Reddit strives to have a positive community and when you let the trolls run the system, you end up with an utter cesspool (e.g. https://voat.co/), and that kills your company's value.

Reddit (nor Twitter) is under no obligation to be a platform for free speech, and it's completely within their right to dictate who gets to participate and what they're allowed to discuss.

Even with the tech topics: Try talking about the positives of PHP and you'll also see this community has a lot of hostility beneath the surface.

How would they do that adequately without a public display of user activity?

> Applying rules with extremely heavy discrimination is never the way to manage a community.

It's less than ideal but when the targeted group seeks to ultimately control or destroy your platform then what you have is a cancer that will spread unless it's removed.

If you post something that doesn't conform to the current left-leaning narrative, you will be down voted by massive amounts of users because of your beliefs.

I don't see much difference than these brigades. Except it's done by 75% of the community, rather than the bottom 1%. A minority subreddit is being discriminated against and blamed for all of the bad behavior on Reddit.

I suppose the CEO isn't all that much different that the people on the alt-right.

"Reddit strives to have a positive community and when you let the trolls run the system"

Yeah, well, if this is really the case and not just a childish political stunt, why are only Trump-related groups targeted?

I'm really tired of a 'positive community' being used an excuse to stifle opposing political opinions. It's becoming really clear that it only has to do with politics based on the abhorrent behavior of site owners and moderators (the CEO purposely altered user comments that he doesn't like. He should have been fired on the spot).

"Reddit (nor Twitter) is under no obligation to be a platform for free speech, and it's completely within their right to dictate who gets to participate and what they're allowed to discuss."

So it's fine for private organizations to discriminate against people simply based on their political beliefs? Do you really want to live in a world where this is accepted?

I find that this is being used an excuse to silence divisive political viewpoints and left-leaning organizations are purging their sites of anyone that disagrees with them.

Most left-leaning media sites have banned all comments for exactly this reason.

Lately, the only sites that are truly free are the right-leaning ones. Fox news, for instance, doesn't ban anyone for merely stating a political opinion...unless you are harassing other users (stating an opinion isn't harassment).

The irony is that people voted Trump because of this behavior by the media (which has slowly been getting worse since the 90s). Continuing to do this will not only create more of a divided nation, but many will be more likely to re-elect Trump.

An employee who keeps on yelling, throwing stuff around, harassing people and disrupting the workplace should be warned and eventually kicked out. Political views have absolutely nothing to do with this.

If this weren't the case, why isn't Reddit and Twitter banning the countless examples of left-wing extremists harassing and abusing people just as badly?

I think abusers and harassers should be kicked out, but Trump winning the election has brought out the true colors in many business owners and other people that would rather use their power for personal grudges.

It's pretty disgraceful.

[citation needed]

I'm there every day and I don't know about that, quite the opposite.

We don't link outside the sub, heck we are not even allowed to mention /r/politics in post titles under threat from Reddit admins. It is now know as /r/[redacted] for that reason.

EDIT: downvotes are not citations

> Centipede Central is the chat Reddit is referring to—a chat room within the Slack-like Discord program ... its users have encouraged the harassment of other moderators, artificially inflated the vote count on posts, rigged off-Reddit polls, and posted John Podesta’s personal Netflix login information for the chat’s 1000+ members to use at will.

I am one of those who have never even heard of that chat room, nor visited. And I am on T_D all day long every day since February.

We have posts with 7k+ points and 56% upvoted.

https://i.redditmedia.com/RbqqP0Cpfs-o-B1DVWIwIqtUU8-dtxUahf...

If anyone is under attack, it is us.

Even the famous Ellen Pao thinks Spez made a huge mistake and says "I would have immiediately fired anyone did that [edited user posts]"

https://i.redditmedia.com/-VmuoYhuKv-Uj-Ild8_FAhGgQgXM68OsuN...

/r/all is now a safe space for people who can't handle seeing certain text !!

And the stupidest part is : Reddit is a commercial enterprise.

