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posted by janrinok on Friday June 12 2015, @06:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the we-will-not-ban,-much dept.

The Washington Post:

"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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Saturday June 13 2015, @02:34AM

    by Hairyfeet (75) <bassbeast1968NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday June 13 2015, @02:34AM (#195612) Journal

    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.
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