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Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by lnanek2 on Wednesday June 10, 2015 @11:51PM (#9697393)
I think banning the fatpeoplehate subreddit wouldn't have gone over so badly if it wasn't for the fact that Ellen Pao was already kind of hated on the site for constantly banning and deleting anything disagreeing with her viewpoint about her law suit.

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.

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by jfuhrman on Thursday June 11, 2015 @12:35AM (#9697585)
Please stop spreading this nonsense. I expected better from HN.

>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?

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by mahranch on Thursday June 11, 2015 @08:47AM (#9699320)
> Please stop spreading this nonsense. I expected better from HN.

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.

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by mattbessey on Thursday June 11, 2015 @11:24AM (#9700244)
A majority of users? Please, Reddit has ~16M unique users per month. I really don't think 8M people hate Ellen Pao. Hell, I doubt more than 0.1M users know who she is.

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.

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by mahranch on Thursday June 11, 2015 @07:34PM (#9703120)
> A majority of users? Please, Reddit has ~16M unique users per month.

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.

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by CPLX on Thursday June 11, 2015 @12:20PM (#9700582)
Apparently there were over 150,000 actually.
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by voxic11 on Thursday June 11, 2015 @07:53PM (#9703184)
Now you are the one spreading misinformation /r/fatpeoplehate had over 100k subscribers and was growing extremely fast over the past few months.
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by hellbanTHIS on Thursday June 11, 2015 @07:20AM (#9698925)
No, there really was shenanigans, I've personally seen it a few times: http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/35uyil/transp... http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/35ym8t/promote_ideas_p...

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.

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by arfliw on Thursday June 11, 2015 @03:57AM (#9698302)
Finally somebody else except me saying this. I've probably gotten -1000 comment karma saying that over the last couple months.

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.

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by LunaSea on Thursday June 11, 2015 @07:42AM (#9699013)
Of course it's not fiction.

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

So stop spreading misinformation please.

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by arfliw on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @01:31AM (#9723978)
Right, that's what the conspiracy theorists always say on reddit, too. Ignoring my argument completely and bringing up shadowbanning.

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.

[deleted]
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by freebsdgirl on Thursday June 11, 2015 @01:47AM (#9697842)
So do a search on reddit, look to see how much Pao-hate remains that is weeks/months old. It's pretty obvious that this was some BS rumor cooked up by conspiracy theorists.
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by jfuhrman on Thursday June 11, 2015 @01:31AM (#9697793)
The sub had no subscribers, and the only mod and founder of it spammed the name of the sub in another sub, and it was a new account. There are plenty of anti-Pao subs that haven't been banned since months and those actually have subscribers and content being posted.
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by leereeves on Thursday June 11, 2015 @12:27AM (#9697545)
They even censored

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)

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by jfuhrman on Thursday June 11, 2015 @12:50AM (#9697646)
It wasn't even removed by Reddit. It was removed by subreddit mods who essentially have full control of a sub. Anyone can create a sub and enforce their own curation or arbitrary rules which is not the same as censorship. From the sub sidebar:

>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?

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by forgottenpass on Thursday June 11, 2015 @12:30PM (#9700650)
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.

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by leereeves on Thursday June 11, 2015 @12:54AM (#9697666)
How do you see who it was removed by?
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by jfuhrman on Thursday June 11, 2015 @01:00AM (#9697693)
Reddit admin staff don't touch any posts in subreddits unless it is something against the site rules like doxxing,personal info or child porn.

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

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by philwelch on Thursday June 11, 2015 @01:13AM (#9697736)
Used to; that's what's changing.
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by arfliw on Thursday June 11, 2015 @04:03AM (#9698322)
No, that part is not changing. What is changing is more rules getting added. They still don't remove anything that doesn't violate the rules.

The only new rule is no harassment.

