to show much restraint, especially if they can get away with it.
On this particular shitstorm, they will be faced to backpedal, yes. People hate pedophiles with passion.
Immature and melodramatic. It is not accurate at all and diminishes the deaths and repression of millions of people because someone disagrees with some websites moderation policies. It is a really regrettable and out of touch way to describe it.
You probably never lived in a Soviet country. Deaths and repression of millions of people weren't the everyday reality. Censorship and self-censorship were.
There is no need to have lived through it in order to point out the absurdity of comparing a social media website to the every day reality of life in ones own country. Censorship and self-censorship happened for a reason, because there were real world consequences. You would have to leave the country and leave behind your life and family to get rid of it. What if you get censored on Reddit? You get kicked off Reddit and go about your life, probably overall happier and with more free time for more healthier pursuits.
There is a degree of exaggeration, I won't argue. Although, it's not that big as it may appear. It's hard to deny that censorship, self-censorship, and cancel culture are on the rise nowadays. Not just on Reddit, but also in many aspects of online and offline social life especially when it comes to colleagues, acquaintances, neighbors and relatives. From that perspective, it's not that far from the everyday life in the Soviet era when people had to pick very carefully what they say and to whom they say it. In certain aspects, it's even worse now because every online communication can be recorded forever and used against the author at any moment for the rest of the author's life. KGB would only dream about such capability.
i guess you're not a conservative, try saying something on reddit which doesn't align with their leftist hivemind narrative and see the reactions.
In fact even moderate liberals on reddit often complain of being attacked and banned for expressing even a slightly different opinion on supposedly politically neutral subs.
it would be fine if it only came from users, one can just ignore nasty DMs and such, the problem is admins and mods are heavily censoring opinions and ban all dissent, so echo-chamber effects are extremely strong.
And it's not only political sub-reddits, the entire site is promoting a particular political ideology in a most "soviet" way possible.
I think the note should be added that the subreddit moderators can be just as 'soviet' and disconnected from the actual sub users....
I was a part of a few subs where sub moderators chose to participate in some reddit protest and go private.
The response to closing the sub temporarily, by the users you see in the sub was nearly 100% negative and a series of moderators who nobody ever sees came out to defend their choice simply demonstrated how disconnected from the sub they were (some didn't even seem to know the sub rules...).
There's a weird multi level stratification on reddit with admins, mods and users and I'm not convinced any of the 3 see eye to eye / understand each other.
I think it really depends on what subreddits you frequent. Me personally, I find it a refreshingly fun place. Same with Twitter
This is probably because I'm focusing my participation on subs where the users are unified by a similar interest in an area of creative expression and participation.
Follow controversy, anger or FUD and you'll just get sucked into it in a sort of meta way. Anger because of the anger, controversy because of the controversy, FUD because of the FUD.
The politics subreddit is among the worst. It seems like it is essentially run by operatives of the DNC. (I’m entirely non-partisan: I believe both major parties are right-wing parties, and neither serves our public interests well).
If you think the US Democratic party is right-wing you should see literally all European political parties, who all hate immigrants and love economic austerity.
Not that it relates to the article (the blackout is a very transparent action) but I agree. The manipulation of content to the front page and /r/all is more and more blatant and without repercussion. And more and more subreddits are becoming "safe spaces" where challenging a narrative gets you banned - See /r/conservative, /r/LateStageCapitalism, /r/OurPresident, /r/BlackPeopleTwitter, etc.
The refrain of "just create your own subreddit" is not practical to combat the indoctrination being manipulated to the top by these orgs. IIRC commondreams.org is behind the /r/AOC and /r/MurderedByAOC subreddits entirely.
Not at the moment, no. I recall reading it on another reddit and being sufficiently convinced, for what that is worth.
The mod of those subs is /u/IrlOurPresident, and the submissions are restricted to pretty much only that account. That is where to start to trace down the claim.
Just noticed it's L, like /Lrlourpresident (because the I account got banned).
And look at the submissions, and the vote count of submissions. I do not have the comments I read several weeks ago available, but in my many years on reddit, I have no doubt there is clear vote manipulation occurring.
That's what I looked for. You should have better evidence than a highly active user in a restricted access subreddit before making an assertion like that. Especially considering how wildly popular AOC is, I don't see any evidence of manipulation.
Your instinct to shit on a lack of evidence is blinding you to the nevertheless present strong circumstantial evidence of vote manipulation on the subs.
You make a specific assertion like that, you should have at least a shred of tangible evidence. Believe whatever conspiracies you want, but it's not my fault you can't back them up.
It definitely has gotten much worse in the last few years. From Spez silent-editing users posts, to reddit employing an "Anti-Evil Operations team". I've been using reddit since ~2012.
