banned
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Welcome back! I admit I've been thinking of you when talking about someone who got Reddit-banned for doing something largely irrelevant.
Current plan is to keep things roughly as they are. I need to fix the pin system first but then I'll probably make sure it can do three pins. Gotta do some work on the theme. From there, it depends entirely on how much traffic we get; "the Motte is a pale shadow of its former self" is a very different outcome from "the Motte is thriving", and it remains to be seen where it goes from there.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Not an actual question, just a minor announcement that I am hh26 from Reddit. In case anyone has paid enough attention to notice or remember me. I figured the migration was a good opportunity to change names. "hh26" was originally intended to be a throwaway account when I started casually participating in pro-trump subreddits, to keep my main from getting banned or tarnished by leftists reading my comment history. I eventually got bored of most of the mainstream subs and ended up using my main less and less, so I haven't posted on it in years and hh26 became my main, (I also eventually got bored of the fanatical devotion of the explicitly pro-trump subreddits, slightly before they got banned, and ended up mostly here). But I also got stuck with the name hh26 which is kind of silly and unmemorable.
Additionally, this being a new site without all the usernames claimed means I can claim something relatively normal looking like MathWizard.
I don't especially have a lot of direct relationships here, but post semi-regularly and occasionally get Quality Contributioned and would like to carry forth whatever good will and reputation I may have with me. I look forward to more interesting discussions and not being awful to each other.
CircleCrossRectangle
1yr ago
I was wholeheartedly against the BLR on reddit, but think it might be needed here to get the ball rolling. I still think moving before admins outright banned us was a mistake, and that this site/community will surely die from lack of new users.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
I have no particularly well-known handles on The Motte or SSC. For disclosure's sake, I was banned multiple times and evaded bans multiple times through alternate accounts and IPs whenever I felt the urge to post; that urge was uncommon, with gaps of months and sometimes years, but it did happen.
I am endeavoring to follow the rules here, though I do hope being removed from Reddit's iron clutch will see the mods lighten up a bit and permit a broader range of discourse and perspectives. I have long wanted to make an effortpost justifying political violence, for instance, but never have.
Westerly
1yr ago
Wow after being permanently banned from reddit years ago this is nice. I can finally stop seething in silence and promptly get back to getting banned again
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Well I've actually shadowbanned a few trolls since then.
So . . . no. Sorry :V
faceh
1yr ago
Now lets be fair, this tactic is approximately as old as mass media is.
Slamming out barely-coherent sequels to books that became unexpected bestsellers, producing a whole series of films based on one hit, and using completely unrelated scripts with the familiar character names swapped in, or making a spinoff TV show using some side character just so people might watch what would otherwise be a generic sitcom.
You'd have a much harder time naming a piece of media that sprang up and grew into intense popularity without having some recognized and respected name attached, be it an actor, director, beloved character, or an established series.
It probably does hit harder for media properties that have a long history and have mostly avoided being exploited or cheapened for years or decades upon decades. But those media properties will be viewed as untapped gold mines by producers, rather than precious natural resources where further development should be banned and tourism restricted to maintain their pristine condition.
I guess I'd say that I agree with you and yet the proven preference of the median consumer/viewer is that they just want to see more of [thing they like] produced and aren't too picky about quality, so given that there's no enforceable rule against slapping an existing franchise's logo on an otherwise unrelated work or spitting out a low-quality sequel, spinoff, or adaptation, it is all but inevitable that it will happen to a series that you love... unless said franchise just isn't popular enough to warrant such sequels, spinoffs, etc.
tandem-modernity
1yr ago
If you're going to wait to move until after admins ban the subreddit, do you have a plan for how to tell people where to go?
I suppose it would be possible to have an announcement in advance "we expect to be banned at some point, go here when that happens". That feels less likely to succeed to me than an announcement "we're moving now, go here now".
