As most of you are no doubt aware, Reddit recently banned the incredibly shitty FatPeopleHate subreddit for harassment. Naturally, members of Reddit’s many other incredibly shitty subreddits — including KotakuInAction, the main GamerGate hangout on Reddit, and of course the Men’s Rights subreddit — are afraid they’ll be next!
“The new age of reddit has begun,” wrote one worried Men’s Rightser. “Admins ban /r/FatPeopleHate (and 4 other subreddits that the admins fail to disclose) for “harassment”. It is only a matter of time before this subreddit gets banned too.”
Meanwhile, in KotakuInAction, a “megathread” about the bans has garnered more than 1100 upvotes and inspired nearly 500 comments.
In that thread, one KiAer has helpfully provided a list of the subreddits Reddit has shut down in recent days. As you can see, most were variants on FatPeopleHate, hastily created in an attempt to get around the ban of the original FatPeopleHate (or just to annoy the site admins); others were offensive in other predictable ways. I’ve highlighted some of the more, er, interesting of the bunch.
My point here?
If you look at a list like the one above and think “oh, no, my favorite subreddit will be next,” then maybe, just maybe, there is something terribly wrong with your favorite subreddit, and probably with you as well.
Men’s Rights: the only self-proclaimed “civil rights” movement outside of literal Nazis that puts itself in the same category as “/r/fatn*ggerhate” and “/r/transf*ggots.”
NOTE TO READERS: My strep throat is better but not gone, and I also have other non-blog things I need to tend to this week, so posting will probably continue to be a bit light.
Dammit, I thought /r/ihatefat was for critiquing Microsoft’s filesystems. I hope they don’t ban /r/ihateext4 and /r/ihatezfs.
:sees banned hate groups list:
This pleases the Fempire
:sees subreddits like men’s rights still up:
This does not please the Fempire
Glad that you are doing better David.
Hamplanet reminds me of pizza planet from toy story. And what is candiddietpolice?
If Reddit keeps up with this sort of housecleaning, I just might take a look at it.
But it still has a ways to go.
/r/ihatepdf.
/r/seriouslyfuckpdf.
I hope the pro-rape subreddits are next.
/r/thinpeoplehate
Ha ha, nice try, jackasses.
@SHFC
What’s wrong with PDFs?
As a graphic designer, I will gladly defend PDFs. They’re very fucking useful for delivering big Illustrator files to clients so they can see them too, and I can still edit them as though they were an illustrator file if I need to!
On topic: As a fat girl: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
The pity I feel for them is equal to the amount of fucks I give about their Freeze Peach when it comes to my body.
Now if Reddit would clean up the Philosophy of Rape subreddit (I sent them a message about it yesterday) and the Red Pill, I’d feel better about using that site to keep track of some of the Yogscast members.
@Pardoxical
Have they gotten rid of those links that host pedo porn, though? And have they gotten rid of the dead kid pics subreddit?
Of course it’s not even a Freeze Peach issue b/c reddit != the public sphere
@Paradoxical: ninja’d me on the Philosophy of Rape subreddit. I really do hope it gets banned. That and Red Pill Man and Woman. And Punchable Faces. And…well, I could go on, I guess, because there are some many detestable subreddits. What a cesspool.
I think there should be a /r/frackinghateresearchpapers and /r/fuckapastyle and /r/srslyhateapastyle.
Oh, for fuck’s sake – there was a dead kid subreddit?
Sometimes being too out of it to know that this stuff exists has its advantages.
@paradoxical – it really depends on your perspective why you might hate PDFs. I hate them because they’re not searchable in the same kind of way that HTML files are, so they’re an easy way to hide public documents in plain sight. But I also use them. A lot. And when I try publishing stuff as HTML only, I always get a request for a PDF. 🙂
Even with all these bans, Reddit is still a wretched hive of scum and villainy. They need to do more than this light work to clean up t heir site enough for me to even THINK about using it.
As far as I understand it, the official policy driving this latest set of bans is that it is not about how hateful the content was, but about whether the subreddit habitually harassed individuals outside the confines of the subreddit. FPH and the other recently banned subreddits apparently had a pattern of doxxing people, sending them harassing PMs, etc. That’s what got them banned, not their hatefulness. (Hence the ban of “neofag,” which, despite the name, was not focused on homophobia – its focus was mocking/harassing of neoGAF, a gaming forum.)
