AMAgeddon: Reddit Mods Are Locking Up the Site's Most Popular Pages In Protest 385
vivaoporto writes: As reported by CNET and TechCrunch, reddit moderators are locking up the site's most popular pages in protest against the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, a key member of the site's behind-the-scenes team. Taylor, who was the main facilitator for the site's question-and-answer community "Ask Me Anything" (graced by the presence of notables like Barack Obama, Jerry Seinfeld and regular folks like a line cook at Applebee's) was fired yesterday, causing all sorts of problems for Reddit's most mainstream offering.
Taylor's reported departure, which has been dubbed AMAgeddon, led other moderators of the marquee IAmA subreddit to switch the page's settings to private, rendering the Reddit userbase unable to view the page. Since then, dozens of other subreddits including /r/askreddit, /r/videos, /r/gaming and /r/gadgets — each with several million subscribers — have also been made private, instead re-directing readers to a static landing page.
Reddit's cofounder and executive chairman, Alexis Ohanian, said in a post, "we don't talk about specific employees. (...) We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community, (...) I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems, because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after." He later apologized for how communication was handled. A full recap of the situation is available at the site itself, with insights from redditors about the whole situation.
This comes in the wake of other highly controversial events like the response to what became known as The Fappening, and the more recent ban of the controversial but popular FatPeopleHate subreddit.
Taylor's reported departure, which has been dubbed AMAgeddon, led other moderators of the marquee IAmA subreddit to switch the page's settings to private, rendering the Reddit userbase unable to view the page. Since then, dozens of other subreddits including /r/askreddit, /r/videos, /r/gaming and /r/gadgets — each with several million subscribers — have also been made private, instead re-directing readers to a static landing page.
Reddit's cofounder and executive chairman, Alexis Ohanian, said in a post, "we don't talk about specific employees. (...) We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community, (...) I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems, because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after." He later apologized for how communication was handled. A full recap of the situation is available at the site itself, with insights from redditors about the whole situation.
This comes in the wake of other highly controversial events like the response to what became known as The Fappening, and the more recent ban of the controversial but popular FatPeopleHate subreddit.
Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologues (Score:5, Informative)
https://archive.is/ppes2 [archive.is]
The admins didn't realize how much we rely on Victoria. Part of it is proof, of course: we know it's legitimate when she's sitting right there next to the person and can make them provide proof. We've had situations where agents or others have tried to do an AMA as their client, and Victoria shut that shit down immediately. We can't do that anymore.
Chooter didn't allow anyone to do fake third-party AMAs, nor did she allow anyone to pay money to do an AMA. She practiced what she preached:
http://blog.prspeak.com/blog/p... [prspeak.com]
My comment from Reddit's banfest [slashdot.org] a few weeks ago:
Reddit has unbelievable traffic and reach, so stuff that earns popularity there gets spread to virtually everywhere and everyone.
It's exposure that marketers (of anything: products, politics, whatever) would kill for. They want to buy their way in, but not if some dirty peasant can tell the truth and (through sheer merit) get voted up and be taken just as seriously (or more seriously) than their bought & paid for message.
So Reddit sees advertisers chomping at the bit to throw money at it, but first Reddit has to demonstrate that it can crush contrary opinions at will.
IMO redditors are right to be suspicious that Reddit suddenly removed (without explanation) the only person whom they trust to expose fake/paid AMAs.
No, we don't know why she was fired. But even if it was for cause, what the mods and community are most angry about is the lack of communication from admins (lots of them were left hanging for scheduled AMAs, with no word from Reddit). You see this lack of communication cited over and over again in the explanations on the subreddits made private. They say it's been a problem for years, and yesterday was just the tipping point.
Reddit's rationalization of its recent taste for censorship is that they want to create "safe spaces" to prevent abuse, harrassment, threats, terrorism, earthquakes, etc. But that is clearly a lie because they never provide evidence of such harrassment and they allow much worse subreddits like SRS to exist, and many other subreddits have been banned since FPH without even the pretense of a "harrassment" excuse, and there are other examples of uneven enforcement (e.g. the admins told KiA (the Gamergate subreddit) that they can't post public company contact info, which appears to be a "rule" unique to KiA).
Saying the wrong thing (especially criticism of Pao) can easily get you shadowbanned, which means you can see your own posts but no one else can see them. This feature can only be used by admins (not mods), and its only legitimate use was against spammers and bots, but even that's no longer the case because tech-savvy users (e.g. spammers) know how to test for it. Now it's just a sneaky way they censor with the hope of avoiding a confrontation and backlash.
Of course none of these unique and secret and biased rules and enforcement policies have been communicated to the community or mods either. This is almost always the real root cause behind every Reddit leadership fuckup with corresponding mod/user uprising, and this time even they and their friends in the corrupt, colluding tech news media--you know, the ones who hailed Pao as a hero of women for her frivilous failed lawsuit--can't hope to spin this user/mod revolt into a "redditor harrassment" narrative. It all started over Reddit's firing of a universally-beloved female employee, for fuck's sake. Redditors would trade
Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu (Score:5, Insightful)
Dig 2.0 all over again.
