this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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Ban the handful of moderators who run hundreds of subs between themselves, along with those responsible for moderating AgainstHateSubreddits and ShitRedditSays. Both communities in particular have done tonnes of damage to Reddit as a platform.
Add clear house rules that make Reddit a better place. Banning things like sexualised content of minors, involuntary/revenge porn, racial hatred, etc shouldn't come as a result of the press generating negative publicity and hurting Reddit's bottom line, they should be basic humanitarian requirements to run a social media platform. I mean look at the reason why they banned /r/NoNewNormal, they quoted some bullshit jargon statistics about vote manipulation and used that as a basis to ban them rather than doing what any sane person would do and forbid medical misinformation.
Make the official app actually good. There's a reason why tonnes of people use BaconReader, Apollo, Reddit Is Fun, etc, and why almost every web user prefers Reddit's old minimalistic UI, and it says a lot when a fediverse clone has a better rich text editor than the 'Fancy Pants Editor' of New Reddit...
Spez resigns and brings in somebody more like Aaron Swartz in terms of their beliefs on free speech to run the company.
Ala point 4, don't let Spez be the only fall guy. Not that it will change anything... but still.
Right. Remember when they brought in Ellen Pao to make all kinds of unpopular changes then got rid of her and kept the changes? She was intentionally a fall guy. People other than just Spez are making the decisions.
Right... and obviously spez's end goal here is to cash out. At which point he is presumably planning on quitting anyway.
What damage has this sub done?
AgainstHateSubreddits deem anything and everything they don't agree with a hate sub. For example, they've bunched communities like /r/SubredditCancer and /r/WatchRedditDie in the same group as places like /r/The_Donald, /r/TheRedPill, /r/KotakuInAction and other communities whose names I won't state here, as they contain racial slurs. They're also the reason why SRC was banned and WRD all but abandoned the site.
Some have also accused them of being agent provocateurs who infiltrate subs they don't like and post rule-breaking content (a bit like how law enforcement have been known to infiltrate and escalate peaceful protests into violence), but there's little to no evidence of this. I wouldn't put it past them though...
They are also the mods who think it's fine to run bots that trawl through any controversial sub and automatically ban anybody for even participating in these communities. It's the kind of crap that has turned Reddit into a partisan hellhole and not the bastion of open discussion that was originally envisioned.
As for ShitRedditSays,, I agree with their overall message that there is a lot of problematic content on Reddit, and I completely agree that Reddit should have taken action against legal grey-area subs far sooner and ditched their laissez-faire approach to content moderation, but I don't agree with the methods they've used to get their message across.
Can't find the specific Reddit comment but Yishan Wong (Reddit's former CEO) has gone on record to say that that they were at one point doxxing and harassing Reddit employees, yet nobody on the team had the nerve to actually ban them from the site.
Also, Violentacrez. Dude was a creep who served as a gatekeeper for some of the most morally decrepit communities on the site. I completely agree that he needed to go but not with how he was basically doxxed. I mean Adrian Chen remains the only Reddit user to dox another user and not be banned for it.
> AgainstHateSubreddits deem anything and everything they don’t agree with a hate sub.
Isn't that kinda the purpose of the subreddit by definition? The things they disagree with is bigotry, so I don't see why it's a surprise that the things they call out are things they disagree with.
But even if I did agree with you here, them being wrong about something doesn't automatically mean that they're doing damage.
> but there’s little to no evidence of this. I wouldn’t put it past them though…
If there is little to no evidence, why bring it up?
> It’s the kind of crap that has turned Reddit into a partisan hellhole and not the bastion of open discussion that was originally envisioned.
Is them doing that really the cause? Because it seems that political polarization is happening everywhere online.
> Can’t find the specific Reddit comment but Yishan Wong (Reddit’s former CEO) has gone on record to say that that they were at one point doxxing and harassing Reddit employees, yet nobody on the team had the nerve to actually ban them from the site.
I tend not to put too much belief into the word of reddit admins. Just look at the current drama between /u/spez and the Apollo dev Christian.
> I completely agree that he needed to go but not with how he was basically doxxed
Did this actually have anything to do with /r/againsthatesubreddits, or their mods?
There is a huge difference between hate speech and calling out Reddit's most prolific moderators for going on a power trip, especially when a lot of the bans posted on SRC were honestly unjustified.
Because it's a tactic commonly used by law enforcement and something AHS are commonly accused of. They're also in cahoots with the admins, and a lot of people distrust the site's admins.
It definitely started with them, and it's unfortunately also the same tactics that right-wing subreddits like /r/conservative and /r/the_donald adopted. Critical thinking is anathema in modern Reddit.
I dunno, I'd consider Yishan far more trustworthy than Spez or kn0thing. The former is looking to monetize the fuck out of Reddit while Alexis is a man of no principles who obviously left his position because his wife finally put her foot down and told him to stop giving hate speech a platform.
Nothing to do with AHS, but definitely everything to do with /r/ShitRedditSays.
They help shut down bigoted and hateful communities. Sounds good.
Buuut they're biased. Anything that's pro-ccp, pro-stalin, or even pro-holodomor is politely ignored by them. Likewise, they also operate racist subreddits towards white ethnic groups and encourage self-harm and suicide for vulnerable men.
There are also rumours of AHS posting ToS-violating content on subs they dislike, such as CP. Of course these don't have much substance aside from the fact that AHS previously trolled The_Donald by "leaking" a false document to The_Donald mod-team (meaning posting false content on other subs is something they have done).
> Buuut they’re biased. Anything that’s pro-ccp, pro-stalin, or even pro-holodomor is politely ignored by them
I was able to find these couple links on the first few page of AHS, so I'm not sure how true that is.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/13wfkdp/rcommunismmemes_once_again_denying_genocide_with/
https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/13mb194/disgusting_meme_on_rcommunismmemes_glorifying_the/
https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/zwo9u8/rcommunismmemes_glorifies_the_sovietsponsored/
https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/116lvi4/rgenzutin_posts_meme_accusing_drag_performers_of/
https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/142xsv3/network_of_proccp_subs_particularly_rthedeprogram/
Besides, following this to it's conclusion, if we are going to ban mods for doing damage to reddit (being biased), every subreddit would need to get nuked because everybody has biases.
> Likewise, they also operate racist subreddits towards white ethnic groups and encourage self-harm and suicide for vulnerable men.
What is the evidence for this?
> There are also rumours of AHS posting ToS-violating content on subs they dislike, such as CP.
I'm looking for more than just rumors.
> AHS previously trolled The_Donald by “leaking” a false document
Do you have a source for this?
SRS was really funny but hasn't been relevant in since like...2011? 2012? AHS are was a good sub.
If people took them seriously instead of forcing them to scream into the void, we'd be in a way different situation right now.