EyesAlight
Formerly blendorgat
1yr ago
I'm also quite curious for an uncensored perspective on this. I knew it was bad, but the story below about being site-banned for coloring a pixel in the canvas thing is so far beyond what I knew about it really threw me. I've always pushed back against the ring of Gyges story, but if admins are willing to go that far just because they know no one will ever find out...
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Response posted!
For what it's worth, I originally thought they got banned for a pretty-innocuous post they made on The Motte. I'm not sure "we went to draw a cartoon cat on Place, so they banned me from the entire site" is better or worse.
karibilu
1yr ago
Now that we're off reddit, does anyone else remember when Reddit banned all links to Gawker.com because they ran this story back in 2012:
https://www.gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-the-biggest-troll-on-the-web
I'm not sure if the site link ban is still in effect. But if you're unfamiliar with this story, basically Gawker doxxed a prominent reddit moderator named Violentacrez, who had a lot of connections with the administration. This guy moderated a number of disgusting subreddits, the most notable of which was /r/jailbait, where Reddit users posted images of underaged girls. Moderators like Violentacrez even went so far as to remove images of females who looked 18 years or older. Reddit kept this moderator around under the guise of "free speech" but they even went beyond this: The admins gave him a unique "pimp hat" badge to commemorate his work, as he did offer tons of free labor and offered to moderate the seedy underbelly of reddit for free. And, for reference, this wasn't back when reddit was a small, unknown site. Rather, Violentacrez ran his own Ask Me Anything around the same time that Obama did, in which the former bragged about the time he got his 19 year old step-daughter to have consensual sex with him.
The only reason reddit forced out Violentacrez was because of increased public scrutiny, where they started to having to answer for providing institutional support for a pederast and a groomer. Yet if you throw the word around today, only a decade later, you're the one who will undergo the ban hammer.
Oh Reddit, may the next decade be as kind to you as the past decade has been to Deviant Art.
DDoS-Guard dropped them without warning.
see, the free market means companies cannot collude /sarcasm
same pattern we have seen in the past . one censors and the rest follow. alex jones another example
I think this is why it's so important to not get banned even if it means temporarily compromising. I posted yesterday that kiwi should have gone into hibernation mode while migrating instead of keeping the site up. This way they would have not been officially banned by Cloudflare. Being banned is the scarlet letter that makes it impossible to find alternatives. It was smart of TheMotte to begin migration b4 Reddit admins came down.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
@ZorbaTHut explained it (which is to say, there really isn't much more explanation than what we've said before).
My personal opinion is that we probably weren't in as much imminent danger of being banned as many people (including Zorba) believe, but it was inevitable that we would be banned someday. I always watched /r/CultureWarRoundup as a kind of canary, because despite their much smaller footprint, I honestly thought they'd get banned before we would. Their witches are pretty open, and SneerClub definitely knows about them, which means presumably they must get reported fairly frequently.
But I do have two things to contribute which I never would have posted on reddit. First of all, I will confirm that it was indeed Chtorrr who visited us and dropped the "friendly notice" in our mod channel.
And that being said, a few months back there was a "Mod Summit" (via Zoom) to which all subreddit mods were invited. I was the only motte mod who I guess was bored enough to zoom in (I even sent them questions! None of which made it to the queue that got answered, naturally). As you might expect, almost all the talks were about things like "How to build safe communities" and "How to self-care and preserve your mental health while having to deal with all these terrible people," etc.
The most valuable thing I got out of it were screenshots.
Without further comment: https://imgur.com/a/4oIS59D
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Note that we don't want people to use offensive terms in general. The big change here is that the words aren't banned, you can quote people using them and talk about them, but if you're using them to refer to a group you should probably just not do that.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
Using ad-blockers is antisocial behavior and should be discouraged or banned wherever possible. If you don't want to consume content that contains ads, don't consume the content if it contains ads. Simple as.
Advertiser supported content makes it possible for a much broader array of content creators to make a living producing commercially viable products. A world without advertising is a world with more paywalls and fewer creators making a living. See the decline of the newspaper for what content creation looks like without advertising dollars: fewer writers making a decent living, higher prices for less content, increasingly desperate catering to a tiny demographic target.