What these companies seem to fail to understand is that by having "the community" do their work for them without pay, they lose any kind of hold on the site and the community.
The mods have nothing to lose by fucking up you site if you mess with them. They can move to a new site tomorrow.
Maybe if being a mod was a payed job you could tell them what to do.
Indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
For all the shitty things you will see on 4chan the one thing that remains constant is it is more or less uncensored free speech, with that freedom comes trolls, with it comes some things most people will not like (there is a reason it is known as the asshole of the internet) but at the same time there are some really intelligent people there.
Some of the most stimulating tech conversations I have had in my life have been on 4chan of all places and lasted the better part of 3 days and numerous threads, at the same time you've got things like the fappening & the hate threads for all shapes sizes and colors. Its humanity uncensored, its something that more and more you don't see because the world has turned into a politically correct, watered down version of a PBS kids morning show...
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Indeed.
I've been involved in some really amazing discussions on 4chan, and honestly if you avoid /b/ and a few others, the other boards tend to be surprisingly sane.
There's some serious gold under the shit, and it's very cathartic to speak freely with effectively no consequence to yourself (or even an online identity). You can say the most hatefully insane thing you've ever wanted to say in one post, and then immediately make some comment with no connection between the two.
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There's some serious gold under the shit, and it's very cathartic to speak freely with effectively no consequence to yourself (or even an online identity).
You can come up with a throwaway identity on almost any site. Very few take any real steps to verify your identity. That's not special. Reddit just seems to lack any sphincter control. When people act like assholes, they are encouraged rather than discouraged. So yeah, there's some gems under the turds, but mostly it's just a big fat circle jerk. It's not like Slashdot is so wonderful; Since Dice took over it's mostly been a big whine-fest since they keep shitting on it. But don't act like reddit is some pa
Re:Indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
You're talking to grown adults. There isn't anything wrong with our behaviour, nor are we the "MRA/Republican/Stromfront/Rascist/Misogyo-nerd" strawmen you and your authoritarian friends constantly paint us as.
We are the same free minded geeks who have been around since Internet day 1. People who are jot afraid of critical discourse, thinking, and who have enough intellectual honesty to recognise censorship and dangerous abuses of power when we see them.
It's getting tiresome to have the open, free, principled sites and communications networks we built being labeled as "septic tanks" by the likes of yourself; apologists for censorship, media panics, and general authoritarianism. Is someone saying something on the internet that offends you? Grow up. We are not burning down the bridges we have built to the future just because you have found a half dozen trolls making cruel jokes in the darkest corner of the web. There are 2 billion people online, we built this network for them, and we will not turn around and hand it over to your feelings, your agendas, or your petty lust for power.
You people are the creationists of the internet, and you are not taking us back to the stone age.
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I was there in the early days of the internet, and the BBS systems before. You aren't the same people who were around then. Maybe you have changed. Back then people weren't bent on making forums into cess pools. Even the trolls on Usenet were of a higher standard.
What really gets me is the war on free speech. While claiming to support it, the trolls keep telling us that there is "no right to be offended". There is, it's called free speech. Everyone has the right to express their disgust with you, and take w
Re:Indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
What really gets me is the war on free speech.
That's rich. You *do* realise that the woman being fired is being fired because, ironically, she lets too much free speech stay up. You're actually sitting at a desk somewhere pouring outrage into your keyboard because someone, somewhere, refuses to follow your ideologically-determined morals.
You (and the rest) have more in common with the Westboro Baptists than with Voltaire. BTW, this is not something you should be proud of.
(PS. You weren't the only one around in the days of BBS's and dialup from C64's - I don't seem to remember anyone preaching their morals to me, the way you and your ilk use your fredom of speech to preach your morals to everyone else).
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Yes, but remember, in those days "Cookie Monster" was a typical virus. And internet communities were relatively homogenous.
There are, there must be, limits to free speech. Shouting down someone else doesn't count as free speech. At most it's a reasonable reaction to their stifling of your own speech.
In this case it appears (as an outside observer) that this is the silencing of an honest, truthful, and respected voice. If she is an employee of Rededit, then I suppose that is their right, but the proper r
Re:Indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
You people are the rednecks of the internet, and YEEHAW I GOTS MY FREE SPEECH BUT DON'T KNOW WHERE TO POINT IT.
Your opinion is not the one that is objectively right, as opinions cannot be objective. So stop trying to pretend you're a good guy to everyone else being "evil". Voltaire was not evil.
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You're not Voltaire. And neither is anyone on reddit.
Voltaire isn't the only person who can defend the right to say something, even if they disagree with what is being said. To pretend any people doing that is evil, is to pretend Voltaire himself and a lot of the literature from the Age of Enlightenment is evil.
Re:Indeed (Score:5, Informative)
While Voltaire defended free speech, I doubt he defended a form that was as absolute as people who quote him make it out to be.