They never recovered from the Diggification. So weird to remember it from 2010 and think that it would eventually host the_donald and other white supremacy subreddits that sealed its Eternal September.
I used "lately" in order to avoid having a back and forth debate about a specific timeframe. The heavy information manipulation has been happening for years, but it feels especially strong since 2018. I know it was happening well before that but the admins and powermods have been especially craven as of this last year.
An interesting question I've been thinking about, though I haven't really gotten anywhere is: At what point does a private platform become a public utility, so that censorship is not permissible on the site?
I agree that reddit shouldn't be censoring anyone or certain topics since it feel like a public utility. But if I were to have a blog, I think I should be allowed to block someone or delete certain comments based on how I think my blog should be, but my blog isn't a public utility. Or is it?
Your platform hasn't been granted a monopoly on anything and has no moat, so why would it ever be a problem?
daringfireball.net is a blog with no comments and at some point someone wrote a browser extension that just adds a comment section the owner of the site has no control over. Bit mean but that could always happen to you.
Like Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, reddit has gone to hell. The only downside to this is the wave of nutjobs that will attempt to flock over to here. I'm crossing my fingers in hope that that they won't discover this place.
Your position on the article is unclear. Has the admin pool gone to hell for hiring a likely passive accomplice in pedophilia? Has the site gone to hell for organizing blackouts when issues come to light (SOPA, this, etc.), or for reasons unrelated to the article?
Prediction: next reddit will be the decentralised one. Yes, those decentralised communities already exist but will become mainstream once those achieve good usability (UX) and accessibility (apps)).
Why the scare quotes around censorship?
People are clearly getting censored. People are mad about it.
If that censorship is justified or not is another discussion.
That's what the problem is. Censorship is defined as limiting or removing content. It doesn't mean it's always illegal or legal, or morally correct or immoral, but because it has a bad connotation, and there's a pro-censorship (let's be honest) Zeitgeist at the moment, the press (the same press that should be fighting against most forms of censorship) has this desire to numb the effect of the word with quotes. Like it's not really censorship, it's, oh, eye-roll, "censorship."
Is Reddit now partially owned by China? If that's the case then I believe there will be more of that. It's just part of the agenda to create divide and chaos in the West.
Not sure on any ownership stake by the CCP, but it does seem that U.S. social media companies in general have zero loyalty to the U.S., its people, or the principles that the U.S. was founded on and stands for.
I get the impression that U.S. social media companies have a very sympathetic mindset and relationship with the CCP driven by social media company's desire to use their technology to surveil and drive the economic, social, and political direction of humans on a mass scale.
In this case, yes. For one, the original title has them. Secondly, as stated in the article, Reddit denies the allegations:
> [...] admin u/landoflobsters explains that it was not the company’s intention to remove any mention of Knight’s name, but that there had been “overzealous automaton” when it came to preventing doxxing and harassment. The admin explained that an internal error had led to the suspension of a moderator who had posted Knight’s name, and that the company had “communicated clearly” with the affected party as they resolved the situation.
A now fixed error would not count as censorship. He might be lying, but there's enough reasonable doubt to allow for quotes IMO.
On a side note, though, it's funny that the article choose to put quotes around “communicated clearly” as well.
I moderate a reddit community with ~200k users, and if I didn't use strict filtering along with a slew of Automoderator rules I'd spend half of my day removing spam, shitposts, and submissions that break our posting rules. A few posts a day get caught by mistake, but it's a lot easier to free those posts than it is to remove the dozens of bad ones that would have made it through otherwise. I think it's at least plausible that the same type of thing happens at a site-wide level.
The post was removed after a few hours, not immediately. It was also removed because Challenor was referenced at the bottom of the article, not because of anything in the Reddit post itself
Reddit needs to fire their entire PR team and just start communicating directly and frankly. The community would be a lot less upset without all the PR speak.
That's mismanagement that doesn't even see it's mismanagement.
A policy problem that affects a person in leadership affects everyone in the group. They should have communicated with the affected parties and it sounds like they left it to the moderator to sort everybody else out.
It seems like online companies go through all sorts of contortions to avoid saying what they need to say with respect to content moderation:
> We will try to moderate our platform fairly, but we reserve the absolute right to do so arbitrarily and capriciously. Users are not entitled to any explanation or recourse.
That should be the extent of any social media platform's content policy. I think we'd all be better off setting expectations properly and honestly.
I agree. As long as they own the website, they will own the ability to censor. In the beginning, there wasn't a need to censor. In fact, anti-censorship views were held by both the admins and the users [0].
