Even political cartoons with her driving the tank and the reddit alien with a down vote in front were getting deleted, which were quite funny and appropriate, since she was shadow banning and deleting people basically for down voting her law suit.

It's tough to stand up and defend the fatpeoplehate group, but when someone abusing their power and deleting anything they don't agree with in a lawsuit does it, well, in this case maybe a villain ruining the site on her managed to do something not terrible, but because she is a villain it comes across a lot worse.

>constantly banning and deleting anything disagreeing with her viewpoint about her law suit.

There are multiple posts on multiple reddits, each with thousands of points and comments that were not deleted. Some posts were deleted by sub moderators(not the same as Reddit staff or Pao) on some subs because they were offtopic and were being vote brigaded and had comments full of hate speech.

E.g of posts:

http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/30j9mn/ellen_pao_loses...

http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/38qkmx/after_losing_he...

It doesn't make any sense why she would leave those posts up if she really was deleting stuff. It's interesting how the folks against her have made it look like she was. It's just sad how easily so many people are manipulated by false information.

Examples of comments that were being made and upvoted by the brigades on unrelated big subs:

>Somebody needs to fire this whore right fucking now. What a tampon smear...

>She's a lying cunt who is using her pussy pass because she didn't get what she wanted; a big pay-out for being a whore.

Why would subreddit mods want to deal with hundreds of such comments when the story is offtopic to their sub?

She may not have been removing anything, nor any of the other admins, but lnanek2 does bring up a strong point, albeit indirectly: She is hated by a majority of users on reddit. And she's hated because of her bogus lawsuit she now appears to be dragging out, and how her husband is in serious debt due to running a ponzi scheme.

Her and her husband are not nice people. She even says as much in her interview with Katie Couric, she says "I'm not likable". I sort of have to agree there. The CEO of a website that cannot function without its community needs to be a pillar of that community. This isn't some hedge fund company or a company making widgets where a sociopathic and ruthless CEO flourishes, this is a very intimate community-driven company and the CEO needs to reflect that. The CEO needs to be the epitome of that.

By all accounts, she's straight up out of touch with what reddit even is. She even screwed up sending a PM earlier yesterday and instead posted it as a submission to a subreddit, and was getting made fun of for it. She literally doesn't know how her own website works.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy those hate subreddits are banned. But completely unreleated to the current drama, and these are my thoughts even before this whole thing started: Ellen Pao needs to leave reddit, like yesterday. She's quite literally the worst CEO for a site like reddit.

There's no denying this is the biggest (and frankly hilarious to watch unfold) shitstorm in Reddit's history, but it is a vocal minority. There were only 5k subscribers to /r/fatpeoplehate. It was a silly move to ban it, because its clearly pissed off more than 5k people, but make no mistake, most of Reddit doesn't care.

You're off by about 160 million. Reddit had 172 million unique visitors last month. Source: http://www.reddit.com/about/

> There's no denying this is the biggest (and frankly hilarious to watch unfold) shitstorm in Reddit's history, but it is a vocal minority.

Here's the thing. I'm a power user over there. And a power mod. I have access to many of the backroom subreddits for the default mods and a few of the other "in group" communities. That said, I have never, not once, stumbled across anyone who truly likes her. Even the prominent mods of reddit are keeping their mouths shut because they're afraid of being targeted by her or the admins. But the general sentiment among most mods is that she's toxic.

Regular users either hate her or are largely indifferent. But those that are indifferent are either not really into the reddit metasphere, or they're ignorant of Ellen. Once they find out about Ellen's life (lawsuit, ponzi scheme) they usually bristle at the thought of her.

> but make no mistake, most of Reddit doesn't care.

If we were to scale reddit's public opinion of her, the people who don't care or are indifferent would get a zero. People who like her would move the scale to the right, into the positives, while the people who dislike her tip the scale to the left.

You're right in that many people are indifferent. They'd be a zero on this hypothetical scale. But the problem is, the rest of the people who do have an opinion tip the scale significantly to the left, into the negatives. There's virtually zero people who like her (even the people into SJW stuff don't particularly care for her) and there are many, many people who hate her. It's telling that more people liked Yishan Wong, reddit's previous CEO and that guy was a loon.

It's never very logical, someone shadowbans the first person to make a comment about Pao's husband but leaves the rest alone. My pet theory is another admin is making it look like Pao is doing it to build a case against her for her dismissal because it only creates a bigger shitstorm.

It's complete fiction that she is censoring anything. Every time it is sub moderators removing stuff that violates the rules of their sub. And there are massively upvoted threads bashing her everywhere with huge comment threads full of vicious attacks on her and nobody is deleting those.

If she is trying to censor criticism of herself on reddit, she is fucking awful at it.