The quote about "I will defend to the death etc." wasn't actually said BY Voltaire, but ABOUT him, by an early biographer.
Here is a quote from the man himself, from his 1763 Treatise on Toleration: “The supposed right of intolerance is absurd and barbaric. It is the right of the tiger; nay, it is far worse, for tigers do but tear in order to have food, while we rend each other for paragraphs.”
An example of intolerance is Goebels on the radio. Or radio presenters calling on the radio for extermination of the Hutu's in the neighbourhood, telling people where and when to gather for that, and giving out pointers on how and why you should kill the Hutu's - as Radio Milles Collines did in Rwanda. Which was absolutely crucial to the genocide taking place. I doubt Voltaire would approve of that and say "oh, it's free speech. We really should defend the right of those poor folk to criticize the Hutu's for being alive."
There hasn't been a single great thinker or writer on free speech who also didn't recognize its limits. Or had a specific purpose in mind for free speech. Only when the debate is divorced from reality, and waged in abstract terms, do we get the pretty weird outcomes we can see today.
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What you say is clearly reasonable, but I've got to believe that you are mischaracterizing this event. Censorship is always questionable, even when done for the highest of motives. So are you asserting that the folk on Rededit were inciting to violence? Taken literally it appears that this is what you are saying. I'm sufficiently unfamiliar with the events that this could even be a true and accurate characterization. But I think I'd need to have seen some proof before I believed it.
Given the way that p
Re:Indeed (Score:5, Informative)
The one that calls a harassment campaign that's trying to silence women (and other minorities) in tech and their supporters through threats of violence "free minded geeks", and those who oppose them "authoritarian" and "apologists for censorship"?
Which campaign is this ? I haven't seen such a campaign online or in tech. In fact, most tech places I've worked at for the last 18 years have been tripping over themselves to hire any women that actually apply, as long as they are qualified.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Tired of gamer gate people (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll take Gamer Gate people seriously when they can bear to hear the name Sarkeesian without going bat shit crazy. It would be nice to talk about genders in gaming, in a sane manner without making the extreme views the most important part of the discussion.
Re:Indeed (Score:4, Interesting)
Plenty. You can start here.
The wikipedia article on this subject is rooted in controversy, up to the point that some of its editors were both topic and site banned from Wikipedia. At this point, no, I won't start with it as it's obviously not a neutral source.
we read what you write...
because you fuckers SHITPOST...
you really are so stupid...
What's this YOU stuff ? Who are you talking to ? You're assuming things about me... for instance :
in your own words on 8chan, /r/KIA, and under the #gamergate hashtag.
I never visited the chan's, and have neither Twitter nor Reddit accounts. So those words can't be mine.
Now, let's review your list of allegations, all of which have no backing or evidence :
- Do everything possible to prevent discussions of women in tech. Because that has nothing to do with "ethics in gaming journalism".
Where have you been prevented from discussing women in tech and how have you been prevented from doing so exactly ? I mean, if you try to inject "women in tech" in discussions unrelated to women, I could see how people would dismiss you and downvote you, but in actual discussions about women in tech ?
- Harass female game devs constantly, because that has nothing to do with "ethics in gaming journalism".
Do you have any evidence showing these female game devs were not harassed because of ethics in gaming journalism ? It seems the whole issue that launched this (outside of years of build up with things like Doritogate and other growing concerns) is the fact that Nathan Grayson wrote this favorable piece :
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/08/admission-quest-valve-greenlights-50-more-games/ [rockpapershotgun.com]
It seems to me that the issue people have is not that the developer is a woman, it's that Nathan Grayson (a man) used a screenshot to feature prominently the game of a person he had a personal relationship with, without disclosing said relationship. On top of that, it seems Nathan participated in making the game as his name is part of the credits, so essentially pushing his work.
Rather shoddy for a journalist.
- Talk non stop about so-called "SJWs" and never mention journalists. Because that has nothing to do with "ethics in gaming journalism".
Looking at one of Gamergate's projects, http://deepfreeze.it/ [deepfreeze.it], all the listed journalists seem to in fact be journalists.
I mean, I could see where SJW (a pejorative term used for people who use Social Justice causes to label and attack other people, with little care to the actual cause itself) could be used to describe some more fringe "journalist" like Jessica Valenti of the Guardian, because some of her opinions are pretty extermist in nature (nothing to do with her gender before you draw the conclusion it's because she's a woman) though.
- Demand Slashdot ban discussions related to diversity in tech. Because that has nothing to do with "ethics in gaming journalism".
Do you have a citation for Gamergate asking Slashdot (specifically) to not discuss diversity in tech ? Because Slashdot doesn't seem to have listened, we have diversity in Tech articles all the time.
- Call JACK THOMPSON "BASED DAD", a lawyer who has actually tried to ban games, while calling Anita Sarkeesian a "censor" or "authoritarian", because she produced a video identifying tropes she feels are sexist in various video games. Because that has nothing to do with "ethics in gaming journalism".