>Cries to censor it would sound out, to be almost inevitably beaten back by cries of "free speech!" The idea of free speech is sacred to many Reddit users, a product of the free-wheeling online message board culture from which Reddit springs.
>Some people would argue that "censorship" would not apply to a private company owned platform.
You're mistaking the argument here. The argument is that a private company exercising censorship isn't violating a US person's constitutional right to free speech because the two things are different. It doesn't mean its not censorship and it doesn't mean it can't be unethical. It just means that the company has the legal right to censor whatever they want.
Many tech enthusiasts are stuck living in 1999 when the internet was this mythical paradise of unrestricted freedom.
The problem is, it's 2021, and the raging dumpster fire of social media platforms has created a world where extremist insanity has become mainstream public discourse. People who believe that reptiles posing as human beings run the earth are have a platform and some sort of earnest following!
People like to scream "censorship" and social media companies rally behind that and their protection from liability. Arguments are made that making editorial decisions about what gets purchased is a moral or legal risk. That's a bunk argument, because social platforms have no problem at all promoting dangerous, wrong or even illegal content to maximize engagement. Let's be real here -- for all of the weighty principles brought up here, a significant chunk of reddit engagement is porn.
> People who believe that reptiles posing as human beings run the earth are have a platform and some sort of earnest following
Those people have always existed. When I was a kid in the 80's, supermarkets carried tabloid newspapers with headlines like "Boy born with head of a bat" or "leading telekinetics agree that world will end in six days". The difference now is that while most of us just shook our heads and dismissed those tabloid newspapers, nobody was pressuring the supermarkets themselves to ban their sale.
There’s a big difference, “Weekly World News” was in the grocery aisle between Archie comics and celebrity gossip. It was a fun distraction. Similarly, crazy public access programs were on a specific channel for the purpose of allowing local viewpoints.
Editorial standards in the normal media didn’t allow for the type of propaganda that is mainstream today. The NY Times didn’t write about Bigfoot, because it’s silly and would detract from their reputation. Who would take a publication talking about batboy seriously?
Reddit/Twitter/Facebook specifically denies accountability for anything - they hijack the credibility of organizations AND you to drive engagement, period. If the content is gross, it’s not “their fault”.
The difference is that in the 80s the few people that believed this nonsense were unable to instantly find hundreds or thousands or millions of equally deluded people to reinforce and amplify their beliefs and subsequently amplify the harm they can cause.
There was a lot of that silly content in 1980s and 1990s BBS's, as well as on Usenet and the early Web. People could definitely find an audience for it. What we didn't have was "social" media and its pervasive matching of online with IRL identity and social ties.
So when deluded people read something outlandish online, they're now left free to assume that some halfway-trustworthy real-world entity must be endorsing those claims. There's no expectation of critical thinking or skeptical debate about what we see online because real-world norms are very different, and it all gets conflated as "what's mainstream".
> Many tech enthusiasts are stuck living in 1999 when the internet was this mythical paradise of unrestricted freedom. The problem is, it's 2021, and the raging dumpster fire of social media platforms has created a world where extremist insanity has become mainstream public discourse. People who believe that reptiles posing as human beings run the earth are have a platform and some sort of earnest following!
"You know, a free press is not freedom for the thought you love, but rather for the thought you hate the most. People need to tolerate the Larry Flynts of the world so they can be free." -Larry Flynt
> Some people would argue that "censorship" would not apply to a private company owned platform.
These people would deliberately enable corporations to restrict your freedoms, and are simply seeking justification after the fact for it by hiding in the letter of the law, and ignoring its spirit. This goes against the fundamental values of the West and goes against what anyone who ever wrote a free speech law would have intended.
Reddit is one of the public squares of the internet. The only content that should be banned sitewide should be content that is expressly illegal in the countries that host their servers. That's it. Subreddit moderators should have a much firmer hand, because if you don't like a sub, you can create another one. The site as a platform, which was created expressly to be a bastion of free speech originally, should not be in the business of banning people for their ideas.
Reddit instead picks and chooses what people can say and think, and can't even hide behind 'obscenity' as they allow plenty of porn but don't allow anyone who doesn't abide by their strange new set of ill-defined postmodern values. Can we get a list of the concepts that fall into their new wrongthink? Hardly.
I'd prefer they just state their policy aloud, in clear terms, rather than couching it. Just say you can't advocate for or even argue in favour of white people, for men, for heterosexual cisgendered people on the platform. Just be honest and say it like it is. It would be much less insulting and much easier to deal with conceptually if there was even a shred of honour in their approach.
So now we've reached the point where we're arguing over the semantic meaning of the word "censorship." While we're here, can you please inform us which word we are allowed to use to describe what reddit is doing?
