Pro gun, pro choice... not a lot of candidates for me to pick from, hah!
I also seem to recall one of the gun subreddits, I don't remember if it was guns or firearms or weekendgunnit, asking express permission to etch the reddit logo and subreddit name into a gun. They received permission, posted pictures, and later received a cease and desist.
Ooh yeah. Was that the dude who deleted people's posts, then reposted them for karma and banned people who called him out?
It was called cringe anarchy because it made fun of anarchists.
They were a lot more peaceful than some "mostly peaceful" protests.
I truly do not agree. Reddit has played games with changing the definition of hate speech constantly. Many subs that were well moderated were closed for very minor things that weren't upvoted. And if Reddit admins sit down to dinner with pedophiles (repeatedly, and only throw them out after mass protests...)
I completely disagree. CA in particular was quite well moderated and didn't brigade either. Reddit admins were notorious for using these as excuses to target subs they wanted to get rid of, while being lenient against other subs (AHS was basically a dedicated brigading sub! But merely saying something negative about certain subs could get an immediate warning.)
What are the worst things Reddit admins/mods did? Especially that can't be talked about on Reddit.
Employing Ghislaine Maxwell has to top the list. Changing their community rules definition of hate speech to only be against chosen groups has to count too. But there's a lot of bad stuff that redditors quietly accepted, forgot, or newer members never heard of.
Who remembers the subreddits that Reddit did dirty?
A lot of redditors today think that Reddit became a hard left echo chamber organically. This couldn't be further from the truth. It once played host to a large amount of conservative subs, and Reddit's admins worked hard to eliminate this community. There have been false flags, constant harassment, selective enforcement of rules, and worse.
Famously, The_Donald was one of the biggest conservative communities on the internet. It represented actual politicians and the people who voted for them, it allowed debate. It was ultimately removed for posts "threatening violence against police". The BLM movement started weeks later, and one glance at leftist subs even today should prove that if this was a REAL reason to remove a sub, then it wouldn't just be TD being removed. Rather, Reddit wanted it gone from the start.
Spez has been caught editing users posts, for example: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-edit-comments
and Spez has admitted, he thinks he has the power to influence elections through reddit: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the-struggle-to-detoxify-the-internet “I’m confident that Reddit could sway elections,” he told me. “We wouldn’t do it, of course. And I don’t know how many times we could get away with it. But, if we really wanted to, I’m sure Reddit could have swayed at least this election, this once.”
Another big sub was r/cringeanarchy. CA broke no reddit rules, it wasn't "hate speech", it just had memes making fun of people who were (arguably) on the left. But Reddit couldn't allow subreddits that were popular and seemed to mock leftist opinions. CA faced mods being forced in, false flag attacks, and constant cries of "hate speech" from r/AgainstHateSubs. AHS was caught multiple times making false flag attacks on conservative subs, but they would pull out their ultimate trick, which I witnessed in person.
CA was flooded with CP late one night, faster than mods could remove it, and this was quickly and quietly used as a reason for Reddit admins to ban the sub. An AHS user admits to this as well: https://youtu.be/yUV9TyfYaEQ
There have been chat logs tying AHS leaders to reddit admins as well. I have no doubt that Reddit's admins, who counted among their numbers known pedophiles Ghislaine Maxwell and Aimee Challenor, used posted child porn as an excuse to delete an unwanted subreddit.
Now redditors say things like "most people are left wing" and the classic "reality has a known liberal bias" not knowing that the opinions of actual people who vote right some or all the time, more-or-less half the US, have been deliberately hidden from them.
This same treatment affected LGBT subs outside the main narrative, and womens subs. Subs like r/itsafetish or r/detrans are gone, subs like r/twoxchromosomes or r/actuallesbians have trans members forcibly placed on the mod team.
Who else was there to witness the censoring? What else do redditors need to know?
I think it would be a fun feature to have a quick copypasta like "I see you've posted something critical of conservatives in the conservative community. We'll allow it because we support free speech, but try posting (insert link to negative article about dems) in r/politics and see what happens!" Either that or we say "this community is for conservative members to discuss conservative issues" and link them to something like c/debateconservative
Try posting anything that looks critical of democrats on r/politics like "totally reproducible psych study proves dems are all idiots!!!" and see if it stays up.
AHS was definitely doing this, and there were several examples of admins being in close communication with AHS leaders, including some leaked chat logs (which arent totally verifiable but are pretty consistent). If nothing else, the fact that reddit admins had their eyes on "bad" posts in right-leaning subs faster than mods could, and yet also would ignore similar posts in lefty or "neutral" subs like r/politics that don't allow any remotely right wing opinions, was very observable to anybody in an effected sub.
Man, that's insane. It reminds me we had an electrical engineering teacher claim the human eye can't perceive screens refreshing more than 30 times per second (never mind all our computers use 60hz monitors...)
That's kinda true. Then again, consider the history of any right-leaning sub or sub that makes fun of the left: Admins force unwanted mods into their subs. New accounts make "threatening" posts faster than mods can stomp them out, and get screenshots to other subs as proof the whole sub is terrible. T_D banned fir a post arguably advocating for violence against police... a few weeks before BLM kicked off, and every left sub was loaded with advocations for violence towards cops. Cringeanarchy got flooded with CP posts from AgainstHateSubs alt accounts and promptly shut down. (Cite: https://youtu.be/yUV9TyfYaEQ ) All this was, overtly or covertly, supported by reddit's admins.
Now, if you're still a r/conservative mod on Reddit after ALL THAT... you're controlled opposition installed by reddit admins, or you want to a reddit mod so bad, you'll compromise your values for it.
Now I can eat popcorn while watching some couple's life burn to the ground around them, but without the icky feeling (from supporting Spez's empire, that is).
Bit of a catch-22, because reddit is also counting all those 3rd-party users as part of their userbase when talking about how many users they have. These 3rd party app users also generate some of the content that draws undiscerning users to open reddit and view ads on the way.
This has to be the dumbest of all the reasons to move away from BMI, but there are a lot of good ones. The reason BMI is still around is because theres not a good alternative that is fast and easy to measure.
Ok well SOME of that probably happened...