I'll have to ask for a citation on this. In fact, looking at GamerGhazi's (which seem to be a group that opposes Gamergate) post about this situation,
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Re:Indeed (Score:4, Interesting)
We are the same free minded geeks who have been around since Internet day 1
No, you're not. You weren't born on the Internet's "day one". I was there on the other hand, and the people I knew back then would have had pieces of Gamergaters/MRAs/KiAs/and /pol in their crap. You guys aren't fit to name the people who were there at the Internet's day one.
To be honest, when we only had usenet I was nearly suspended from my CS study for a few weeks because a flame with what was probably the first notorious troll in the country got a bit out of hand and we descended into namecalling ("idiot" was used, I believe)... good times :)
But you're right. The folks driving gamergate are a bunch of right wing teens that think that shouting "free speech! free speech!" is somehow a laissez-passer for racism and sexism, and then act like victims if someone responds to it and shoots back.
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IIUC, Amen is properly interpreted as meaning "So let it be" (traditionally "so be it", but subjunctive I is rarely used anymore).
As such, Amen is not the proper resoponse to an accurate portrayal of a historical fact. "yay verily" would be more accurate.
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You're completely clueless, aren't you? As long as you've been around here, you honestly don't know what those dates mean? And what they don't?
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Interesting how the moderation on virtually everything I post that's anti-harassment these days proves my point.
Your post was downvoted for pretending people like Jenny Bharaj or Oliver Campbell are white male teenager, rather than a women and a black man.
At least be honest when you try to broadly paint a movement as something, as not to dismiss women and minorities like you did. You won't get down modded as much if you are truthful, rather than posting simple flamebait.
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I've never heard of either of these people, nor are they mentioned in my post.
You talked about Gamergate no ? From researching this stuff, I have found both to have been prominent Gamergate figures. So are you admitting you do not have all relevant information about the Gamergate campaign ?
I suggest more research before you continue discussion on the matter, because it's now apparent you're ill informed.
This is a piece Oliver wrote last year about this topic :
https://medium.com/@oliverbcampbell/when-a-black-game-journalist-spoke-up-on-gamergate-a1f36421022 [medium.com]
What the ever loving fuck are you talking about? Or is this a #notyourshield troll?
What ? What's "notyoursh
Re: (Score:2)
What these companies seem to fail to understand is that by having "the community" do their work for them without pay, they lose any kind of hold on the site and the community.
What they fail to understand and when they fail to understand it is that the community doesn't give a shit about them and right away. The community just wants a host to infest.
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Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu (Score:4, Interesting)
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How do you differentiate between that and a site that wants to remain open for it's users despite the actions of few?
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I hear you. It sucks when someone decides to take their ball and go home only to be reminded that it's not their ball. It sucks even more when you support that someone only to be reminded that it's not your ball or your home, and that both of you are v
Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu (Score:5, Informative)
Reddit, so far, is living on investors money... their last published revenue from advertisement was $8.3M in 2014, of which they gave 10% to charity. In 2013, they operated in the red... as far as I know, they also operated in the red in 2014. In the last funding round (Oct 2014?), they were valued $500M and got $50M in extra funding. 6 times their annual advertisement revenue...
News at 11, reddit is a company and needs to produce money to stay afloat. Do you know what happens when an overvalued company runs out of investors while still not operating in the black?
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Re: (Score:2, Troll)
[Remainder of tinfoil hat rant snipped]
That's what the Reddit hivemind thinks... In reality, not so much. Reddit only makes the news when it's on fire, again.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
8+ million users with accounts. 12 million unique ip's a month.
400k unique ip's a month for slashdot...
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8+ million users with accounts. 12 million unique ip's a month.
400k unique ip's a month for slashdot...
Well I for one am coming back here...
Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu (Score:4, Insightful)
That means Reddit as a whole is popular (and fairly large) but popularity != influence.
Especially when you consider that even the largest subreddit is but a fraction of that traffic - much of the traffic is spread across thousands of subreddits (many of them quite small, even though they're popular among their habitues). It's essentially a collection of independent websites (though bound by a common interface and portal) ranging from fairly small (in terms of the overall web) to infinitesimally tiny.
Looking at this list [reddit.com] of subreddits that have gone dark is instructive. Relatively few break the 100k subscribers mark, most are under 10k. And unless Reddit is very unusual in it's counting, the number of subscribers is a significant multiple of the number of active users.
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Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu (Score:5, Insightful)
It's happened before, it'll happen again.
The people that have historically been on reddit were a 'techy' or 'nerdy' minority. They were who Slashdotters were 20 years ago. They want to attract bored housewives and people not currently on reddit and they'll never do it with fat people hate or other people having full control of subreddits or big things like Secret Santa, so they got rid of everyone that disagrees. Victoria actually made celebrities do their own AMA. Now they can just have the PR firm phone it in.