"moderation", "anti-harassment protection" ( I think that one was used for justifying action against a specific subreddit ), of course reddit would not use a term as bad as "censorship" knowing how much it would cost them.
However, I really feel to clarify that I feel that reddit is in the wrong in endorsing the action of an admin that was clearly censoring mention of their name from the news.
This is a little more nuanced than you imply. In the end, it seems they fixed the automod rule, but sub's are still actively blacking out as we speak. We'll see how far it goes, I guess!
reddit admins responded and specifically said their automod got aggressive, remediated it, and that talking about the admin is alright as long as it isn't a dox attempt or threatening behavior.
Keep this in mind as you see other people claiming falsely that anything is still being censored.
Reddit's automoderator is not a wild animal that gets "aggressive." It's a simple regex: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/automoderator/full-documentation Someone edited the rules to deliberately block any mention of the name in question site-wide.
Tbf admin real names seem like quite a reasonable thing to include in such a regex (unless they're so common it's likely to be an accidental collision or publicly known) which is consistent with Reddit's explanation
The allegation is that the name was only mentioned in the body of a linked (paywalled) article though...
> admin real names seem like quite a reasonable thing to include in such a regex (unless they're so common it's likely to be an accidental collision or publicly known) which is consistent with Reddit's explanation
The "publicly known" part is the key here. She is a public figure who held prominent political positions. She has her own wikipedia page. There were plenty of news articles featuring her name since forever ago.
>The allegation is that the name was only mentioned in the body of a linked (paywalled) article though
Also, from the user[0] that posted the original Spectator article:
> Automation tends not to take five minutes, edit people's comments to remove publicly available information on public figures(in this case a passing one sentence mention that did not even mention reddit or admins), make typos on that edit, re-edit them again later to fix the typos and then permanently suspend posters with still no reply on their appeal after almost a day.
The point was that the list of admins that could be 'doxxed' wouldn't include Alexis Ohanian or any admin that actually posts under their real name.
Of course in this instance it appears the opposite happened and nobody knew Challenor (a pretty obscure figure whose political career probably deserves the past tense) was involved with Reddit at all until the modding Streisanded it.
>The point was that the list of admins that could be 'doxxed' wouldn't include Alexis Ohanian or any admin that actually posts under their real name.
What? Alexis Ohanian doesn't post under his real name, he posts under u/kn0thing. And it isn't a recent thing, that has been his username from the very beginning.
That's why I said Alexis Ohanian or any admin that actually posts under their real name, yes. You can't dox the real life identity of a founder whose username is public knowledge, or somebody who posts under their real name and will be addressed with their real name in replies. You could dox a lot of the others.
(All of which is moot anyway if the interventions were manual. Their PR would have been probably been a lot better blaming an anonymous human admin and reinstating the post too...)
The problem with the automated moderator excuse seems to be that it started with a post that was removed that was an article that merely mentioned her name in passing. It was not part of the title and the article was not about her. It was a single sentence in the article itself that triggered the admin action which no one seems to be buying as an automated action. It seems highly suspect that the fallout of an automated moderator is a human mod getting perma-banned for it just for sharing the article
Ugh, what a ball of mud. Well, I think there are two problems here: first, that Reddit has a bug in its anti-abuse software, and second the mob decided to abuse Reddit for hiring this woman who's history is, at worst, questionable.
This is "cancel culture" in a very dangerous form, one that if taken to its conclusion, could prevent someone from ever being employed again. That is a very harsh punishment, handed out without a trial or defense, it is NOT justice.
Furthermore, it puts a potentially chilling effect on employers, and harm employees. The first reaction of employers will be to keep their employee identities entirely secret, and to enforce that secrecy in the work contract. This will harm workers who want to move to a different job, and talk about the work they did.
My firm hope is that this protest is more an emphatic bug report than a mob looking to murder someone's career after spending about 30 seconds thinking about it from all sides.
No, I mean at worst. It doesn't sound like she was involved in anything illegal. She was never charged, let alone convicted. The allegations are all innuendo without proof, so yes, I meant "at worst".
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/mcisdf/an_up...
But it's such a weaselly post.
First, it admits they didn't vet her before hiring: "We did not adequately vet her background before formally hiring her." Apparently, a basic google search is too difficult for HR.
Second, it says this: "On March 9th, we added extra protections for this employee, including actioning content that mentioned the employee’s name or shared personal information on third-party sites, which we reserve for serious cases of harassment and doxxing."
OK, and they _still_ didn't check why people were opposed to this person? Still no Internet search or, oh, reading the comments people were posting?
Notice that this "protection" was two weeks ago, not recently.