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"We will not ban questionable subreddits," Reddit's then-CEO, Yishan Wong, wrote mere months ago. "You choose what to post. You choose what to read. You choose what kind of subreddit to create."
But in an apparent reversal of that policy, and in an unprecedented effort to clean up its long-suffering image, Reddit has just banned five "questionable subreddits."
The site permanently removed the forums Wednesday afternoon for harassing specific, named individuals, a spokesperson said. Of the five, two were dedicated to fat-shaming, one to transphobia, one to racism and one to harassing members of a progressive video game site.
Unsurprisingly, a vocal contingent of Redditors aren't taking the changes well: "Reddit increases censorship," read one post on r/freespeech, while forums like r/mensrights and r/opieandanthony theorized they would be next.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2015, @07:08AM
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, anonymous comment posting has temporarily been disabled. You can still login to post. However, if bad posting continues from your IP or Subnet that privilege could be revoked as well. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner or login and improve your posting. If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down.
(Score: 5, Informative) by NCommander on Friday June 12 2015, @07:48AM
That's the automated karma filter. If a subnet (/24 IPv4, /56 IPv6) or an individual IP or IPv6/64 gets more than -25 negative karma, AC posting is temporarily blocked. That requires 25 separate downmods to kick off, and it ages out after a few days if I remember the code correctly. There's the right to discuss whatever topics you feel like, there isn't a right to general disruptiveness on SN.
To the best of my knowledge, we've never implemented a hard ban against anyone aside from spambots, and usually thats an AC only ban, registered users from the same block can still post.
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2015, @10:34AM
Interesting. Is it net or gross negative karma? How could a lowly AC find out their own hidden karma?
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday June 12 2015, @10:52AM
Net. Positive karma cancels out negative on a per IPID/SUBID basis. Its currently not visible to anyone beside site editors. Perhaps something to be changed with a site update.
Still always moving
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2015, @04:00PM
That might help things. It would be easier to tell the bad actors that post nonsense from the good. For me personally I try very hard most days to post interesting content, even if it is blatant criticism. I won't get an account on principle for the same reasons I was on slashdot for 15 years without an account. Apart from not leaving a trail for whale phishing expeditions it challenges me to post better, as it takes far more work for an AC to get +5.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Saturday June 13 2015, @02:34AM
Question...does the system (or an admin) actually check to see who has done the downmodding before issuing such a ban? Because if not it would seem like a perfect target for attack. Simply crank up some sockpuppets, karma whore the accounts to get plenty of positive karma so they can downmod without taking too big a hit, then modbomb any user you do not like until they can no longer respond.
So while such a system on its face sounds fair and reasonable one must always look at it as a weapon and see how it can be used by a bad actor. For an example of why that is required just look at Slash, where the sockpuppetry got so bad you had "Mikey(ever increasing number)" and my personal fav the "knock off guy" who made all of his sockpuppets as knock off of known Slash posters. He had twittler, macthrope, hairytoes, he would then simply copy the post of the person whose account he was knocking off and then reply higher in the thread which was pretty damned genius actually, as he not only gained the positive karma that the other person's post was gonna get but made the real person look like they were ripping off the knock off. Once he had the accounts in good standing with modpoints? Here came the trolling and modbombs.
So any time you have a system like that you should always ask "If I were a troll and wanted to use this system to my advantage, what would I do?" and then try to come up with ways to counter the threat.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.