Post 37 -- The Reddit Revolt

Yesterday, Reddit admins posted an announced in regards to policy changes around how harassment and harassing subreddits would be handled. The most salient event was the banning of the subreddit /r/fatpeoplehate, a space where pictures of the obese were openly mocked by the community.

Reddit claims individuals within the subreddit were actively harassing moderators and administrators of the image hosting site Imgur, to which Reddit ostensibly acts as a portal for. The harassment began after moderators began removing images posted under the fatpeoplehate tag. True to the internet, people's personal information was found and some form of abuse began. Or at least that is what is alleged. I am attempting to find some evidence of this beyond the vacuous hearsay of the web, but so far have been unable to find anything.

I do want to respond to a few points made by the administrators in the announcement thread. First, there is the comment which helped me find them:

"Our goal is to enable as many people as possible to have authentic conversations and share ideas and content on an open platform."

Look, I've never posted in r/fatpeoplehate and never visited it, but can we drop the charade and everyone just come out and admit that all this is about making reddit's user base more palatable for advertisers? 

Coca-cola doesn't want to be associated with r/jailbait or whatever, I get that. Reddit needs to monetize because it's not profitable, I get that too. 

But let's stop pretending this is about ivory-tower ideals of community and free speech. Reddit has never been about free speech. Shadow-bans aren't the tool of choice for those who support free speech. And the isolated-island format with moderators having dictatorial control over their potentially-walled gardens hampers an honest exchange of ideas in favour of increased groupthink and radicalized discourse. Free speech and "authentic conversations" (whatever the fuck that means) isn't out there waiting in the wings for r/fatpeoplehate to be banned. Advertisers are. They don't want their ads accidentally popping up on r/ihatejews or something and then a media shitstorm erupting, so the admins need to sanitize. 

If this was about cleaning up reddit's act, then r/coontown and r/rapingwomen would be gone, too. But neither of those subs made it to the front page in recent weeks and r/fatpeoplehate did. It's so obviously about what makes them look bad to the media, and Yishan acted in the same way during his tenure. 

Ellen Pao is a lawyer and an MBA: you don't bring someone like that on board to create an ideal utopia. You call in the MBA's when you need to turn something that was idealistic into a profit stream. "Authentic conversations" is the most business-school phrase I've heard in quite some time. How about the admins treat us like adults instead of like idiots? 

edit: Guys please don't downvote the responses from the admins, they're relevant to the conversation and should be visible. At least make it easier for others to find them.
other edit: kn0thing on free speech
also edit: krispykrackers on SRS
such edit: sporkicide on SRS
other other edit: ekjp on bans
also also edit: 5days on bans

Now to the fun parts of this. I will take them in reverse order. 5days on bans

Systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person (1) conclude that reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation, or (2) fear for their safety or the safety of those around them. We used the behavior in the subreddits to determine the banning.

5days is stating the rules used by Reddit to ensure the platform is welcoming and allows for open discussion. The two-faced vomit that has come forth is a different sort of either double speak or idiocy; 5days is arbitrarily admitting to using this rule to set to remove subreddits which might be unwelcoming or which might lead to a safety risk for individuals. /r/fatpeoplehate was not a great place to go if you were obese and particularly sensitive about it. What about /r/coontown, though? A subreddit entirely dedicated to the maligning of blacks as "the Chimpire". At least there is some humour in the group, as the current sidebar has Ellen Pao's posted comment, which I will get to in a moment.

Does 5days believe that /r/coontown is a safe space for blacks to go and voice their opinions? Of course not! That racist corner of Reddit brings individuals together who hate blacks. Those individuals have a safe platform to express their views, which were not dissimilar to that of fatpeoplehate, where we can easily swap out "black" with "fat".

This rule can also be arbitrarily applied to any space which might be difficult for a dissenting voice to come in. Of course, the reasonable response would be a suggestion that, if you're black, don't bother wasting your time in /r/coontown, and instead spend time in other parts of the site. Does every subreddit have to be a safe space for everyone? Atheism would be gone because it's not a safe place for Christians or Muslims; /r/Christianity would be gone because it's not a safe space for atheists. It's the snake which eats its own tail.

ekjp on bans

We're banning behavior, not ideas. While we don't agree with the content of the subreddit, we don't have reports of it harassing individuals.

What a glorious quote from our dear leader. Does it have to be actively harassing individuals or can be passively harassing an entire race or culture?  This is the wonderful quote which exists in /r/coontown's sidebar currently. The idea of being racist is just fine by Reddit's admins, just so long as you don't act on it in some nebulous way. If the problem was the behaviour, why not just layout the clear evidence--names can be redacted if you must--which transparently shows the negative behaviour which took place and resulted in an entire community being shut down. It's not a stretch to assume that, if the evidence did exist, it would have been posted by now in an announcement of its own to clear up the confusion.

Obfuscation aside, the double-standard of not being allowed to hold the idea that obesity is unhealthy and worthy of mockery (just as all things in life are) and being allowed to post the racist tripe is damning of the Reddit admins. The sword of power is wielded as such to strike without notice, inspiring compliance by fear.

Because I am not familiar with /r/shitredditsays, its history of abuse, or how their standing now is still in-bounds after the recent goalpost shifting, I am going to skip those two comments. Read them from the announcement post, though.

kn0thing on free speech

Look, I've never posted in r/fatpeoplehate and never visited it, but can we drop the charade and everyone just come out and admit that all this is about making reddit's user base more palatable for advertisers?

No. Steve and I did not create reddit to be a platform for communities to target + harass individuals. It's really that simple.

No, but it appears that by the administrators' complicity with allowing spaces like /r/coontown to exist, they have created a platform which allows for the positive conversation around why it's great to be a racist. Does that make Reddit, as a whole, a racist site? Surely not; that's not the point to be made here. Rather, it's taking the oleaginous words of a founder to task over the stupidity of banning one subreddit over another based on non-producible evidence of harassment.

Reddit will kill itself with these sorts of actions. They are not transparent, leaving a myriad of communities in a state of nervous energy. Who will go next, because of some tangential piece of hearsay which might damn a single user who may be connected to one post on one subreddit? That is the fear used to control. It works on children and the credulous. It does not work on me. It will not work on most adults.

This has been an unedited rant. @nrokchi