If anyone is upset at the changes then you they weren't the target demographic of Reddit 2.0. The type of people that originally came to Reddit a decade ago will find elsewhere. Reddit will continue to exist as a place for bored housewives to continue talking becoming a facebook of sorts. Right now all of those people are shoehorned into a terrible ayout of Facebook (Notice how facebook just added threaded discussion?). They're going to attract the people that want a "better" place to discuss things than Facebook but not actually have any real discussion. Why do you think CoonTown and SRS still exist? Loud vocal minority idiots are very profitable (Patreon).
Write something in a low level, portable language. Someone on slashdot should know how to roll up Usenet, IRC, voting & a web front end into a single set of packages that anyone can host.
Why isn't 'moderation' in a RFC yet? It's something that could probably be nailed out by now as we've tried multiple different methods.
I personally prefer Slashdot's style of moderation for most things. (Where its limited to -2 to +5, and you have taxonomy built in). But for some things I prefer Reddit's where everyone gets a vote. Let people write their own implementations of the RFC and let anyone incorporate it into their website. Slashdot and Reddit are open source in the same way that OpenSSL was. Technically open source but such a pain in the ass to get running for most people it wasn't worth it.
Add on Tor/I2P and you now have all of the above 'off' of the main internet.
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Slashdot and Reddit are open source in the same way that OpenSSL was.
Is slashdot even open source any more? Seems like at some point slashcode silently stopped being updated, and now seems very out of date.
Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu (Score:5, Informative)
Slashcode hasn't been open source in some time. Soylent built their site based on an older version of slashcode that was available and has modified it and improved it from there. Slashdot is built on the closed, and now completely proprietary, slashcode base.
Please Dice, drop the silly share button and return the read more link, and the read comments link. And provide a way to turn off the video stories that get stuck inline. This is an appropriate story to remind you of this. Your money is made because of content provided for free by us.
Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu (Score:5, Informative)
Please Dice, drop the silly share button and return the read more link, and the read comments link.
Second this, but don't know why, at least, they can't all be displayed?
BTW, I solved this, and the video stories by adding this rule to my Proxomitron config file for "slashdot.org":
Matching expression: </head>
.fhitem-poll { display: none !important; }
.nav-social { display: none !important; }
.popularity { display: none !important; }
Replacement Text:
<style>
</style>
</head>
And killed auto audio play using:
Matching Expression: <audio \1 autoplay="*" \2>
Replacement Text: <audio \1 \2>
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I personally prefer Slashdot's style of moderation for most things. (Where its limited to -2 to +5, and you have taxonomy built in).
But that's not why it works. It works because you only get 5 or 15 mod points at a time, you have 3 days to use them or lose them, and you only get them when you get enough micro-points (I think they're called "tokens") from normal usage such as reading threads.
When EVERYONE can upboat and downboat EVERY post with no limit, that's when the groupthink and circle-jerks begin. Metamod helps too, but not as much as simply making mod points something that happens only once or twice a month for normal users.
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One of the many reasons mods are upset is that the employee who was fired was (by all accounts) crucial to the reliability and credibility of AMAs.
Pro Tip: Pay close attention anytime a manager or company says something like "employees are our most valuable asset" or "... are critical to our success" because that's what they look/sound like when they're lying to you.
Re: Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideolog (Score:5, Insightful)
Having been in various stages of management for years you don't just fire people unless they are stealing or grabbing peoples asses without doing a risk assessment first and getting coverage. That isn't like black belt shit that's common sense.
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They are a large part of the community. Your whole site runs based on the community. Your community is more like a customer than a non-employee. A customer that suddenly loses their favorite member of the company they are in contact with certainly will have some questions and might chose to bring their business elsewhere if the answers are no satisfactory.
You think students have never had questions about why a certain teacher was fired, especially if it was a teacher that did a very good job from the studen
Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu (Score:4, Insightful)
Agree, but they should have had a much better response prepared.
It's like if you suddenly fire the company rep that your main customer has been dealing with exclusively for years. You don't just call them up and say "hey, Joe's no longer with us, we'll get back to you in a bit about his replacement."
Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu (Score:5, Insightful)
... hmmm... not really... all the gaming journalism sites updated their ethics policies which was what GG wanted... the "gamers are dead" articles were killed and they haven't done that again.
I think comic con san diego is going to have a GG discussion...
And the developers and publishers have almost entirely sided with the evil gamers... because... they actually buy games.
Most of the important people in anti GG were fired or have been marginalized and a few of the pro GG people have actually openly gotten jobs at some of the bigger gaming news sites like the Escapist.
so... everything you said would make perfect sense... if you said the exact opposite. :-)
Contradict me... I would love to rub your face in a bit more... I am turgid with excitement. :-D
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I was clearly talking about my epeen... but if you'd rather my comment refer to a sapient fungus with funny dialog from SC2... I'm cool with it. :-P
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the policy changes were precisely what GG was asking for...
I mean... EXACTLY.