300k t_d subscribers. Instead of embracing a customer base and working out how to profit from it, he's pissed everybody off my repeatedly kicking the nest. Either directly or by letting CTR take over r/politics. They should have had a sales team focussing directly upon us and building an income stream. Instead they've generated a whole bunch of people who actively boycott buying Reddit Gold, will never click on your ads, even in other subreddits.

What would you give for 300k high energy cross demographic customers with a tight focus on conservatism. I wouldn't be giving them annoyance and grief.

"Front Page of the Internet" is the greatest joke of all

What do you love about it that makes you go there everyday?

I'm guessing that you say that based mostly on media coverage like the recent New York Times article? I think Scott Adams (author of Dilbert) has a more accurate view, which is that there is in fact a mountain of "obvious" evidence, but despite this almost all the connections and conclusions are likely false. I think it's worth the time to contrast his view with the "no evidence whatsoever" explanation that most of the media has taken: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/153821538056/about-pizzagate.

Saying "no credible evidence" might technically be correct, but I don't think it explains why some people are so convinced that the evidence is conclusive. I think it's more accurate to say that some of the evidence appears credible, but the conclusion is unsupported because of the biased manner in which the evidence was collected.

I agree with Adams when he says "Confirmation bias looks EXACTLY LIKE a mountain of real evidence. And let me be super-clear here. When I say it looks exactly the same, I am not exaggerating. I mean there is no way to tell the difference." And I think he's right that other aspects of the political divide may have similar origins.

Here's one article with surprisingly good grammar - http://therightstuff.biz/2016/11/27/pizzagate-2/. His evidence? NYT and WaPo are defending a pizza shop owner. Why would they stake their credibility on defending an insignificant pizza shop owner? Clearly there must be something afoot! Add it to the mountain of evidence!

Right now, I'm putting you on the spot. Come up with something even halfway credible.

Most of it is persuasive only if you already hold a particular set of beliefs. For example, if you are a conservative Christian (I am not) showing that Podesta participates in (arguably) Satanic rituals is credible evidence that he more likely to abuse children. Is it "evidence" that his brother has risqué art depicting children on his walls? Yes, if you believe that only a pedophile would possess such art, or condone someone else's possession of such. I believe these conclusions are wrong, but are logical within a particular moral framework (that I don't share). So without knowing your beliefs, I may not be able to come up with anything that you view as credible.

For me, I find the NYT's portrayal of Alefantis as "just a pizza store owner" to be sufficiently disingenuous to be of note. Regular pizza store owners don't get listed as one of GQ's 50 Most Powerful People in DC. Alefantis was the romantic partner of David Brock (the founder of Correct the Record) and was a losing co-defendant with Brock in a lawsuit characterized as "blackmail". If you start with suspicions about someone, and then later find that someone has been successfully sued another party threatening to "spill the beans", I think this is weak but credible evidence that your suspicions may be justified.

There are leaked Stratfor emails where Pizza appears to be the name of one of their projects: https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/13/1326067_testing-the-pi..., https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/13/1319020_pushing-pizza-.... This lends credibility to the idea that "pizza" might be a code word in emails like this: https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/23757. Personally, I read this as testament to the quality of New Haven's apizza (http://www.eater.com/2014/3/18/6264277/the-definitive-guide-...) but I can see why someone not familiar with foodie culture would have trouble taking Clinton's response literally.

Last, I think that the discovery of prior accusations of Podesta's involvement in pedophilia is relevant. A year before his death, Andrew Breitbart tweeted that Podesta was a "world class underage sex slave op cover-upperer": https://twitter.com/AndrewBreitbart/status/33636278100561920. As an accusation without proof, it means very little, but if an independent path leads to the same conclusion, it becomes stronger. Still weak, still circumstantial, but if the discovery was truly independent, it seems like enough of a coincidence to justify looking closer.

