Please don't misrepresent what happened. A lot of people, myself included, left Reddit because I don't agree with the way the CEO is handling things. My leaving Reddit had nothing to do with fatpeoplehate being banned. I just don't agree with shadowbanning people and removing -distasteful- subreddits. I just don't visit them.
Reddit has become a marketing tool either way, so I that was just another drop in the bucket for me and I left.
They should have handled the /r/fatpeoplehate problem by hiding them from /r/all. Then nobody will see the subreddit unless they directly go to it and/or subscribe to it.
What they actually did reeks of incompetence. The reaction they got from banning the subreddit was entirely predictable, and because of this, gives the impression that they're pretty far disconnected from their users. It doesn't bode well for the long-term success of the site.
Totally agree. Whoever made that decision proved that they are absolutely not the right person or persons to be at the helm of reddit.
Not only that, apart from the decision, the way that it was implemented was so tone-deaf and juvenile that it went beyond mere incompetence.
For example, take a look at the announcement where they tried to outline the rationale for the decision and their methods. When they were bombarded with polite and sharp questions about their hypocrisy they avoided any response.
The thing is the people that are upset and claiming this is the end of reddit are actually the ones that are disconnected from what most users want as evidenced by the fact that almost no one but a small vocal minority in a few places on reddit care anymore and when they try to get support in more popular/general focus subreddits they are almost unanimously being downvoted or disagreed with.
I think you vastly misunderstand the size of reddit's userbase. Furthermore, it's been my experience that a small vocal minority produce significantly more content than the average user. And the single largest group of people with enough time to post all the time are children.
Most users don't care about most subreddits. That's the way any big forum with many sub-forums work.
It's true that you get downvoted on Reddit for posting anything even mildly politically incorrect which is another problem with it - it's not a place to have any sensible political/worldview discussion anymore.
> They should have handled the /r/fatpeoplehate problem by hiding them from /r/all. Then nobody will see the subreddit unless they directly go to it and/or subscribe to it.
FPH brigades. FPH brigades other subreddits, and also other forums.
Your personal reasons for not using reddit don't have any impact on the fact that most of the people switching over were either from the /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/kotakuinaction, and /r/conspiracy crowd. You can have whatever personal BS with the CEO you want, but the fact is that voat's ex-reddit userbase is all from what is essentially the worst parts of reddit.
You should not lump /r/kotakuinaction and /r/conspiracy in the same category as /r/fatpeoplehate. They aren't even mildly offensive - the only relationship here is that they tend to be zealous about freedom of speech, and therefore angry about the removal of /r/fatpeoplehate.
I would classify them strongly as "political speech", which /r/fatpeoplehate was not.
/r/conspiracy was harassing a daycare in Utah. I don't like to use that term lightly but yes, actual harassing. As in, the subreddit was obsessed with it because it had some records online that made them think it was secretly running some kind of malicious operation. people were going there and surrepititiously scouting the place and sending back photos and talking to neighbors. Admins were deleting posts, which is why it turned into a "free speech" issue for them and a bunch went to voat.
The difference between those subreddits and the ones banned where:
1) Magnitudes more users -and-
2) Mods were actively promoting harassment of individuals
Reddit admins had to step in because people were being bullied and receiving violent threats, in part due to actions taken by Mods of these large communities built on prejudice and harassment.
They are in the same category as far as SJWs are concerned because the are not "politically correct", or put simply they are not taking a knee and kissing the ring as SJWs demand.
This is why they have no problem simply telling lies about these subreddits (as they are lying about FPH). The entire point of KotakuInAction and GamerGate is to point out how dishonest this movement is... and what is the response? They lie about them!
Expecting dishonest people to respond with anything but more lies is a silly expectation.
The morally repugnant SJW movement is, at its core, a political movement. They succeeded in turning /r/politics into a monoculture around a single thought and the entire purpose of /r/SRS and all their activism on tumblr is to shame and harass anyone who thinks differently into submission.
They aren't the worst. They do say some pretty anti-semitic things at times however from what I've seen (some of them think the world is controlled by a Jewish conspiracy or some such).
/r/conspiracy has quite a diverse set of 'characters', the anti-semitic ones are merely one of the loudest. There's also the various 9/11-truthers, the flat earthers, UFOlogers, Christian/spiritual scientists, pro-gun/anti-federal government types, etc. It can be a pretty fun place to check out, actually, if you enter it with the right frame of mind.
Could you please cite the source on this? I've heard this asserted, but haven't seen the data yet. Would love to understand the dynamic that took place. Specifically, the data supporting the words "most" and "all" in your comment.
> I just don't agree with shadowbanning people and removing -distasteful- subreddits. I just don't visit them.
Please don't misrepresent what happened.
FPH has been bullying, harassing, and abusing individuals for almost a year. Pictures of people out in public, Facebook profiles, other Redditors, the Imgur staff, brigading other subs (inc. weight loss subs), attacking popular bloggers, YouTubers, and people on Twitter. Often this was just for the "crime" of being overweight and the abuse was nasty.