As to GG dying down... GG is the dog that gets kicked. It dies down when you stop kicking it. Kick the dog and see exactly how dead it is... And the reality is that it existed before it had a name.
the whole thing started because the media kicked the dog... and they didn't stop... they just kept doing it until the dog go really really pissed. And the dog bit the media... the media said "ouch"... and things have been more civil sinc
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The main target seems to have been GameJournosPro and Leigh Alexander who wrote the basis of what was the "Gamers don't have to be your audience anymore" piece, which came as an answer to gamers asking why journalists were not covering TFYC incident, after it came out that the person responsible for that had had positive coverage by a journalist whom she was in a relationship with.
The banning and deletion of discussion on these issues really didn't help.
http://deepfreeze.it/ [deepfreeze.it] seems very journalist focused to
Ethics, Set, Match. (Score:3, Informative)
You want me to give a shit about the "other things" gamergate represents start a new fucking movement. I could give two fucks what that movement has to say at this point.
Hey, I recognize that shitty attitude. It's downright identical to Gawker's . . . right before the FTC got involved [reddit.com] in December (in direct response to GG pressure), and Gawker was forced update their disclosure policy (and tons of articles that were then clearly in violation). And things have only gotten worse for them since. Read it and weep:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Kotaku... [reddit.com]
The section of the FTC's website that deals with disclosures was updated late last month:
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advic... [ftc.gov]
Some of this new guidance directly reflects the language and particulars of the concerns GamerGate asked the FTC to address.
"Is “affiliate link” by itself an adequate disclosure? What about a “buy now” button?"
Consumers might not understand that “affiliate link” means that the person placing the link is getting paid for purchases through the link. Similarly, a “buy now” button would not be adequate
Does this guidance about affiliate links apply to links in my product reviews on someone else’s website, to my user comments, and to my tweets?
Yes, the same guidance applies anytime you endorse a product and get paid through affiliate links.
The revised webpage contains a great deal more language that needs to be analyzed but these two examples in particular reflect specific complaints GamerGate had about how Gawker Media handle their affiliate link disclosures. I know of no other group of people who were vocally complaining about this specific practice to the FTC. In addition, the FTC emails from my previous posts confirm that, yes, the FTC tailored part of their new guidance because of frequent complaints sent by GamerGate.
That's only scratching the surface of the FTC guideline updates directly attributable to Gamergate (follow that link for plenty m
Hm (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a shame we can't do something similar to get some changes made on this site. Shithole that it now is.
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Quick, where's that share button so I can share your great post with all my friends on Flopbook and Twatter...
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"We" can write an alternative. Make a new Usenet. Integrate IRC. Add voting somehow.
Usenet solved 30 years ago the exact problems a lot of people are having with Reddit/Voat/Slashdot. It's distributed, you can't 'take it down'. Make a new RFC and let people host their own 'sites'.
It just needs voting/some moderation on top of it. Make it a simple, straight forward interface. If I want to spin up a 'chat, discussion, et al' website on AWS.
I would peer a node on a discussion if someone wrote it.
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It just needs voting/some moderation on top of it.
So what we need is a newsreader which implements a web of trust. People sign their messages. You assign scores to people, when you do the system automagically downloads their pubkey, and their scoring file which contains pubkeys for the people they've scored. Their scores get weighted by your score for them and incorporated into your scoring system... And you could have multiple webs so you could have different experiences. Seems relatively straightforward, so the community should cook up a bodgy implementa
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It's already half implemented in BitCoin, just have Karma"Coin" and make it a distributed system.
/technology/ is private :( (Score:2)
Its because she refused to censor a question (Score:4, Informative)
Someone asked a loaded question to Jessie Jackson accusing him of nefarious mob style tactics. Victoria left the question up, in fact it was upvoted near the top. He responded without answering the question. Then she got fired.
My speculation is that Jessie used nefarious mob style tactics to get her fired.
Re:Its because she refused to censor a question (Score:4, Informative)
From the OutOfTheLoop subreddit: /u/chooter was removed as an admin, and that will almost certainly continue to be the case until the admins get their house in order: both parties are at being professional in that they aren't talking about the reasons why it occurred...."
"...no-one, excluding a select few of the administrative team, knows precisely why
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both parties are at being professional in that they aren't talking about the reasons why it occurred...."
Is it professional not to tell the community why you fired an admin of a community site? I don't think that it is. I think that it's half-assed and can only lead to unnecessary speculation which could be avoided by being straightforward. The only reason not to make a public announcement making the situation clear is if they're not acting in their integrity, and legal wants to sit on the announcement like it's an egg and wait for it to hatch.
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Re:Its because she refused to censor a question (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Its because she refused to censor a question (Score:4, Interesting)
Here is the thing. Suddenly they have to get rid of someone and had no plans on how to replace her? I mean it would take about 10 mins to pick someone else to do that job and say 'this is your job now work with her to make sure it goes smoothly'. They did not plan it out because they did not plan on her leaving. It was a firing of passion not because she screwed up.
If she was leaving on 'her own' then she would have said 'you need to find someone to xyz'. If they had planned for a couple of weeks to get rid of her someone would have asked 'who does her job when she is gone?'. If not that is a massive fail of management.