But yeah, I find all the evidence to be weak and circumstantial. With a different set of beliefs/prejudices -- or if you have a strong intuition for the power of confirmation bias -- coincidence is the best explanation. But I think it's worth trying to understand why a subset of people genuinely do find the evidence to be credible, even if it's not.

Thanks for your candid response. We're both agreed that the evidence is highly circumstantial and its maybe worth a second look if the police have some slack. However, amongst many online communities, this circumstantial evidence was enough to start a witch hunt, harassing and intimidating people who just work at a restaurant, serving food.

The issue is that when we say "look maybe something is there, there's no smoke without fire", it encourages exactly those people who verbally and physically intimidate innocent people. The more responsible thing to do would be to say "guys, pipe down. There might be something here but its innocent until proven guilty".

This isn't what's happening, and they don't have the same conciliatory, nuanced approach you're taking. That saddens me.

It might not be convincing and certainly not conclusive but there are a series of remarkable coincidences.

Could you elaborate? What are these coincidences and what is remarkable about them? And please don't say "read the emails!" or "watch David Seaman!" like the others.

You read JP's emails for political reasons, you find known paedo / child trafficing jargon in them (Cheese Pizza is Child Porn, various flavours of food describe children etc.). So you dig a bit deeper and then you look at this photo [1] where they look very similar to the police wanted images of Madeline McCann. Wow that's weird.

So you look at his email and find that at the time of the abduction, JP is out of the country and someone else is replying to his emails for him, something that doesn't happen regularly.

And then you find he is friends with suspected paedophile Clement Freud, who lives 1/3 of a mile from where the McCanns were staying. [2] And that they knew each other.

[1] http://www.thedailysheeple.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/20...

[2] http://victuruslibertas.com/2016/11/do-john-and-tony-podesta...

Jumping to the most damaging, the second article you link says "One of our FBI insiders can confirmed the Intelligence community indicates John and Tony Podesta were in Praia da Luz, Portugal on May 3rd 2007– the day Madaline McCann vanished. The Podesta brothers were staying with a friend named “Clem”."

So far as I can tell, other than this assertion, there has been no evidence uncovered that the either Podesta brother was in Portugal at the time of the girl's disappearance. You reduce the article's claim that "they were staying a friend named "Clem" to saying only that they knew each other, but I haven't seen any proof of even this level of association.

As 'nindalf' asks, how do you balance the goal of finding the truth with the responsibility to avoid terrible damage to a innocent person's reputation based on something that (at this point) is based largely on trusting an unaccountable anonymous source?

(Admittedly I don't know the order of your downvotes, your edit, and the replies to your comment, but this is a pattern that happens all discussions about that subreddit. "There's no evidence for X" posters maintain their stance by simply ignoring all the evidence that gets readily supplied. It's absolutely infuriating to deal with.)

Which is all chat from Moderators which openly want us banned. It is rather one sided because our mods didn't respond.

Gizmodo is owned by Univision Communications, not exactly objective.

"Restrictions on a quarantined community include:

Requiring an account with a verified email address Requiring an explicit opt-in No custom images Will generate no revenue, including ads or Reddit Gold"

This effectively kills subs unless it's lifted.

Subs targeted for this range from offensive to innocuous (E.g. freckles, female ejaculation, a racist anti-black community) https://www.reddit.com/r/GoldTesting/comments/3fxs3q/list_of...

Reddit is a business, not a bastion of free speech. They have killed communities for less than what The_Donald was doing. I'll let you speculate on the motives (:

I think there's a general law of online communities: so long as there are rules of any kind, there will always be users who push into the gray area (e.g. by finding ways to follow the letter but not the intent), and then keep pushing until stopped(). The moderator is then always left with the choice between punishing only the bad actors (which will be interpreted as selective enforcement or unfair targeting), or changing the rules to make things stricter for everyone (disallowing behavior that wasn't causing problems apart from the bad actors).

() I read once in a parenting guide that children crave boundaries, and tend to escalate bad behavior until punishment occurs in order to establish where the boundaries are. Probably there's an analogy to be made there.