I'm tired of people defending this behaviour as being "distasteful" or "offensive." Even the title of Reddit's announcement was "removing HARASSING subreddits." And if you don't believe that's what FPH was doing then you literally didn't spend even one minute on it.
Key Reddit staff quotes:
> subreddit as a platform to harass individuals
> We’re banning behavior, not ideas.
> based on their harassment of individuals
> When we are using the word "harass", we're not talking about "being annoying" or vote manipulation or anything. We're talking about men and women whose lives are being affected and worry for their safety every day, because people from a certain community on reddit have decided to actually threaten them, online and off, every day. When you've had to talk to as many victims of it as we have, you'd understand that a brigade from one subreddit to another is miles away from the harassment we don't want being generated on our site.
If this is what you support, please leave Reddit. I welcome you gone.
FPH has been bullying, harassing, and abusing individuals for almost a year
Yes, and /r/shitredditsays has been bullying, harassing and abusing individuals for several years. But that subreddit is allowed to exist because Ellen Pao (reddit CEO) and admins agree with their politics.
Any other subreddit is deathly afraid to directly link to other comments on the site because they don't want to be accused of "brigading" votes which is against the rules and will get the subreddit banned. /r/shitredditsays links directly and openly vote brigades dozens of times per day. Again, because their political speech is favored.
> Pictures of people out in public, Facebook profiles
But Reddit mostly does not give a shit about posting pictures of people without their consent. Even on bis subs like /r/pics or /r/funny you will see pictures of people in public, which obviously did not consent to have their images posted there. So that's a pretty big double standard to accuse FPH of that while completely ignoring it on default subs.
And /r/videos time after time results in people harassing and brigarding youtubers.
If they wanted to ban behavior, they should have banned the individuals from reddit site-wide. But that would have been hard, so instead, they go after the common banner that causes the behavior.
That IS banning an idea. They have essentially said "We're banning FPH for harassment, but if you participated in that harassment, feel free to browse our other subreddits."
>>We're talking about men and women whose lives are being affected and worry for their safety every day
I was reading /r/FPH on regular basis for few weeks before it was closed as I've found it entertaining even if distasteful. I think you have very skewed view of what it was:
-posting identifying personal info was forbidden/removed by the mods
-linking to other parts of Reddit was a no-no
-I can't remember seeing anything threatening on it there was no discussion about threats or doing bad things to specific people; just over the top venting
That is unless you understand "safety" as it is too often interpreted today: hearing not politically correct opinions.
If you think the decision has anything to do with removing harassing subreddit try visiting /r/coontown and think why it's still online.
You completely missed their point - those other subreddits are distasteful, but they weren't abusing people or leaking over into other mediums to make threats or bully.
SRS and many other subreddits like that are abusing people and leaking out into other mediums and making threats and bullying people. Doxxing is the primary method of war of SJWs.
No SJW reddit were censored.
So, clearly it is a politically motivated censorship and the excuses are not standing up to scrutiny.
Those are prime examples of shitty, distasteful communities, but are they examples of leaking over into other mediums to make threats or bully?
- Were the parents of the deceased ever raided and harassed on facebook?
- Was the husband of the dead wife bullied on twitter because the mods posted their handle?
- Did the black man receive PMs threatening violence?
Reddit admins banned these subreddits because they said they had clearly identifiable instances and patterns of person to person abuse. That's the point you're missing.
Edit: I'm not sure why bhayden deleted their comments
The thing is there were many readers of FPH (150k subscribers and probably way more readers as people were afraid to subscribe/comment as it could get you automatically banned from other subreddits) so naturally they participated in different subreddits as well.
I remember there was no (at least for a short time I was reading it) calls for brigading and linking to other parts of reddit was prohibited.
For example, I think that health minister shouldn't be fat and fat health minister calling for cigarette ban is comedy in the making and mockery of the position.
With views like that I am likely to read r/fatlogic or r/FPH from time to time and even subscribe to them. I will make comments expressing my views in other subreddits as well and as such views are rare enough it's natural to link me with above mentioned communities or say that I am "coming from them to comment".
The problem is if it's then treated as brigadding. It isn't, there are just many people with politically incorrect views and they tend to gravitate to subreddits where they can express them without being automatically downvoted to death as is the case in popular subreddits. Once such subreddit becomes popular (and FPH was one of the most active subreddit on the whole site during the week it was banned) eveything can be labelled brigadding.
I don't know why you're vociferously defending FPH against the charge of brigading.
A sub being mentioned (but not linked) in FPH would result in massive traffic spikes. Smaller subs with a couple of hundred subscribers and a couple of thousand visits per week would suddenly get thousands of visits per hour. The increased traffic is fine, but some of those people would comment.
You've mentioned the huge numbers of subs to FPH. Even if it's only a small proportion of those people causing problems it's still a lot of people.
And you use, yet again, trivial examples that no-one (certainly not Reddit) cares about. No-one cares if you call some minister fat and stupid. What they do care about is getting people fired from their jobs; having child protection social workers called; huge amounts of brigading; hate mail to real life addresses.
Reddit has become a marketing tool either way, so I that was just another drop in the bucket for me and I left.