Just curious to know if anyone else bailed on reddit? Either because of the layoff/firings, or just sick and tired of whatever.
I deleted my account (shortly after creating an account on Voat) partly because of the shake-up, but also because I don’t agree with the rules of some of the subreddits (ie, in ELI5, you can’t give a one-sentence reply, even if you provide a link to the explanation… I feel that is ridiculous.)
So, if you’re fed up with reddit, and either you’ve quit or you’re thinking of quitting, please vent, here.
I’ve never had an account there, and have only had occasion to visit when someone has posted a link elsewhere to take me to it. I’ve never particularly like the way it’s set up visually, and all I ever seem to hear is the less savoury aspects of the behaviour there.
I think the direct consequences of the layoffs were a lot less severe than people make it out to be. The direct consequence was: no contact person for AMAs, so new celebrity AMAs were dead in the water. That sucks. Reddit dropped the ball. But they fixed that within a few days. Everything else – the various subreddits “going dark” – was voluntary, self-inflicted damage by the wider user base. They were protesting things they had absolutely no knowledge of. They had absolutely no knowledge of why a person was fired nor who made the decision to fire them. But mob mentality took over, and everyone started protesting based on speculations taken as fact, speculations that now are very quickly turning out to have been very wrong.
Sadly, mob mentality is part of human nature, and we won’t solve it by moving to a different internet site.
Don’t both reddit and voat work the same way? That is, whoever creates a subreddit/voat is the moderator of that group, and they can make whatever rules they please. What makes you think a moderator on voat won’t ever make a rule that you disagree with?
I’ve never used reddit in my life. I can proudly say I’ve never typed the word reddit.com in my URL box. The only such communities I visit is 4chan. /b/ lurker for like 5 years, /pol/, /tv/, /g/ lurker for only a couple.
I only heard about the reddit drama via one of my late night 4chan browses and a little on Recode. I say, good for them for not putting up with the censorship the higher ups were trying to suppress them with.
I disagree with calling it ‘censorship’. As I understand it, the subreddits that were removed violated policy. There are many other hate subreddits that still exist - because they didn’t violate policy.
One has the right of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in the US. This does NOT guarantee that one will be given the platform from which to speak/express. One must (legally) find that platform on one’s own. No one can be forced to provide it.
A lot of people think that removing a sub because of this or that is censorship. Truth is, people throw ‘censorship’ around because they know the word evokes a certain knee-jerk response. Kind of like the way right-wing conservatives like to call the Affordable Healthcare Act ‘socialism’. Socialists have stated that the AHA is NOT socialism. But it gets used because many people will get up-in-arms about it, and without actually investigating or researching it will denounce it as the next great evil.
Conversely, I had seen a headline in Google News, earlier, claiming that reddit wanted to shut down many subreddits for a long time, but Pao prevented then from doing so. So, she gets canned, the targeted subs disappear, and then more of reddit upper-management jump ship. Related or not, I’m following those who have left. I think reddit will soon become a ghost-town, with only a fraction of the users it had a month ago.
Not me. But I’m not really tied to reddit, it just happens to be what I like right now. I’ll go where the content is. Currently, nothing matches reddit in terms of sheer amount of population, topics, and quality.
I do not believe Voat will be the successor. I could be wrong, and I don’t care either way, but I just can’t see it unless they make major changes to their team, policies, and code.
Subs are controlled by the mods. That’s one of the greatest things about reddit and the biggest cause of the drama right now is taking some of that power away. Don’t like the sub’s rules? Make your own. Make your own rules.
These sites are based entirely on self-governed subsections.
If you don’t like the way a particular sub’s does things, that’s what this button is for.
There are lots of subs for all sorts of things with lots of rules defined by the users who created them. There are thousands of them and some of them are really weird with really weird rules. I mean… there is literally a subreddit entirely dedicated to posting pictures of severed penises.
And voat.co got it’s popularity boost when the sub /r/fatpeoplehate was banned and all those users moved there. FatPeopleHate was a sub that would not only ban people for posting pro-fat comments, but the mods would actually ban people if they saw them posting those kind of comments in entirely different subs.
Honestly, I’m not entirely sure, but after having read this article, this morning, I’m beginning to suspect that the banned subs (despite being respites for complete jerks) may not have actually violated the current policies, after all.
Is it censorship? IMHO, it’s starting to lean that way. Time will tell.
Okay, that seems like a violation of both policy and just being a decent human being. But the word ‘censorship’ gets the knee-jerk reaction that could potentially push to get their bastion restored, which is why they (the jerks) keep throwing it around.
Be that as it may - according to the article I linked to, reddit is on track to do sweeping sub bans; no mention about policy violation, just that the subs targeted for removal are hate/shame subs. Voat (currently) is promoted as a site that will not ban anything that isn’t illegal. My question for that, however, is: which laws will be used to determine the legality of content? (Oddly enough, that very question was asked on Voat, recently.) Currently, Voat resides on servers in Switzerland.
In the US it’s pretty clear cut what is illegal and what is not as far as content goes. Basically it boils down to stuff that the large majority of the population finds appalling anyway (bestiality, sexualizing minors), which is the same in most of the civilized world. The grey area comes in with torrents and downloads, which pretty much no country is safe from that because the people pushing that have lots of money.
I wouldn’t get your hopes up for voat.co the developers moving to Switzerland and risking the things that the creators of TPB have went through.
So really… it boils down to “full freedom speech” is just allowing things that no slightly normal person would be ok with anyway. Like racism, hate speech, sociopath level misogyny (theredpill), and severed penises. All of which reddit still allows, and more. The whole censorship issue was pushed by the main reddit staff in the more visible sub’s to help attract more businesses to make the more money. Something that any community site will do eventually if they want to make money, or end up like 4chan and basically be worthless despite having hundreds of millions of unique visitors that would make any other site worth 10’s of billions of dollars in the current over-evaluation market… and that’s what reddit is going after right now. Good luck finding any site or company who wouldn’t.
I never said that I hoped devs would move to Switzerland, nor anything about the servers staying in Switzerland. I mentioned that CURRENTLY the servers are in Switzerland - which I believe is a country more open to speech than the US, but they do have extradition agreement with the US.
[quote=“mawburn, post:15, topic:195872”]
In the US it’s pretty clear cut what is illegal and what is not as far as content goes
[/quote]Agreed. In the US. However, reddit and voat are both international communities. Laws and societal mores/folkways aren’t always simpatico across cultures.
Yeah, the cartoon sums it up. This is not a free speech issue at all. The owners of the site have every right to decide what they do and don’t want on their site. We tend to forget that these sites—Facebook, Reddit and the like—are commercial entities. They are also content silos—exactly what we should be avoiding on the web, imho. (Haha—he says, posting on a forum. )