No one asked those questions. Because it was 'get rid of her or I turn up the heat'. They can spin it however they like at this point. They probably can even find something to 'justify' it. But it happened too quickly for it to be a justifiable reason.
They do not want to cave to Mr Jackson. When they are actually in a position to do so. They could literally say 'he asked us to' and it would be on him. They are helping bury the bodies. This is part and parcel for Mr Jackson. Just to be clear I am not racist. This man is an opportunist who uses race to make himself and his friends lots of cash with a shakedown racket. The black community would do a lot better without people like him. He may have started with good intentions but now it is just about the greenbacks.
I would not be surprised to find out that somehow reddit is behind getting the new site the community was building banned from paypal.
Re:Its because she refused to censor a question (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone asked a loaded question to Jessie Jackson accusing him of nefarious mob style tactics.
Bluntly stated, such a question can't possibly be "loaded". It's fully legitimate given Jackson's background and current activities.
I was bemused that Reddit would put someone with Ellen Pao's background in to run the place, and I figured it would probably cause a lot of problems. I was correct. First she had the stupid "we're not going to negotiate your salary" stunt (whaddaya bet she negotiated *her* salary?) and now crap like this.
Sometimes I think people miss out on the fact that these companies are ephemeral. There's literally nothing there, just a bunch of people who come together and form a community. Those people will quickly go elsewhere - ask myspace. Someone mentioned Dig and it's a good lesson for those who would learn. You can lose 99% of the value of your company in the course of a few months by making a few stupid decisions.
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Bluntly stated, such a question can't possibly be "loaded".
You can judge for yourself if the question was or not loaded : http://i.imgur.com/TpNZ2jQ.jpg [imgur.com]
Yes, that was the actual question. Didn't seem to phase Rev. Jackson who just offered a non-reply.
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Yes, because you know, rampent speculation is much more interesting than just hearing it from sources. The sad thing is, the Internet has manifested MOB justice just like we had hundreds of years before from uninformed emotion driven people. How many corpses will the internet leave in its wake before people can act sensibly? Oh well, good luck with -whatever new site- you depend on to spring up and be your nmew sounding board. But hell, it'll go the same way as this one beacuse people too busy tearing down
Stick a fork in it (Score:4, Informative)
Reddit is done, the only question is how long does it have left?
Since Ellen Pao was made interim CEO its been bad decision after bad decision
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If Reddit is the peanut gallery of the Web, what does that make Slashdot?
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The chocolate covered raisins that got dropped under the movie seats?
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The old folks home, full of senile old farts pining for the way things were.
What does that make Usenet?
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Undead territory.
Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in (Score:5, Funny)
And (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing of value was lost.
Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait -- is that a comment about Reddit or Slashdot...?
That's not merely cheap snark. I've been reading this site since shortly after it launched, and it's become a howling example of self-parody.
Like a Confederate Flag (Score:2, Insightful)
I miss fatpeoplehate, because any time someone said something good about it, I knew they were a piece of shit. I don't know enough about Reddit to know which boards to have that opinion of, so I just have that opinion of all of 'em now... because Reddit is home to big collections of jackholes, and they're proud.
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Found the fatty
See? This is why reddit was good. These people associated their identities with logins over there. Over here, they just stain their pants with pee.
Re:Like a Confederate Flag (Score:5, Interesting)
And that's why I like not putting all of my discussion eggs in one basket.
I personally don't care if someone is a racist or a fatty when they talk about their opinions on technology. I'm sure I've picked up a great number of things over the years from people I may not have agreed with on other subjects. I'll just copy and paste my old post on what slashdot needed to do [slashdot.org]
Dice you've successfully figured out how to run one of the most best 'news' and opensource websites and run them into the ground for profit. /. and Fark were the only 2 places that could handle 9/11 traffic. I rode out that entire day on both sites when CNN was crumbling.
I'm glad I had Slashdot over Reddit when I was an angsty tenager. I took pride in trying to get +5 comments and put effort into doing so. Honestly slashdot made me a better writer. Reddit is nice for short terse communication but sometimes I want to "talk with adults".
Slashdot didn't need much. Unicode support. Newer HTML5 support. CSS3. Make a decent mobile app, move away from HTML for Markdown. Moderation made sense and was much better than a simple +- system. Voting was randomly enabled and you couldn't both vote and comment on the same article. -2 to 5 also limited band wagoning. It's easier to recover from a bunch of early 'down votes'. Instead you drove everyone away to other sites (which still don't quite scratch the /. itch). You shoe horn in what ever fucking agenda is "big in IT". Looking back at all the news I got from /. I can't ever remember thinking "I wonder if a woman did this" or "Too bad a woman didn't do this" because I didn't care. It was about the tech and news for nerds.