Tons of people got shadowbanned and shadowbanning can only be done by the admins.

So stop spreading misinformation please.

Let's see your proof that people are getting showdowbanned for criticizing Pao. You have no proof. Because shadowbans are about as transparent as mud.

So stop spreading conspiracy theories as fact, please.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/39ddnb/if_you_dont_...

"If you don't believe in freedom of speech for those you loathe, you don't believe in freedom of speech." (1600 points and gone from http://reddit.com/r/bestof)

>This is a curated space. >The moderators reserve the right to remove posts, users, and comments at their own discretion.

If I create a subreddit where I ban all posts start with A, is that censorship, or is that freedom for me to run and build my online space as I wish?

It's very much both. Where did you get the impression they're mutually exclusive? The "censorship" word is often only vocalized such when popular opinion objects to it, doesn't make it not censorship.

It's like how Bruce Schneier says that facebook's business model is surveillance. It's a descriptor advertisers and their platforms work hard not to be associated with, that doesn't make it not-surveillance.

Some subs leave a flair or a moderator message on removed submission, if not you can modmail them and ask.

The only new rule is no harassment.

If they were abusing that, we'd know about it. There would be a shitstorm just like this. There has not been.

I reported a user harassing me all over reddit, stalking me everywhere I went for weeks. They did not even ban him. Anecdotal but the bar seems to be pretty high.

Was in /r/TIFU recently, too lazy to get the link.

Interestingly, one of them submits awful content. It's not spam but he is absolutely terrible. I wonder if they shadowban because the algo's figured out you suck.

So, many of the deleted posts could have been deleted by the admins, in theory.

Though not entirely consistent with their statement that "we do protect the right of people to express their views".

Would remaining true to their statement for one day really have killed them on the hill?

Editorial cartoons are a pretty fundamental part of journalism. What if Tony Blair could delete news of the world editorial cartoons?

Seems to cross a line and, all due respect, until I saw proof that a delete happened, I'd be more likely to believe it was a histrionic "just-so-story"

I mean, Pao deleting this stuff personally? Even admins doing it?

It doesn't seem reasonable to me.

These people somehow seem to miss the dozens of huge threads that aren't removed that she could delete with a couple clicks. She could search her name every night and delete everything in a few minutes. Yet instead she randomly deletes a thread here and there? Makes no logical sense.

I'm really glad that moderation actions like that are taken, and I'm sad that people reply to that by "harassing" the CEO...

Hopefully such people will get frustrated by such events and will eventually leave reddit.

Note that it's mostly people posting to /r/punchablefaces that are reaching r/all right. Another hateful reddit for you...

PS: FWIW, /r/all has always been pretty bad. If you want a good reddit experience do like me: unsubscribe from most subreddits and suscribe to smaller subreddits with active moderators.

I liked that reddit bent over backwards to allow a wide variety of opinions, even ones that were ignorant or hateful. I viewed it as a noble stance.

But once upon a time, the "ugly" subreddits were ignorable and mostly self-contained. (At least to me, usually)

> that attract more and more people like that, that makes the community as a whole worse.

Yup. This trend surprised me--the recent exponential growth of some of the toxic hate subreddits. I guess I was naive. The uglier subreddits more and more frequently show up on /r/all, the users would encourage each other to post more frequently, and there was a thriving community built around the hate. It struck me as mentally unhealthy for all involved--the rapid innovating of negativity and the stoking of mild opinions into full on hatred.

But individuals being singled out to slander and poke fun at is not acceptable in my opinion, regardless of whether you define it as free speech or not. There's a world of difference between simply saying "I hate fat people" and putting up a specific image or video of a fat person and then gathering around to verbally abuse them. Quite happy to see that sort of behaviour banned.

Here's an example unrelated to harassment. Many people strongly disapprove of consumption of drugs, including marijuana. Reddit has a forum with 750k members who actively promote the consumption of this drug. It isn't even considered 18+ only, so reddit is ok with children subscribing to this forum. Shouldn't the promotion of acts which are illegal be banned too? Shouldn't we go after this before we go after the people who are merely insulting others?

Another way to view it: Hateful reddits are a pressure release valve caused by political correctness.

The media's political correctness and current pushes for "diversity" in tech pretty much gut normal speech in favor of giving control to outsiders. I could elaborate.

There's a large segment of the online community in general that understands the ideal of free speech to mean that no one may ever be prevented from saying anything, in any location or context. These folks believe that the banning of /r/shitniggerssay deserves exactly as much righteous indignation as, say, secret police disappearing anyone who speaks against the government. Reddit was founded on this ideal, and has only recently started to move away from it.

This understanding of "free speech" was obviously originated by petulant children on BBSes and Usenet groups casting about for a justification to (ironically) silence anyone who disagreed with them. I'm not really clear how it became something that otherwise-rational adults espouse in defense of people other than themselves.

My idea of free speech is that large privately-owned communication networks shouldn't engage in censorship, just like the government. If you disagree with that, say goodbye to free speech on the internet, because most of it is privately owned. Large websites are already cooperating with each other in censorship, and it's only a matter of time before ISPs join as well.

I think that's kinda weird. Does a book publisher have to publish my manuscript because "free speech" and rejecting me would be censorship? If MTV doesn't want to pick up a show is that censoring the producer's freedom? If I owned a site and then shut it down because I couldn't afford the bills is that censorship of the people who engage in my site? If I owned a very large site do I have to have a comments section for the stuff I post am I censoring other people's opinions on what I post? If I made a community dedicated to (say) Christians and it became overrun by atheists and was no longer suiting its original purpose and I shut it down because of that is that censorship? Is the New York Times obligated to post dick pics because a reader posted them in the comments section?

Private (IRL) meetings for a certain groups/organizations have the right to kick out troublemakers and those who disagree. Those kicked out have the right to start their own group with their own members too. That's not too much different with how it works on the internet too. If you go to (say) and atheist conference they are not obligated to give the podium to anyone who walks into the door and has an opinion. You are suggesting something as strange as that.

>If you disagree with that, say goodbye to free speech on the internet, because most of it is privately owned.

That's silly. There's plenty of hate and various opinions on the internet and always will be - but it thrives in smaller communities with a more dedicated audience. In other words something like Reddit who was trying to be "everything to everyone" has problems with making everyone happy but the KKK forums are certainly not going to have such an issue and will thrive. If there is so many people who want to shout to the world their hateful things than you bet one of those people (a private individual/company) is going to spend a couple bucks to make that happen.

Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.

I feel like you're skipping over a lot of slippery slope in the middle there.

I'm not saying that is explicitly the case for reddit, but there are a number of internet communities who work from that definition.

The thing is, these are different goals. There's no reason to assume that a goal of "we don't want to host a forum exclusively dedicated to egregious bigotry and bullying" will necessarily morph into "we demand that all our forums be safe spaces for PTSD sufferers." You might as well say that, I dunno, installing public security cameras on a college campus will lead to the students being escorted to recess by a hall monitor, and given detention if they're not in their seats when the bell rings.

I don't care, though. I have never found use in reddit, except as an example of how putting people into internet echo chambers turns them into reference-spouting cliques.

> do like me: unsubscribe from most subreddits and suscribe to smaller subreddits with active moderators.

Answered your own question. Because people can do that and not have to deal with that crap. reddit is many things to many people. Some people enjoy that stuff and reddit wants as many people as possible on the platform. The site was also founded with free speech and an open platform as something they believed in. And they've stayed true to that.

The situation seems almost identical to when Reddit axed r/jailbait: one of their more embarrassing communities started to get too much attention, its users were increasingly behaving in a way that was damaging Reddit, and Reddit decided to kill it (ostensibly for the greater good of the site).

But even though that pissed plenty of people off... I don't recall the front page being totally dominated by calls for anyone's head on a silver platter. Reddit's userbase seems to feel especially threatened by Ellen Pao, and it's hard for me to believe that the difference is anything rational.

FPH in and of itself isn't the most defensible or tasteful subreddit, but they're going to start by banning the least defensible subreddits first. Once the precedent is made, they can start banning political dissent subreddits.

Some people find themselves wondering what opinions will be deemed unsafe next. The policies are not exactly clear-cut, and neither are the actions of the administration.

I think this is a little dramatic. It's not about censorship of "unsafe opinions" - you are free to hold your opinion and talk about it, just not on Reddit. It's akin to a hotel owner disallowing a Klan meeting in the conference room. I think any business owner deserves that right.

> The policies are not exactly clear-cut

I dunno, the blog post seems fairly clear cut to me. It's not about blocking content, it's about blocking subreddits whose sole purpose was harassment of individuals.

Sure. But if your business derives its customer base from its longstanding support of freewheeling speech, more than a little pushback is to be expected.

> I dunno, the blog post seems fairly clear cut to me. It's not about blocking content, it's about blocking subreddits whose sole purpose was harassment of individuals.

If your only context is the blog post, it seems exceptionally clear. From following some of the discussions, I'm also aware that they came down on exactly five subreddits while ignoring many others. In a few cases, they appear to have tacitly approved of some.

So the result is that it's not clear what they come down on, why, when, or what gets their attention. Except bad PR - that seems to work miracles.

Tell me; Would you support that same hotel owner disallowing the NAACP from renting a room? He disagrees with their economic views. Would you support him ignoring requests from GLAAD, because their color scheme doesn't fit with his drab hotel? Private enterprise refusing to serve those they disagree with should be treated no differently than any other form of bigotry.

Would it be acceptable, or legal, if that were a Black Panthers meeting? Or a gay wedding?

Understated.

Well, she has basically said that she wants to start cleaning up the "objectionable" sides of reddit. Plus, there is a strong sentiment that content that's critical of her (even the less hateful stuff) has been removed often in the past.

Take a look and see how much reddit gold has been gifted recently. Reddit is doing just fine.

this sub has been banned today: https://np.reddit.com/r/paoiskillingreddit

here's a thread regarding a joke removed about two weeks ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/378smw/a_jo...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlOSdRMSG_k

I mean its almost like her being an asian woman rather than a white male makes a difference

This is not true, there was a massive controversy and subsequent schism less than a year ago.

A "folk history" (if you're feeling generous enough to call it that) of the episode here: https://encyclopediadramatica.se/M00t%27s_GamerGate_Sellout

I don't agree with censorship, however the two sites aren't comparable.

Lots of ads have fat shaming in them, so I'm not sure why you wouldn't want diet pill ads next to fat shaming posts. Have you read any fitness articles recently? It's pretty much fat shaming content, next to ads for things that might make you less fat.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/one-on-one-christop...

People can express their freedom of speech elsewhere, I am extremely pleased with reddit getting rid of the most egregious subreddits

A very small fraction of the worst bored on a bad website left to join an even worse website.

Don't kid yourself.

GamerGate seems to think that they are the majority of users on any given site. They're convinced that Twitter is going to fail if they leave. It's pretty amazing how much they misunderstand the scale of any large social platform.

To be fair, I kind of always assumed that moot and mods did what they did solely for the shits and giggles they themselves got out of it.

It's not like they were running a distinguished web portal that would bring them fame, riches, and glory; they run the sewage pit of the Internet.

I think people are just upvoting anything that is critical of reddit at the moment. I doubt most people actually care who, if anyone, is being targeted.

An nice juxtoposition is the top post of the default homepage is social justice outrage about a police officer shooting somebody.

This is reddit in the act of growing up. And it's about time and a a good thing in my opinion.

I like that I manage my filters well enough that I visited reddit several times today and was blissfully unaware of this particular bit of drama.

That's really sad - I don't think there's many communities like /r/assistance and even /r/buildapc around.

r/hiphopheads, r/nba and r/comicbooks are great communities in their own right

If-and-when they do that, they will finally have an actually-effective tool (in the form of being able to ban people "for good") to stop harassment. Until then, it will just go on forever.

Ideally: imagine that the government of each state/country—who already have to work out how to deduplicate people for purposes of taxation, Social Security, etc.—acts as an OAuth identity provider. Then doing KYC becomes as simple as having a signup process that requires an OAuth login, and having a whitelist of identity providers you'll accept for that login (presumably just government ones, but there might be interesting edge-cases.)

In other words, imagine a site that detects the country you're coming from, and presents a single button saying "Sign Up with [name of country] Federal IDPass" or something similar.

The first time you see one, you'll probably be forced to set up your Federal IDPass account, which will likely be a huge hassle (though I could see it being as easy as showing up at e.g. your local post office with your regular physical ID. A process similar to voter registration.) Every time after that, it's like logging in with Google or Facebook.

All I mean is that your application (e-mail req for a ship) is processed by a human, and there's incentive to keep it that way (because there are objectively not enough 32-bit numbers for everyone to get their own.)

If you don't have one, you can still get on the network, you just have a 128-bit identity. It would be relatively easy to blacklist all of them if it becomes a case of abuse. At the scale of Reddit, you would probably need the help and intervention of the government (or at least some multiple of current staff devoted solely to new user onboarding) to prevent an impossibly large backlog from forming.

Maybe I'm overestimating the number of unique individual new users that sign up to reddit every day.

And because of that, any company that did this would have a sort of natural monopoly. So the respective government would have to at least regulate them a bit to avoid them exploiting their users. A "crown corporation", in the British terminology. (In British Columbia we have ICBC, a crown-corporation insurance company, as the issuer of physical ID, which works well enough.)

http://imgur.com/a/5KMCS#0

I only noticed what was up when The Verge wrote an article on it, for example, since I tend to browse subreddits directly.

I see mentions of thought-policing etc., but that's really wholly different from censorship and moderation.

This is an obvious departure from this ideal.

I understand that point of view and agree with the need for those kinds of arenas. But even the article you link to state that doxxing and harassment goes against the TOS, which seems to be precisely what started this whole mess, from what I've gathered. Or at least that's what the official announcement [2] and /r/OutOfTheLoop [3] threads state.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9697285

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/39c58h/could_so...

[2]: http://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removin...

[3]: http://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/39bzdf/why_was...