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Comment by alexcharlie | Hacker News Reader

Countries can lean on Google and Apple and say "Get this app out of my country." We are rolling out one by one so that we can stay on top of the content reports. Reddit has a lot of potentially controversial content and countries have various levels of sensitivity to that. It would be counter productive to go global now, get banned in a bunch of places, and then have to fight protracted battles in a bunch of different places to get back into those stores. See: Secret in Brazil.

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This doesn't make any sense. If they would ban the app, wouldn't they also ban the website?

Secret is a different case, the purpose of the app is to anonymous communication, I can see why Brazil has a problem with it (mass protests recently, protestors probably using secret, amongst other things)

Exactly, so far as I know Reddit already responsibly complies with subpoenas. Secret is designed to defeat that process and is completely unlike Reddit.

Not to mention other apps are available worldwide.

Didn't Russia ban Reddit for some mushroom thing?

Let's keep in mind that you also didn't release it in much more open countries than the UK or the US.

If you worry that countries like Germany or Switzerland might censor you out of the market because of reddit controversities you'd probably overestimated reddits emotional potential.

Their concerns seem grounded in reality, as Germany does censor Reddit[1].

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChillingEffects/comments/3gw9g1/201...

Hmm, works for me. But fair enough, I see the point.

Reddit (as a page) is still up and running for everyone. I can't see how an app would be more controversial.

To make this clear: Nobody in Germany requested a takedown of that subreddit. A German agency (BPJM) sent Reddit a letter with a few questions about that subreddit. Reddit then blocked the site for German IPs but it was not requested to do so.

The BPJM does not have authority to block foreign websites. They do maintain a (non-public) list of websites deemed harmful to the youth which e.g Google uses to not show certain sites to German users. They planned to add that subreddit to this list.

That's quite far from censoring but rather Reddit censoring itself.

> That's quite far from censoring but rather Reddit censoring itself.

While you're completely correct, and this case is exactly that, the end result is the same isn't it?

They can hardly argue legal compliance as a reason, when they go beyond what's legally required of them.

Not really, because reddit had a choice not to censor itself. The result would have been that /r/watchpeopledie would be not findable in German Google with safe search on, and that it would be blocked in all schools, and if you install a family blocker software at home.

Reddit really has a really hard to follow rule as to what content is or isn't allowed.

The point here is that the subreddit works fine almost everywhere in the world. Just if you try accessing it with a German IP Reddit voluntarily decided not to return content.

I was thinking more along the lines of what subreddits they still allow and what subreddits have been banned (or at least 'encouraged' to go private).

I'm not sure but I thought that Google doesn't show websites listed in the BPJM-Modul at all in Germany, even with safe search off. Does anyone know whether this is documented somewhere?

I’m not sure either, but I know that legally, they can show that stuff.

You opened it in exactly the set of Anglo-Saxon countries (minus New Zealand). You're saying this was a coincidence?

Thanks for the details on why you're doing it slowly. Can you please also explain why you did not do either of the things i mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11447494 Or maybe say whether you even plan to do any of them. It's easy to go "yeah they're just self-focused", but it would be nice to know what the actual process was.

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