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by philwelch on Thursday June 11, 2015 @04:23AM (#9698396)
Adding more rules counts as a change.
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by arfliw on Friday June 12, 2015 @05:58AM (#9704892)
He said that they don't touch posts unless they violate the rules. You said that is changing. No, that is not changing. They still don't touch anything unless it violates the rules.
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by mcintyre1994 on Thursday June 11, 2015 @02:33AM (#9697992)
I thought they'd added the harassment stuff as a site rule though, presumably that's how they justify pulling subreddits? So admins could now be pulling posts on that basis?
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by arfliw on Thursday June 11, 2015 @04:05AM (#9698332)
Yes, theoretically they could. And banning users.

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.

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by 001sky on Thursday June 11, 2015 @01:11AM (#9697730)
What is a shadow ban like on Reddit?
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by jfuhrman on Thursday June 11, 2015 @01:14AM (#9697738)
User keeps seeing their comments, but other users cannot see their posts or their user page. Only Admins can shadowban. Mods can use a tool called automoderator to remove posts by certain users but only in their subreddit.
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by brimanning on Thursday June 11, 2015 @02:01AM (#9697886)
To add to this, you can also be automatically shadowbanned by spam filters which, at times, can be quite aggressive. I was once shadowbanned for "getting caught up with a spammy IP address" according to a mod.
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by arfliw on Thursday June 11, 2015 @04:06AM (#9698337)
That happened to some guy and he kept using reddit as normal for three years until he found out. Took it pretty well. His history is painful to look at. Just talking to himself, nobody ever responds or upvotes him.

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

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by brimanning on Thursday June 11, 2015 @12:10PM (#9700528)
I saw that too. That's what made me check if I was shadowbanned. I'm not nearly as active as he was, but it made me realize I wasn't always just late to the discussion or something.
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by finnn on Thursday June 11, 2015 @02:01AM (#9697885)
Minor correction: Posts of shadow banned users are visible, but only after a mod of that subreddit manually approves each one. Basically everything they post is flagged as spam.
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by arfliw on Thursday June 11, 2015 @04:10AM (#9698357)
That explains a lot. I have a few users whose submissions to my sub are always flagged as spam even though they are fine. They must be shadowbanned.

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.

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by finnn on Thursday June 11, 2015 @12:38PM (#9700723)
You can check by trying to visit their user page. If it 404s, they're shadowbanned. The shadowbanning system is terrible. It's not transparent, it just randomly censors people, some of whom happen to be spam, does not notify the people involved and offers no recourse to those who have been shadowbanned. I was shadowbanned a few years ago, I spent about 3 months spamming different reddit contacts, then one day noticed I was unshadowbanned.
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by djf1 on Thursday June 11, 2015 @01:07AM (#9697717)
As a reply to jfuhrman's comment, Reddit has recently updated their rules to include "Keep Everyone Safe: You agree to not intentionally jeopardize the health and safety of others or yourself." (https://www.reddit.com/help/useragreement#section_reddit_rul...)

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

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by felixgallo on Thursday June 11, 2015 @12:33AM (#9697577)
In what sense is it ironic? Reddit is a private corporation unaffiliated with the United States Government.
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by leereeves on Thursday June 11, 2015 @12:36AM (#9697589)
I was wrong, it's not ironic at all. Censoring a post criticizing censorship is perfectly consistent.

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

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by felixgallo on Thursday June 11, 2015 @12:45AM (#9697626)
You will doubtless learn, in your travels, that not every corporation will die on the hill staying true to the maximal interpretation of a throwaway sentence posted on their free service.
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by leereeves on Thursday June 11, 2015 @12:50AM (#9697648)
That statement was posted 10 hours ago in their official announcement of these bans.

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

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by deciplex on Thursday June 11, 2015 @12:55AM (#9697673)
Censorship need not involve a government entity. Censorship is not equivalent to violating the First Amendment.
Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by alexc05 on Thursday June 11, 2015 @12:33AM (#9697573)
Do you have any source that gives more detail about a post of "editorial cartoon" being deleted? That does seem an odd example.

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.

Re:Reddit Bans Five Communities In New Anti-Harassment Campaign by arfliw on Thursday June 11, 2015 @04:17AM (#9698377)
I don't know if it's reasonable or not but it is not happening. Every time it is subreddit moderators removing stuff that violates their own rules. Then the second it goes down everybody blames Pao automatically. Just like today.

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.