If you don't want advertising on your TV, don't watch OTA TV, limit your viewing to paid streaming services that don't show ads. If you don't like youtube ads, subscribe to premium. If you don't like reading essays with pop up ads, pay for a newspaper subscription, or if you're too cheap for that go to the library and read it for free. If you expect to google "How to fix my sink when it gurgles" and find the answer for free, you have to expect that the ads on the side of the page are paying the guy to make it.
If you think that putting advertising in your face is wrong, vote with your feet/wallet/eyeballs: reward content producers that offer alternative models. If content producers find that they're losing customers when they put up obnoxious ads, they'll stop doing it.
Can anyone offer me an argument in favor of ad-blockers that doesn't amount to some kind of misanthropic "The system, man, it's broken; so whatever I do against the system is a-ok"? I really can't even create a steelman for the ad-block position. I can understand the logic of not liking to be tracked, sure, and I find that a somewhat reasonable ask; but not viewing any ads that pay for the content you consume is just expecting the world to provide you with something free of charge.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Banning them alerts them to the fact that they've been banned, which encourages them to start a new account, which makes our jobs harder.
The thing about dealing with trolls is that you need to do two things:
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Make sure they're not having fun.
-
Spend as little of your effort as possible in order to spend as much of their effort as possible.
Shadowbanning is great for both of these; there's a point where they say "oh, wait, I've been trolling for two weeks and nobody saw any of it, that was . . . just wasted." And at the same time this means we get considerably more impact for our effort; we ban them half as often, or even a third as often.
I don't plan to use this for anything except trolls, but if someone is straight-up spamming (or, not-hypothetically, mass-downvoting), then I don't really feel bad about it; if they're going to play the game of Annoy The Other Person, then I will play that game too.
boo
1yr ago
The block button exists for a reason. If someone feels user X isn't contributing quality comments, they can block them. Or just downvote them if it's less extreme.
For literal spam sure I get it. But "trolls"? Such a subjective reason to open the door to redditry.
I personally will never put effort into anything in a place where I know I'll be banned at the drop of a hat. Why bother? Especially if, like you said, it may be silently hidden from everyone.
And maybe you only ban low quality dumb troll comments to a reasonable standard. But all it takes is you appointing another janny who's slightly less fair about determining who's a troll. Maybe you appoint a janny team that turns out to all be trans, and they start shadowbanning anyone who questions transdeology.
I just don't understand how groups that have been run off of reddit can still be drawn to strong moderation. I'd take a blockable troll over a power hungry moderator I can't do anything about any day of the week.
boo
1yr ago
All it takes is a janny who decides he doesn't like naughty words in any context and you'll be shadowbanned here too, there's no protection against redditization.
hustlegrinder
1yr ago
Can anyone offer me an argument in favor of ad-blockers that doesn't amount to some kind of misanthropic "The system, man, it's broken; so whatever I do against the system is a-ok"? I really can't even create a steelman for the ad-block position.
First, tracking is in fact a big problem and ad blockers are a practical solution to it. The adoption of ad blockers, by crippling the ability to track users in browsers, incentivises the ad networks to develop other ways to deliver ads that don't rely on tracking to such extent. See for example https://www.ethicalads.io/ . Hopefully that reduces the amount of surveillance that's going on.
Second, ad-blockers may need to be discouraged, but definitely shouldn't be banned; the last thing we need are more regulations on what we are and aren't allowed to run on our hardware. If the content creators and other businesses want their users to engage with ads or otherwise bring revenue, that's great, and such businesses should ensure that by means of technology or by the choice of their business model. Consider what Apple is doing with iOS, they arguably imposed a greater restriction on the vast majority of their users (in that all the apps and purchases have to go through the App Store), meanwhile jailbreaking your iPhone is legal and always has been. Or, in fact, see the recent efforts by Google. No regulation is necessary here.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
You showed up here saying that you got banned from the old site, and I think it's becoming clear why.
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
Some of the things we discuss are controversial, and even stating a controversial belief can antagonize people. That's OK, you can't avoid that, but try to phrase it in the least antagonistic manner possible. If a reasonable reader would find something antagonistic, and it could have been phrased in a way that preserves the core meaning but dramatically reduces the antagonism, then it probably should have been phrased differently.
Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
Also known as the "hot take" rule.
If you're saying something that's deeply out of the ordinary or difficult-to-defend, the next person is going to ask you to explain what you mean. You can head this off by explaining what you mean before hitting submit. The alternative is that the first half-dozen responses will all be "can you explain in more detail", which increases clutter and makes it much harder to follow the conversation.
I have an entire mod queue full of partisan flaming from you, and that's after I already handed you a warning. (Which isn't visible unless you hit "more comments", we clearly need to do a better job of permalinks.)
I'm giving you a one-day ban; you either need to behave a lot differently or find another site.
You tell us who it is, basically; private messages don't yet have a report button.
If it's who I think it is, they're already shadowbanned, it turns out that just doesn't apply to private messages and we have to fix that.
Edit: Shadowbanning should apply to private messages; if you're still having trouble with a user, send me a PM.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
We've silently banned a number of trolls, but I think this is the first not-a-straight-up-troll ban.
I didn't say the reddit admins secretly liked that content. Rather, they liked the members who moderated those seedy subreddits. I would also disagree with your portrayal of my drawing of the cultural lines. Regardless of the more tech libertarian origins versus the more outright social liberal position today, Reddit has always been anti-social conservatives, specifically Evangelicals. R/atheism used to be one of the default subreddits and the thrust of its content was not atheists discussing atheism intellectually but rather them deriding Evangelicals as bigoted idiots. This theme continues today- just yesterday, the top post I saw on reddit was some secret gay conservative Christian getting outed.
I also don't agree banning jailbait led to a slippery slope. You can have site rules that are required to participate, without micromanaging the opinion of users on your site. So, you can ban images that abuse the bodies of children as a site rule. The problem is when these rules are applied inconsistently or in a biased manner. For instance, to Reddit, it's fine to saying completely bigoted things against Christians about how dumb they are because of a religious position they hold, but woe unto thee if you say anything slightly antagonistic about someone who is transgender. It's fine to make fun of people whose conscience has been seared towards a certain religious identify but not those compelled to a certain gender identity. And also, it's even fine to make fun of certain gender identities (see /r/femaledatingstrategy)! So, discrimination is bad except when it's not per reddit.
For me, the dye was cast when reddit banned the incels. There, one deranged individual on the subreddit, who was planning violence, was invoked as the reason to ban the whole subreddit, even though the subreddit had rules against that kind of behavior and would have banned that member for that behavior. We all know the reason Reddit banned it was because it was a zoo for them and was getting bad publicity. The subreddit /r/femaledatingstrategy is just as sexist and disgusting, but no bans for it.
To kinda tie it back to this site, I feel like we could easily gain the same level of harassment just for hosting wrongthink, but the only reason we haven't is because we have stricter standards on behavior and we write long and nuanced posts that are hard to take out of context (compare Kiwi Farms which, while they might not harass people themselves, will routinely dox people who have no opsec). Still, though, there are already communities dedicated to do, well, exactly that - take nuanced posts out of context and paint us all as some sort of menace to society. But Kiwi Farms is a good example of what a completely legal site needs to do if it wants to stay up. Null has had to move hosts and VPSes countless times, move domain registrars, spend thousands of dollars on hardware and DDoS mitigation, move to Ukraine (and later Serbia) to reduce personal expenses, hire lawyers and pay thousands of dollars in legal fees to fight several frivolous lawsuits, and do it all while he's been banned for most of the time from using Visa and Mastercard. The site's history is a harrowing tale of what harassment mobs can do if they just yell at someone for long enough, and I hope we never have to go down that path. We've already had to move off of /r/SlateStarCodex and now even our own subreddit due to the increasing tension of people who just can't stand living in the same world with people whose speech they don't like.
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