This explains why these specific subreddits were banned, while others with utterly loathsome content continue. The balancing act Reddit is currently going for is that “you can have hateful and despicable content, as long as it stays within the confines of your subreddit.” This is their attempt to continue their traditional dedication to allowing freeze peaches even of an extreme and offensive kind, while also offering their users a safe environment where they don’t have to fear harassment. The idea being that, as long as the hate stays inside the subreddits, you can avoid it by simply not going into those subreddits.
(Mind you, I am not necessarily agreeing with this policy, just explaining Reddit’s logic.)
The only exception would be subreddits whose contents blatantly and clearly break the law, which can get banned even if they “keep it within the subreddit.” Hence the fact that Creepshots got banned. That’s an older policy though, and significantly predates the new policy and the new bans.
Hey, small update, the (actively right-wing) Reddit clone that some of the banned bigots have been exodusing to, Voat, has been shut down by its host. Don’t know why a site designed to coddle neo-Nazis too disgusting even for Reddit bought server space in Germany where that shit is illegal (DUH), but whatever.
http://33.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzva1dXifA1rqq1iao1_500.gif
GLAD YOU’RE ON THE MEND, DAVID!
Uncle Iroh thinks that some nice tea might help.
I still think that M was right: you cannot un-corrupt reddit because reddit was built from corruption. It is not a host to harassment: it is harassment, and there is no way to redeem it. Insure it heavily, burn it to the ground, plow the earth with salt, and move on.
Why is it so important to people to have a place on the internet to make fun of fat people? How can you possibly feel superior to fat people if you’re such a loser that you spend all your time hunting for pictures of fat people to post on reddit and doxxing said fat people? Do these people know how pathetic they are just say “eh, fuck it!” Or do they honestly think they’re winning something or proving something positive about themselves by doing this?
proxieme:
That particular rabbit hole goes deeper than most of us would want to explore. Reddit’s long-stated dedication to freeze peaches (and yes, I know it’s not Free Speech in a US Constitution sense, just their internal policy) and allowing all content, no matter how offensive, has led some of their users to compete for creating the most vile, offensive, disgusting subreddits possible. For the lulz/shock value, mostly (because trying to be The Most Offensive is soooo mature and hilarious), though I’m sure some of them are letting some of their actual inner depravity seep out under the cover of “I’m just trying to be shocking/ironic/edgy!”
Internet trolls competing to be the most shocking produces some unimaginably repulsive results. For any disgusting subreddit title you can imagine, there are literally dozens more that are even more racist, sexist, sadistic, hateful, and just plain gross. Happily, some of them are mostly empty – clearly someone set them up to be oh so shocking and then maybe posted 2-3 items, and now it sits abandoned – but others, sadly, get plenty of traffic. I agree, simply not knowing about most of them is definitely better for one’s peace of mind.
@Panda & PI
Mostly because Adobe Acrobat and I do not get along. It’s almost as laggy and buggy and ARGH NERDRAGE as iTunes, and after dealing with that pissawful program for so many years, I just kinda want to throttle the whole damn filetype. =P
Scented Fucking Hard Chairs:
As a German Jew who is quite familiar with Germany’s policy of Free Speech, Shmee Speech, We’re Not Putting Up With Any Nazi-related Bullshit At All Because Heaven Knows We Have Reasons, this tickles me to no end. Thank you for sharing it, it’s making my day here.
BRB giggling at internet assholes shooting themselves in the foot. Glorious.
@proxieme
As far as I know, and it might still be active. There was a subreddit dedicated to pictures of dead kids, pictures of dead babies, pictures of dead women – pictures of dead everything, really. Not the fake, either, like actual photographs of dead people and animals. Of course, I’ve heard about this from a third party source, but, honestly, I really doubt they aren’t/weren’t real subreddits.
I’ve never dug deep into reddit, and I’ve only run across subreddits through internet searches, so I don’t know the details for sure, but I’m I 100% certain those subreddits weren’t dedicated to Victorian post mortem photography, either. Although there probably is a subreddit dedicated to Victorian post mortem photography.
@SFHC
There’s some other software that handle PDFs without Adobe programs.
Here’s a list offhand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software
My mother has a program on her laptop that I don’t remember right away, but it boots pretty smoothly and loads documents quicker. I rather like it. If she lets me mess around with her computer, I’ll let you know the name if it if you’re interested.
Well, I also have access to Adobe Illustrator, so that helps. <u<
You might want to try Open Freely though. It's a freeware program that opens all kinds of file types, and it's really good with PDFs