On 'Gamergate', 'sexual equality', 'gender issues', we don't care "Trans-gendered" is a big thing in the news these days (and especially around tech) but a long, long time ago I remember a Mac developer made the transition. (This was in the late '90s.) I read her bio. Shrugged my shoulders went "Neat" and moved on. Why? Because she made some awesome Mac games. Most other person I know in IT or engineering think the same way. None of us care what you do with your body or who you take to the bedroom. I do care if you can cut it and get your work done or contribute to society.
On the other side of that is Randi Harper (FreeBSD Girl) [twitter.com] who actually write decent code. I've dug through some of her BSD commits, major props to her for doing that. But it can all be done without photoshopping traffic tickets to make it look like you got swatted, begging for money to move on twitter [youcaring.com], (When you already earn $3k/month from Patreon [patreon.com]), grandstanding on Twitter for no reason and bandwagoning users against anyone that disagrees isn't the way to do it.
You had the same opportunity to fix Sourceforge all of its' convoluted download mirrors (just use a proper CDN), update to Git, and everything else that Sourceforge isn't and GitHub is. Instead you rested on your laurels and are now trying to use this as one last cash grab before the Titanic goes down.
I don't know where I was going with this either. Just thought someone up top should know why your traffic is tanking and a lot of us are pissed off at you for what you've done.
I still won't forget the time you broke the capslock filter [slashdot.org], I remember BitTorrent being announced and people thinking it was useless, the iPod's lack of wifi and space compared to a Nomad, et al.
Thanks for the fish?
And once again (Score:2)
http://www.voat.co/ [www.voat.co] is currently down. I'm assuming for capacity issues (again)
Reddit was good, about 5 years ago. It's turned from a time waster to a waste of time.
I hang out in a few subreddits that aren't bad. The front page has become kind of a joke in a non-funny bad way.
It is a vicious cycle (Score:5, Insightful)
A website comes and makes some "social web application for sharing stuff", said web application has some very interesting discussions -> said web application gets popular -> said web application gets increasingly worse usually as a consequence of trying to monetize it or due to the sheer number of people using (drowning everyone else in noise) -> users start to migrate to alternatives -> only a shell remains -> death.
See: digg, facebook, myspace, orkut, slashdot...
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A website comes and makes some "social web application for sharing stuff", said web application has some very interesting discussions -> said web application gets popular -> said web application gets increasingly worse usually as a consequence of trying to monetize it or due to the sheer number of people using (drowning everyone else in noise) -> users start to migrate to alternatives -> only a shell remains -> death.
See: digg, facebook, myspace, orkut, slashdot...
I find it funny you put FB in there. Still one of the most popular sites on the internet, but to you it 'tis but a shell.
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To me facebook is in the stage "said web application gets increasingly worse usually as a consequence of trying to monetize it or due to the sheer number of people using (drowning everyone else in noise)". The users have not yet started to migrate to alternatives.
Slashdot is the one that is only a shell of what it once was and digg is the one that is dead.
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Facebook's alive and well. Hell, tghey make more money than ever, mostly because:
1. Users have no control over the narrative (to anything outside their social group)
2. Everyone and their dog (but not me) uses it
3. You can send each other useless (fb monetized) links to crap nobody cares about
4. Its an amazing diversion for people with no lives (don't forget pinterest / buzzfeed / instagram)
5. Its an amazing way to post how cool you are by posting all the amazing things you do, and like the amazing spread on
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To me facebook is in the stage "said web application gets increasingly worse usually as a consequence of trying to monetize it or due to the sheer number of people using (drowning everyone else in noise)". The users have not yet started to migrate to alternatives.
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See? you are part of the problem, you can't let these services get popular. Stop sharing your sharing websites!
Reddit, schmeddit (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time there's an article about reddit I have to visit their site to remind me exactly what reddit is.
And at that moment I remember why I don't ever remember. I'm still not sure what it's supposed to be.
i left reddit in protest of bad treatment by mods (Score:5, Insightful)
awhile ago
and i feel vindicated
reddit needs to pay its mods (say, a cut of ad revenue from their sub)
if they work for free, they have no real power over them. which is unstable as current developments indicate
also, if they pay them, they can fire them
you can say paying mods will change the tenor of reddit but this is bullshit: what motivates someone to mod for free is a sort of pathetic need for power, which is actually worse than any nefariousness due to filthy lucre as their motivation
bye bye reddit, you were fun. but you have a fatal flaw in your power structure:
uncaring admins and abusive mods
so what's the next site to rise?
any tips?
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Or maybe it's time to go back to usenet?
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hmmm... what about slashdot?
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Sadly, though, while
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What makes it less fun now than ~2-5 years ago?
The incredibly obvious paid submissions being passed off as user-submitted stories.
-B
Meh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Rival controversy (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, Slashdot quickly reporting on Reddit drama, while simultaneously suppressing the Sourceforge drama. How lovely.
Reddit is discovering... (Score:2)
I for one won't be back until
Re: (Score:3)
Take a lesson here, slashdot: stop fucking with the layout!
Re:Dugg (Score:5, Funny)
Looks like 4chan is the only reasonable alternative.
>4chan
>reasonable alternative
We're DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED.