Over twenty subreddits have gone private | Hacker News Reader

Over twenty subreddits have gone private

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246 pointsgiancarlostoro207 comments

It appears to be fallout from the admin(s) banning people over any mention of that UK ex-politician's name. Checking the top subreddit hit I see this message:

> Music is joining many subreddits in condemning child abuse and censorship. Reddit has hired a known enabler & protector of a convicted child rapist & torturer. Mentions of their name are being removed, and the posters banned. We are private in protest of Reddit's conduct; we demand actionable statements from the admins. Below are the facts as we understand them now. This is an evolving situation, and we will keep you updated, but the urgency of the issue demands action. https://redd.it/mbmthf

More info: https://www.reddit.com/user/Blank-Cheque/comments/mbmthf/why...

this is the largest-magnitude streisand effect event I can remember. No way even 0.1% of the people learning about this now would have heard about this obscure UK figure if not for the censorship.

>It appears to be fallout from the admin(s) banning people over any mention of that UK ex-politician's name.

Apparently one of the reddit admins is the ex-politician.

In case people what not know what is going on https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/aug/27/greens-risi...

The article seems to indicate that this person was not involved, and had no knowledge. They were also never charged.

I mean, the situation itself is quite horrifying, but I'm unclear as to why this should cause such an uproar. Guilt-by-association is already tough, but now guilt-by-relation? That's going to be tough the world around.

>She added: “Yes, he was my election agent. This was one of a number of ways I was seeking to reconcile my relationship with my father after coming out of care. On reflection, I can understand that it was unacceptable for me to appoint my dad as my election agent when he had been arrested.”

Do you really think that someone hiring a convicted pedophile as their election agent isn't a big deal? Doesn't it make you wonder why reddit hired this person, and then made a top-down effort to suppress their name?

Well, minor nit here, the father was not convicted when they were hired.

They received 22 years when they were convicted, so unlikely to be working anywhere.

But who knows what the father told his child. I mean most reasonable people would not believe their parent capable of such horrors, even if they were charged.

> I mean most reasonable people would not believe their parent capable of such horrors, even if they were charged.

Blind faith in friends/family is absolutely NOT reasonable. If I'm supposed to believe a system convicts strangers accurately, then it follows people you know are accurately convicted.

You seem to have a problem with the arrest / conviction timeline.

The father was arrested, hired, then convicted and sent to jail. It is entirely possible to believe one's friends & family after their arrest, but completely change your mind once they are convicted.

What am I missing here?

Edit: maybe you are unfamiliar with Western justice systems where people are able to post a bond and remain free until the verdict and/or sentencing phase?

The father was hired after his arrest. To me, that's troubling. It suggests bad judgement...and the Greens and Lib. Dems both agree with me.

Further, I don't believe in the existence of a 50 year old man who one day decides to rape and torture a 10 year old child. I believe he's guilty of more than that though I have nothing to support that assertion except my priors about how pedophilia works. Nevertheless, I'm fairly confident of those priors and so is our justice system: there's a reason sex offenders are forced to register.

Progressives seem unable to ferret out deeply troubling behavior as long as it is associated with certain minority groups. I do fear for backlash against innocent people by those with the opposite bias but that's no excuse to downplay what's going on here.

I absolutely 100% agree with you.

But I am trying to decide if the internet brigade is upset because they think this person is guilty of more than they are letting on, or if they are guilty of extremely poor judgment, and the internet is never going to let them forget it.

I further wonder how long people can be punished for exercising extremely poor judgment, or at least making the wrong call when the optics are already extremely poor.

>I further wonder how long people can be punished for exercising extremely poor judgment, or at least making the wrong call when the optics are already extremely poor.

I really think you're being too generous. If someone told me their chosen campaign manager was a man who had been arrested for raping and torturing a child, conviction or not, I would not give this person the benefit of the doubt. She claims she didn't know the "extent of the crimes" - even if that's true, it's a complete failure on her end, because she should have known. I also find it very concerning that reddit would hire a person with a history of "extremely poor judgement" as an admin (it's already concerning she's a mod of so many subreddits) given that reddit has millions of users and lots of them are children.

I'm going to presume we mean literal torture here, and not rape being akin to torture.

Sadistic behavior is indeed a risk factor which puts someone at a heightened risk of re-offending over other child rapists (this isn't to say sadistic fantasy will lead to such crimes in someone who is more empathetic).

If the individual is psychopathic, there have been some recent breakthroughs which show it is possible to treat such individuals, but researchers call for more research in this area. A couple of programs look promising.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/opinion/when-junk-science... Not all sex offenders have the same risk factor (sex offense is a very vague term, and unfortunately, one people associate strongly with the worst kinds), and the risk factor for a lot of them is fairly low.

Courts are moving towards more individualized assessments of recidivism to determine what tier of risk they should assign someone to.

There are a few questions I would ask here in connection to this case:

Has he been taking any sort of drug?

Does he have any mental health issues?

Has he had any recent head injuries?

Does he have a brain tumor?

>What am I missing here?

I guess you are missing the tendency of most people to decide that a man who was arrested for torturing and raping a child should not be a part of any kind of governmental campaign. I understand he wasn't yet convicted, and that presumption of innocence is fundamental to our justice system. But I also understand that charges like these don't appear out of thin air, and that charges are usually only made by authorities if a conviction is highly probable. And finally, I find it pretty absurd that one could live in the same house as this person and not have a clue as to what was going on.

Just imagine being in the green party and hearing about this. "Hey guys, I chose my dad as my manager. He's currently on trial for torturing and raping a child, but fingers crossed!!!"

Her father was charged in 2016, hired by her in 2017, and sentenced in 2018.

If she was not aware at the time about the horrible events taking place in her home, between 2016 and 2017 whenever she has spoken to her father there must have been an elephant of just enormous proportions in the room.

Did she talk to him about this at all before hiring him? Did she end up being fully convinced by him that the allegations are false? If she were, how come she did not make great noise about her father being put in jail despite being innocent and only claims that she didn’t know?

No matter how you spin it, legal system is never perfect and there are dark grey areas that aren’t captured by law—the reason vetting/background check processes exist.

Who her husband is certainly isn't helping matters.

https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/something-rotten-at-the...

I actually got blinded by the first two mentions of conviction that it didn't even register that you said charged even though I quoted it. But still, blind faith is still unreasonable. Would you hire a stranger charged with rape if they gave you a serious alibi? A verifiable "I wasn't even in the country, here are receipts and photos" type alibi. Most people would say "we'll wait until the charges are dropped to make it official but you got the job".

One can believe in the system but still doubt it when personally affected by one of it's decision, as hypocrite as it might appear on a surface level, that's actually an entirely human reaction.

Pretty much everybody would ere on the side of the accused when they happen to be somebody they are very close with, like a parent, sibling or child, due to the emotional attachment we tend to have to people like that vs strangers.

If we're going to minor nit, they lied about the father's name to try to get that hire in under the radar and it led to their expulsion from the party.

This might be hearsay, but I read that the father was hired under a false name while he was being on bail.

Of course, we must apply some innocent until proven guilty principle before reaching to somr conclusion, but reddit (nor any modern social network) have never been known to apply the same standard

She lived in the house during the time that the child was chained up, tortured, and raped over the course of numerous days. I find it hard to believe she wasn't aware of at least some of it. I also don't find it hard to believe that there isn't enough evidence to prove she was aware in a court of law.

This is a very serious allegation. She says she was in the house off and on, and it appears she had a complicated relationship with her father (this is not at all surprising given the context).

I am not saying it is not true, but it is pure speculation on your part, unless you were somehow part of the investigative team, and a very dangerous idea to just throw out there with nothing more than conjecture and circumstantial reasoning.

The Reddit administration continues to make terrible decisions as usual. The site's a far cry from how it was 10 years ago.

Perhaps what makes this case most interesting is they're in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. If they fire the admin, they'll likely be labeled as *-phobic, but if they don't, they'll likely be branded as pedophile supporters.

The idea that this person got through HR without a cursory google search is crazy, or worse, the idea that they hired them knowing their history is frightening.

Being trans is not a free pass to be pro-pedophilia and it's absurd that this could be considered a controversial take.

It's absurd to me that you consider this person to be 'pro-pedophilia' - where on earth do you get that from?

You need to do more research around said person. Who they married specifically.

her partner and father are both pedos. 'pro-pedophillia' isn't much of a stretch

Telling lies to protect a horrifically abusive pedophile father and a pedophile husband, just for starters.

There are aspects of this you probably just don't want to delve into. Ignore the people telling you to do research, it's not worth it.

If you marry someone who "...under the account name Nathaniel Knight said: “I fantasise about children having sex, sometimes with adults, sometimes with other children, sometimes kidnapped and forced into bad situations.”" you are pro-pedophile.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lib-dems-suspend-trans-ca...

It's a pretty hard decision: on one hand you can let it continue and potentially make take some reputation damage, on the other hand you can try to silence but there's a chance that the Streisand effect will make the situation worse.

Hard call to make really, as by it's very nature we don't know how often a silencing situation triggers the effect.

10 years ago pedophilia was prominent on the site, alongside numerous hateful subreddits and questionable content. It was like 4chan with worse moderation due to scale. Porn barely cracks /r/all anymore.

porn is no longer allowed (well, cannot reach) on /r/all

Specifically subreddits marked NSFW aren't allowed on /r/all. NSFW posts from regular subs still get through

There was /r/jailbait. There was also the time the CEO defended /r/thefappening and copyright infringement. It got awkward when some of the girls in the pictures said they were minors when the pics were taken. Oops.

Not CP, but there was also /r/creepshots. Ironically, that was more legal than /r/thefappening.

Only from last week where they decided to hide NSFW posts from /r/all

This old stuff by internet standards but historically the reddit administration has been uncomfortably friendly to pedophiles on its site.

It, for YEARS, had at least a dozen (public!) subs that were explicitly for exchanging sexual photos of underaged people and it was an open secret that DMs with power users there was a way to access actual child porn.

They gave a site-wide award to a power-mod who managed a huge number of these and other awful subs. They finally banned the subreddits when it got media attention. People on the site had been calling for them to do it for years.

Also that tweet by former CEO Ellen Pao where she admitted to attending parties with Ghislaine Maxwell while knowing about the pedo sex trafficking

https://twitter.com/ekp/status/1280020996460670976

It's fascinating to look at the thread about this on r/ModSupport (https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/mbqgx2/a_clarif...). Highly upvoted comments condemning Reddit with 50+ awards. But note that many of the posters edited their posts saying "don't give me awards". This shows a contradiction in trying to do the right thing while in public.

We have reasonably good solutions for problems like this: they are democratic, representative ideals. They involve anonymously measuring everyone's opinion (voting). Or randomly selecting from within a population (juries). The internet is creating an unregulated situation with none of these safeguards. If there is a solution to this problem, I don't think it is top-down control, I think it is the spreading of our democratic, representative ideals to the internet and into, yes, private companies. Not all of them, but certainly Reddit.

I think much of the reason that these kinds of discussions are chaotic is that we are so unaccustomed to thinking about what formal principles and tools that self-governed communities might decide to use. In the case of reddit, there is a tension between Reddit the company and it's use of the top-down power it has, and Reddit the admin community, and the general user community.

Yeah, I've always thought it weird that in addition to the ideas of democratic decision making (juries, voting) we don't apply the known standards of jurisprudence online - rules of evidence, right to representation, right to trail, right to confront your accuser, no ex post facto laws etc. For all their faults, these are the best that the world's been able to come up with for keeping the peace and resolving conflict.

Not saying they should be imposed from without by law, but that even from Reddit's own perspective it could be beneficial to be known as a fair site. It just requires high distribution of knowledge and information, without much manipulation for a population to consistently see and hold to these complex values.

> But note that many of the posters edited their posts saying "don't give me awards". This shows a contradiction between trying to do the right thing while in public.

This is a phenomenon all over reddit and not unique to this situation in subreddit comments sections, it's been going on ever since reddit rolled out the paid gold concept. A non-zero number of people edit their comments (when they get popular) to the like of "stop giving me awards, go donate to this charity instead" to try and get readers to spend their money on a good cause related to the post subject matter. (I love animals subreddits, so see it a lot in the various places "go donate to this shelter / coservation" or similar attempt to redirect money)

In this case people are saying "don't give me awards, you're sending the subject of my complaint money"

Same thing happens when someone rants about the New reddit (redesign) or some other "I don't like this at all" post/comment about reddit itself - people start giving it awards if they agree. shakes head like Foghorn Leghorn

I find that whole thing a bit odd considering the "award spam" only got as extreme as it's now when Reddit started handing out temporary free awards to users for them to give away in addition to the occasional gold coins.

Case in point: I never spend money on Reddit yet I have given out a whole bunch of awards.

Organizing this with a bunch of alt accounts should make it trivial to just hand out mass-awards for free.

My take is it applies to a certain personality type (not sure what kind, not my specialty - just see the patterns) - on last year's profile I got some sort of award for just joining a sub or making a comment or some other no-value low-effort action. shrug It maybe ties into whether giving away awards for any reason was part of your school/childhood? Wasn't part of mine so not embedded in my psyche? (just pondering)

If anything the last two decades have taught me to question putting all the eggs in the raw democracy basket. The baseline contributer doesn't invest a lot of thinking into the often quite significant stakes at hand. The opportunist knows this, and exploits these populations for their vote. In the end the system is still controlled by a small influential few, but now their actions are sanctified by being supported by the democratic vote and it is now much more difficult to get rid of these opportunists when so many blindly support them against their own interests.

Using an internet example, if we didn't like the bent of the admin team of a site today, we find another website maintained by someone with shared interests. If we remove top down control and enable the masses to control a site like reddit, then you really are handing the keys directly to the opportunists, and every site will have the same voices eventually churn to the top.

Organic democratic voices simply don't exist on this for profit commercialized internet we've constructed over the last two decades. SEO wins, virality wins, pandering to xenophobic fears and conspiracy theories wins over data and facts. We are a far cry from the learned men of Athens discussing the affairs of the city from the Pnyx; democracy today is like the dirty rowdy bar by the city gate where people are complaining about immigrants speaking foreign languages coming to the docks.

I am contrasting juries and representative systems (republican ideas) with "raw democracy," which is fundamentally mob rule.

We haven't always viewed the Athenians as "learned men". Polybius judged Athens negatively: he saw the Athenians as an example of mob rule. We also have ancient commentators like the Old Oligarch, who was critical of Athenian democracy (though he saw its utility).

Of course the measures I mentioned to curtail mob rule are not completely effective. What I'm saying is, we seem to be in the process of reinventing the wheel and so let's take look at our existing vehicles, which function fairly well.

I remember when Reddit was considered a bastion of free speech. It's amazing how the culture's changed so quickly. But it does appear like this particular incident is a mistake made by automated moderation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/mbqgx2/a_clarif...

It was only founded in 2005 and hasn't been a bastion of free speech since at least 2016 or 2017, in my opinion. So while I wouldn't say reddit's culture has changed that quickly, American culture certainly has as it's gravitated towards mainstream media shutting down non-PC topics and content

As recently as 2018, the company was taking a pretty strong stance (https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-44779237), deliberately avoiding a hate speech ban and saying things like "we are not the thought police".

I would argue they say that in public but massive content manipulation through moderation is not even a secret.

I agree and would go further to say that's obvious. Why would a company not say whatever's safest and most beneficial to their image?

Let's say the company was acting like the thought police. Do you think they would go and publicly announce that "we are the thought police"? PR statements have as much value to me as a pigeon's fart.

As a regular user I don't have any visibility into the leadership, but it's been obvious for years that at least at the level of users and moderators, there has been a hard shift away from free speech like there was in the earlier days. I only joined reddit in 2011/2012, but even then there was still a strong feeling of free speech, which includes the freedom to heinous and despicable (but legal) speech. Maybe the leadership tried protecting free speech in 2018, but users and moderators had long since drifted away from promoting free speech by that point.

> Let's say the company was acting like the thought police. Do you think they would go and publicly announce that "we are the thought police"?

I do. They wouldn't say it in exactly that way, but they would (and did: https://www.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045715951) post an explanation of which thoughts are so hateful they need to be policed.

Reddit has never been a bastion of anything. One sub is radically different from another. Maybe you mean they allowed the subs to do whatever they wanted in their own sub as long as it wasn't illegal, but that seemingly hasn't been the case for a while.

They pretty much do allow subs to do whatever they want as long as it isn't illegal and also as long as it doesn't draw negative media attention to reddit.

They will usually crack down on the latter. They will sometimes ban illegal activity subs unprovoked but really it's fairly rare right up until they draw outside attention.

> They pretty much do allow subs to do whatever they want

Haven't been on Reddit in a few years, eh?

Yes, that's what I mean. They allowed the subs to self-manage. They also explicitly and publicly expressed support for open discourse and admin non-interference.

The subreddit mod in question seems to have some convincing arguments against the "automated moderation" spin: https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/mbytxw/daily_me...

I can't figure out where this association ever came about. I literally only ever hear the phrase "bastion of free speech" when it's in relation to Reddit and not any other social media platform. Why is Reddit always the go-to for free speech? It honestly feels almost like an astroturfed term at this point.

They explicitly defended and espoused free speech/open discourse in the early days. It was very much part of the ethos. One of their founders (Aaron Schwartz) was a famous activist in areas intersecting with free speech. They were known for allowing edgy content on their platform, even if they didn't approve of it, like exotic but legal porn and stuff like FiftyFifty. There was really huge pushback from the community in the mid 2010s to instances of censorship. In 2012 their CEO specifically said "we stand for free speech".

https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/15/8964995/reddit-free-speec...

Reddit also used to be open source, but they moved on from that, too.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/mbzggv/why_ha...

This seemed like a decent summary of what happened and why. Though I am not sure of the accuracy.

I think the most detailed one I've seen is also this one:

https://www.reddit.com/user/Blank-Cheque/comments/mbmthf/why...

The Blank-Cheque user isn't a paragon of morality either though.

He's not being paid by Reddit and abusing his admin access.

Related discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26557175 (365 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26554697 (89 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26556187 (29 comments)

I find rather curious that these discussion have been flagged

The discussions these kind of submissions generate tend to get overly political. It's also hard to justify that every internet controversy is suitable content for HN - I think it's more likely that dang et al. allow the submission slide for a while out of "public interest" and to centralise comments on a single submission (before then dropping it off the front page).

This is awesome. I've been reading about the complaints from mods regarding the way admins do things without any consultation or even warning for years, so it's pretty cool to see it happen the other way for once. I have 0 faith that reddit will do anything reasonable here, so I'm pretty curious to see what happens next.

It kind of unbelievable that reddit would hire someone as an admin that has such a colored and sketch background. They need to fire her asap.

Can you imagine the backlash. They walked into a stupid situation. The backlash of terminating this person will be labeled as Anti Trans, Supportive of Trans Harrasment etc.. Even though none of that even matters.

Someone surrounded and involved with issues related to Pedophilia is something I feel would show up on a background check. So now you have to question both their bg checks and their motives for hiring.

If the goal was to find someone that is Trans, i'm sure there are plenty of people that are free of crazy controversies that would do the job well.

If they don't fire this person, then they're going to face a revolt, if they do, they face a revolt. Stupid on Reddit. Though that seems par the course these days.

I'm trans and was initially sympathetic to her by default (seeing pitchforks raised against a trans woman), but now that I've read up on what she's done and who she's married to/protecting I think her conduct is inexcusable, and she should be fired.

Trans people can suck the way people in general suck. I'm only touchy when they're targeted for being trans instead of for being sucky.

The problem is that it's very difficult to target trans people for being sucky without being accused of the former.

Yea I haven’t found a way to do that, I know many trans people who are absolute bastards but can’t really say that out loud if I care for my reputation.

It's not helped by people using sources such as Linehan who are using this person's bad behaviour to bash all trans people

bash all trans people, or bash the trans-movement? Don't confuse the church for the religion.

What is the trans movement if not the movement for acceptance of trans people? I don't see a meaningful distinction between bashing the idea that trans people should be accepted and bashing trans people.

There's of course the right wing strawman of what a trans movement is with ideas of forcing children to be gender neutral or opposite gender or bathroom panics, or that super straight needs to be a thing etc., but presenting that strawman is something that is bashing trans people

Tolerance and membership are distinct. I can tolerate those who believe in god without believing in god myself.

Acceptance of trans people, and subscription to their beliefs about sex/gender are distinct. There are lots of trans movements that operate on the assumption that they are not, hence refusal to believe in aspects of queer theory is the same as not tolerating trans people.

I personally think that while there should be some restriction on behaviour, and on what can be said; there should be no restriction on belief, or mandating what must be said. The idea that the latter are a natural or normal part of tolerance I find chilling.

As for your right wing straw man comment: I put it on you to prove those things are straw men, for there are certainly people who will call you a transphobe for disagreeing with any of them - those people are not right wing creations or fictions.

Case in point: she actually cited transphobia as the reason for her resignation from the party, essentially weaponising own minority status.

> labeled as Anti Trans, Supportive of Trans Harassment etc

Reminds me of Black peoples comments on the current fad of banning the terms master and slave. 'No one's asked us what we think'

I suspect Reddit's backup plan if going public doesn't work out is to use the villianous admin team they've created to try and take over the world.

Jokes aside, reddit has terrible admins and the "anti-evil team" has taken the site fully 1984. I suspect the current hire is less the exception and more par for the course.

It's pretty believable. I wouldn't have thought to flag a potential employee based on crimes that someone else did.

It's one thing when your father rapes and tortures a young child a thousand miles away and you have no contact with him.

It's another when it's over the course of several days, in your own home that you were staying in, while claiming to have no clue AND then you hire your father as an election manager.

It probably didn't help the husband is also a prolific writer of pedofilic fantasy.

I did not know that aimee was born in 1997, nor can I find when her father's crimes actually transpired, other than that he was convicted in 2018. My initial impression was that aimee was a transwomen well into adult hood (an adult complicit in these crimes).

This whole thing is going to blow up spectacularly if it comes out that the father committed these crimes when she was in her teens, and she is a product of being a victim in an abusive household.

> This whole thing is going to blow up spectacularly if it comes out that the father committed these crimes when she was in her teens, and she is a product of being a victim in an abusive household.

I don't think people care, even Linehan accepted as much in his final paragraph

When convictions and crimes are being investigated there's room to have doubt or not speak up, exigent circumstance, etc.

Still doubling down years later as an otherwise functional adult removes any ethical cover.

I don't understand, did she double down that her dad was innocent/what he did was ok?

All I am aware of is that she says she did not know it was happening. And frankly if she was only 15 or something at the time, I would likely believe her. I would also leave open the possibility the she was being abused too, and feared retribution.

She hired a family member awaiting trial for raping and torturing a young child to a governmental position. That decision should be enough to flag any potential employee for having bad judgement.

Reddit has a checkered history with their admins.

For example, Violentacrez: https://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-th...

In another instance MaxwellHill: https://www.inputmag.com/culture/is-ghislaine-maxwell-secret...

Reddit's hiring practices need some reform.

Neither of them were admins, as far as I know. They were just moderators of their own subreddits. Anyone can be a mod.

In this case, Aimee is an employee of Reddit.

Neither of those were admins. On Reddit, Admins are paid reddit employees tasked with enforcing sitewide rules. ViolentAcrez and MaxwellHill were both Mods, volunteers who determine and enforce the rules for individual subreddits.

The MaxwellHill account is NOT Ghislaine Maxwell, that's just a straight up far fetched conspiracy theory.

Huh? You can’t even be a lowly admin and have nonconforming thoughts?

Society will require purity pledges to be a janitor soon.

The bar for employment for an Admin should be higher than other positions. It's a position of authority and power. Just as you'd want better background check on a police officer than someone working fast food. Both are needed, but one needs to be much more thorough.

Admins control the narrative and messaging on Reddit, which is their core business interest. Reddit should treat those positions as critical and a risk (in fact if they IPO I would imagine these kinds of controversies are listed in their risks).

No one is asking for purity, but you do need objective people that are more nuanced than the average. This individual has a background with multiple questionable situations. Many of which are recent.

I guess everyone's in favour of cancel culture now. /s

(this is a joke, but also a very serious point that everyone has a "I don't want person X employed by organization Y" threshold, but for different things)

No one really cared about her or any of this until Reddit started banning anyone who mentioned her name...

So yeah, people now want her to be fired as retribution for the events that have transpired over the last few days.

But also, what RMS did is not comparable to what Aimee Challenor has done. The context is wildly different so your comparison is disingenuous.

I didn't mention RMS, there have been a large number of incidents over the past few years which have been called "cancel culture".

You joke but it's pretty funny to see this double standard pop up. People will screech and complain about "cancel culture" and then turn around and say stuff like "vote with your dollar" or "boycott <company>" without a hint of irony.

Targeting a company for their own policies and actions is much different than targeting a company because someone you don't agree with works there. That is the difference I see between boycotts and cancel culture.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this is reading how much these posts come off like Harry Potter -- people terribly frightened to tell the truth, and resorting to back channels and whispers of what happened, and "He who shall not be named".

I don't buy the excuse that this is to prevent doxxing. This really seems to be primarily out of fear of being shadow banned.

Full list of subreddits here: https://www.reddit.com/user/Blank-Cheque/comments/mc9ave/lis...

Definitely interesting to see how this "users vs. admins" situation will play out.

Surprised finally one of those threads is allowed to stay on the front page after all so far were quickly rejected upon reaching it since yesterday.

Several of them made and stayed on the front page for a decent amount of time. They mostly devolved into flame wars. This gets two penalties, when it happens: some people flag the post because its comment section is useless and obnoxious; the flame war detector kicks in and starts dropping it down the list.

Based on the initial comments here, expect that to happen again with this post.

Mine (first one) was rejected while it still had only 3 comments (no flaming) and the flagged modifier only appeared 5 hours or so later.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26554697

More interesting backstory here: https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/something-rotten-at-the...

This whole thing is a massive yikes from me. She even called the child victim a 'lying little slut': https://twitter.com/fixedforlicks/status/1035647401783173121...

That appears to be the mother of the person in question. Nevertheless, what a charming family...

Will this thread be flagged and removed from HN as it were with the others?

Kinda noticing pattern here.

LOL

I'm so glad I quit Reddit! It's more of a cesspool than it was even last year.

how did you manage to do it? Quitting smoking was way easier than quitting reddit :( I even uninstalled the mobile app and occasionally scroll throgh web version.

You don't have to quit cold turkey, but do set up an RSS reader and begin adding the feeds of every single interesting website you find on content aggregators like reddit/HN. Eventually, over the course of months or years, you'll grow your local RSS feeds like large enough to wean off centralized corporate aggregators.

Very helpful idea! Do you have any recommendations for interesting websites you like?

Here's a categorized HTML unordered list of all of my feeds as of about a month ago, http://superkuh.com/feeds6.html . The RSS icon links to the feed, the text to the right links to the associated website.

If you want the straight opml: http://superkuh.com/rss-feeds-2021.opml

Here's what I did, I put up roadblocks to mindless browsing: Use firefox nightly on android and do the hackery required to install arbitrary extensions, and install the "Request Blocker" extension. Block all browsing front pages, /r/all /r/popular /r/pics or whichever subreddit you want to block yourself from.

    *://*.reddit.com/r/all/
    *://*.reddit.com/r/popular/
    *://*.reddit.com/

Also do this on your desktop machines.

Also, I use old reddit on my desktop, and I use ublock origin to remove the entire bar of links at the top.

    www.reddit.com###sr-header-area

These blocks are permanent. If I run across an important link on reddit from a google search, or someone sends me a link, I can view it. But what I can't do, is browse the front page or dumb subreddits.

I went cold turkey at the start of Trump’s presidency. Although I will break it for specific searches such as “compare X vs Y item” when shopping, or to view links my wife sends. Wasn’t as hard as kicking my TikTok habit. It’s become a hive mind. Avoid it.

Given all of this I am looking for some good alternatives to reddit. Anyone got any suggestions besides 4chan?

I’ve been playing with Lemmy and it looks good so far - UI is okay and the community looks decent at first glance.

Yup I'm actually setting up my own Lemmy instance as we speak. Started last night, weird timing.

I have a fun swedish domain for it and everything.

I think it could be great. In my opinion AP is very well suited for stuff like message boards, comments, tweets. Not so well suited for Instant messaging chat because when it starts lagging you're not Instant anymore. That's what I've seen with Matrix. When they had trouble scaling the chats were basically like message boards.

Retalk [0]

It's actually moderated which is quite different to most reddit alternatives

[0] https://retalk.com

In what sense, for what purpose? Just to participate in the hivemind? Or post stuff? Or learn stuff?

I couldn't care less about the drama, Reddit is basically a conglomeration of forums, and for better or worse (leaning towards the latter), there's a lot of information there these days.

I wish I could go back to the individual blogs and RSS reader, but that ship has sailed.

I know the Reddit drama is juicy and such but I left it for exactly that reason. And now consistently this crap spills over into HN. Can we at least aggregate this story into a single post?

Personally, I think this person should be fired from reddit. However, I would like to earnestly raise the question to those who generally take issue with "cancel culture" if they believe that this type of reaction is something that is appropriate. Specifically, I am referring to these online protests that are focused on the goal of firing this employee.

Perhaps part of "Cancel Culture" is an indication that we don't trust the criminal justice system - given that it's reasonable to ask why this person wasn't arrested and tried with aiding her father's kidnapping, torture, and rape of a very young child.

(If I'm understanding the events correctly)

Given 1997 birth year and the father being put away 20 years ago, I imagine she was pretty young when this was happening, young enough to excuse not doing anything about it.

Her father was convicted and sentenced 22 years in 2018.

I think it was put away for 20ish years, not 20 years ago: "In August 2018, Knight's father David Challenor was sentenced to 22 years in prison..."

Yeah, clearly that was wrong. I assumed based on him being an election agent, he wasn't still in prison, and based on not being in prison, must have served the sentence. I don't know anything about how the UK system works, so bad assumptions.

Honestly, no. Association with child rapists is fairly bad, but I don't see how you're supposed to just bar people who themselves didn't do anything illegal from ever being employed at all anywhere. She needs to do something for work and this is pretty harmless compared to being a politician, which she should absolutely be barred from.

I think harmless is working at a grocery store or writing code for a smart lightbulb, not helping to decide what stays and what goes on a website with a really problematic history of managing what is acceptable content in terms of child pornography, among other things.

I think redditors have a right to be skeptical, especially when there are so many people like her husband trying to attach pedophilia to the LGBT cause.

I'd like to expand on this a little more. Do you think these communities are wrong for their protest? Personally, I think it's fair for the users of reddit to express their displeasure with respect to how reddit operates the business, even in situations where I might disagree with the sentiment (though this isn't such a case).

I am not in favor of this person getting fired.

That said, should this person be making decisions with regards to abuse reports (especially those involving questionable content involving children) when this person has apparently shown poor judgement in administration decisions on Reddit that involve said content? Or anything involving community relations? No.

I'd be satisfied if they found something else for her to do.

I suppose there is a continuum. And yet, "fire people who tweeted something politically incorrect" seems to me like overreaction, and "don't let pedophile-friendly people moderate web forums for minors" seems quite reasonable. Yeah, we could find an example somewhere in the middle of these two, and then I perhaps wouldn't have a strong opinion.

Reddit has created such a toxic community that they have to enforce special rules to insulate themselves from their creation.

They don't HAVE to enforce anything. The whole idea of internet regulations is pretty against what it was intended to be. Everyone is terrified of words now though so I guess that's what we're going to do. It's gonna look like network television within the next decade.

According to Wikipedia[0], citing the Verge[1], she has been fired...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimee_Challenor

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/24/22348255/reddit-moderator...

This individual is also a wikipedian, which one would think would call into question the neutrality of any articles edited by the individual.

This is probably the main problem reddit has had for years. If a sub becomes too popular, it becomes a liability as mods can lock or destroy the sub. What can reddit do? Bring in a mod of their own (powermod) and remove the mods who do not obey. They can always replace the sub with another by tweaking their frontpage algo. Nothing new here, unless all popular subs go dark in protest.

If only the entire site would do humanity a favor and go private. Giant build your own bubble cesspool full of bots, astroturfing, paid posts, and propaganda.

I tweaked the title mainly cause the original couldnt fit, and added the context of default subs[0] going private.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/mbq12a/over...

This one mentioned /r/nottheonion but I've seen other comments throughout reddit about other subs too.

Y-day I deleted my account and re-newed blocking of reddit in my /etc/hosts and I suggests everyone to do the same.

So... I guess the IPO is off for a few months?

I find it odd that I've had to click through a few times on both hacker news and reddit to get the info for the person in question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimee_Challenor

> Aimee Challenor, who currently works at reddit, is, at best, sympathetic to pedophilia. She has hired her father after he raped and tortured a 10 year old girl, a fact I find it hard to believe that she wasn't aware of, due to her living with him at the time of the crime, which happened in their house over several days. Her boyfriend also posted clearly pedophilic tweets, and he is now her husband.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/mbqgx2/a_clarif...

Why would reddit hire this kind of person and then _PROTECT_ and _HIDE_ this decision. Strange.

I've heard over the last 12 hours that just saying their name on reddit gets you banned. I've seen some posts with the name on them on reddit, so I'm not sure if that happened beforehand. They spun it as doxing, but this person was a politician and the subreddit that got targetted by them was political in nature. They also then blamed it on auto bots but their name was in an article in an instance, I doubt reddit bots are that thorough as to scrape through linked articles.

> I doubt reddit bots are that thorough as to scrape through linked articles.

I'll bet they are. The tactic of getting someone to make a coordinated blog post and then spamming it everywhere on reddit under the cover of "its public information now" is obvious. I'm reasonably certain that has happened to some other reddit employee in the past. That part is entirely believable.

In addition she hired her father to act as an employee for her political party after he was charged with his crimes and convicted.

Here's an article I found about her husband also fantasizing about pedophilia: https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/something-rotten-at-the...

I'm posting that link because it also contains information around their claim his Twitter account was "hacked".

Jeez, that's disgusting and concerning to say the least.

Wonder if this is another case of reddit admins went rogue or even sanctioned by reddit.

How am I supposed to feel about this? Someone has sexual fantasies about clearly immoral and horrible acts, but has apparently (I only skimmed the article) never acted on them. I am supposed to, what, think this person is vile? That anyone who associates with them is vile? Why is it any of our business what this guy is into?

I guess the outrage is more that someone associated with both him and with her father (who was convicted of acting on those fantasies) was put into a moderation position at Reddit. And people were being banned for calling this out.

Sure, fair, I just don't think anyone dredging up this guy's sexual fantasies up and associating them with actual child molestation is taking the moral high ground. There is a difference between watching John Wick murder people and doing actual murders, and it is the same difference between harboring immoral sexual fantasies and actually committing them.

I don't think the John Wick movie is useful analogy. People are "dredging" these up to raise real questions about the judgement of someone who was hired to use that judgement to moderate their social networks.

Sure, so why don't you let this person tutor your kids. Nothing wrong with that right?

I appreciate your username, but really, is this the hill to die on? Being morally relativistic about this subject is beyond the pale.

And to make it obvious: yes, yes you should find this and the notion that someone would fantasize about it utterly gut wrenching.

Guessing said person has no children. I wouldn't have my kids within 10 km of this utter creep.

> And to make it obvious: yes, yes you should find this and the notion that someone would fantasize about it utterly gut wrenching.

I don't. Theft is obviously immoral, should I condemn people who enjoy heist fiction? People who enjoy roleplaying soldiers in a Civil War re-enactment? People who murder people in video games?

There is a difference between fantasy and reality.

Then you are a true nihilist.

So you want this person working in a school or daycare? Do you want such a person to adopt some kids, or tutor kids in his spare time?

I think it definitely matters when a person has such fantasies.

Would you let a woman you cared about work on a project with Larry Garfield?

I don't know why this concept is so difficult for some people. Fantasy and reality are not the same thing. Millions (if not billions) of people occasionally have fantasies about strangling their boss, or murdering people they don't like, and they never actually do those things because they're abhorrent. Add some "think of the children!" into the mix and otherwise rational people are suddenly very much in favor of lynching.

Does the same standard apply to crime writers? Movie makers? Why fantasy about gruesome killing is just fine, but fantasy about perversion suddenly is not?

If you have sexual fantasies about the opposite sex, you're straight. If you have sexual fantasies about the same sex, you are gay. Even if you never had sex with another person, it would still make you gay. If you have sexual fantasies about both, you are bi. If you have sexual fantasies about young kids, you are a pedophile. If you have sexual fantasies about sex with corpses, you are a necrophiliac.

The same doesn't go for acts of violence. You can quickly think "I'm gonna kill this person", but it doesn't make it so. Most people have such a quick thought, which basically makes all of us killers. This is considered normal, because most of us are that way. Most of us do not fantasize about sex with kids or corpses, which makes it abnormal.

> If you have sexual fantasies about young kids, you are a pedophile. If you have sexual fantasies about sex with corpses, you are a necrophiliac.

Yes, but simply being those things isn't something they chose any more than gay or trans people chose to be what they are. Unlike gay or trans people, acting on those fantasies would be wrong, but there's nothing wrong with just having them. There is a difference between being a pedophile and being a child molester.

Do you have any idea how many people have rape fantasies? The vast majority of them never rape anyone or want to be raped for real, it's just something that excites them sexually. Are we to condemn them as well? How about those who harbor fantasies about slavery like the aforementioned Larry Garfield?

> You can quickly think "I'm gonna kill this person", but it doesn't make it so. Most people have such a quick thought, which basically makes all of us killers.

To you maybe, but to those of us who realize there is a difference between fantasy and reality it doesn't mean much of anything. Also, perfectly normal people often play games about murdering people for hours on end.

> This is considered normal, because most of us are that way.

Is your problem that it is amoral or that it is abnormal? Or are the two the same to you?

> but there's nothing wrong with just having them.

It is indeed not a crime to have them. But I would strongly suggest that those people do not work in places where they have power over kids. (teachers, tutors, youth clubs, etc)

We have a saying "putting the cat next to the milk". And that is exactly what is going on here. If you hire a teacher, and you know this person has sexual feelings towards kids, you are really some dumb fuck. You should also be punished for negligence when shit hits the fan.

In a word, yes. This is how society polices itself. Just like dogs. When a dog does something that isn't beneficial for the group, it gets a nip. The entire pack sees and learns from this. And the entire pack also helps in enforcing this behaviour.

However these days Twitter is the pack and "cancelling" is the nip. What's missing is a pack leader or at least a sense of what is truly "right" or "wrong" at this point in humankind's development.

So it might seem heavy-handed or a knee-jerk reaction, but I'm on board with this simply because it aligns with my moral views. It's a choice.

I think it is ridiculous to condemn someone for what happens solely in their imagination. I don't believe in thoughtcrime.

Important to note that this article is written by a huge "anti-trans activist" Graham Linehan.

Are the facts wrong?

Did I claim that?

Is that not the implication?

The implication is that they have an extreme agenda and bias, so everything they say should be scrutinised extra carefully and examined for twisted or distorted truths.

Graham Linehan is one of the most doctrinaire anti-transgender individuals, anything he writes on the subject should be taken with a very large pinch of salt.

Yeah. He's pretty awful and when I find my myself even partially in agreement with his public statements I double check carefully.

True, but it doesn't make what he's showing (in this instance) to be false.

Wait, the IT Crowd creator?

Yes, he went off the deep end on twitter over the last decade, culminating with getting banned about a year ago for continued harassment of specific transgender individuals.

> Graham Linehan is one of the most doctrinaire anti-transgender individuals, anything he writes on the subject should be taken with a very large pinch of salt.

Aimee Challenor advised an LGBT rights charity called Stonewall from 2015. Stonewall advises Girlguiding (UK’s equivalent of girl scouts)[0]. If one accepts that accusations made against her are legitimate, one has to take Stonewall’s recommendations—and hence trans-related Girlguiding policies—with a large pinch of salt, too.

(Hint: those policies made headlines in 2017, when Girlguiding started to admit males who identify as females but choose to remain biologically male. Weigh that together with Challenor’s and her husband’s background, and the evidence of her father working together with her and influencing her political agenda.)

Challenor remained on Stonewall’s advisory board, even though she left the Green Party over her “serious errors of judgement”, until 2019.

I can’t help thinking that perhaps trans community is doing itself a disservice by not being picky as to whom it lets to represent itself, which in some cases may give ammunition to anti-trans sentiment.

[0] Stonewall has downplayed the involvement Challenor has had with their policies, but they’d be bound to do this regardless.

Wow. Truly disturbing.

Wow, there's Richard Stallman level Epstein/pedo comments, then there's this. I don't know why she has a job right now. I get that some people have rough childhood, go through things that a normal person can't comprehend and we shouldn't hold that against them, but why in the world would you take someone who is either that stunted or a pedo and put them in a position of power?

Please don't compare RMS and Epstein. RMS made a comment re consent, which I believe he said he had reconsidered.

Epstein was not just a pedo but a pimp for all sorts of rich and powerful people, complete with a pedo-jet, private-pedo-island and shitloads of money nobody seems to know from whence it came.

He didn't compare RMS to Epstein, he referenced RMS' comments about Epstein.

Phrasing-wise, it did sounded like a comparisson/association.

They meant there's comments Stallman made about Epstein/pedophilia and then there's this.

It is common for sexual abusers to have been abused as children themselves. Her father was a pedophile. There is a decent chance she was abused, which would explain the weird behaviour.

> Wow, there's Richard Stallman level Epstein/pedo comments, then there's this.

But on one hand you have an old, white male. On the other, a clearly oppressed minority who happened to make a little mistake. In the current climate, where do you think this is going?

Remember when censorship was supposedly about protecting the children? This woman had publicly shown herself to be more accepting of pedophilia and child rape than 99.99% of the population, and Reddit hired her as a censor. It really makes me wonder, what exactly were her qualifications?

i'm going out on a limb here and __speculating__ it's the identity of this person to fulfill some kind of quota, I can't explain it otherwise.

It appears she is pretty good at rallying troops for her cause, even despite this controversy. It’s not that far fetched she could have seemed a good community manager.

What's the end game here? If she is a free person - is the end goal that she never works again, anywhere, ever? Or is the goal that Reddit allow their employees be targeted and bullied by users?

I've wondered this, too. When someone who isn't rich gets cancelled, did something legal, but egregious enough that they can't find a job, or had to "resign" because they oversaw an organization where something bad happens, how does this play out? Can they never find work again? Do they find work and are massively underpaid? In the US, relying on government support isn't really an option.

And that was for people who did something sort of bad. What about people like this woman who allegedly have very controversial opinions? What happens to cops who are fired after shooting someone? That, and what's the right thing to do? Are they unemployable? Does the government provide some sort of domestic political asylum payment?

There’s a bit of a difference between “working” and “being given the power to moderate teenage-oriented communities and censor/silence all criticism on a mainstream website”.

It’s very humane to forgive, but also incredibly stupid and irresponsible to forget.

> moderate teenage-oriented communities

Data point. My GF worked on a online multiplayer game targeted at tweens and teens. Everyone hired had to undergo a background check.

Honestly I'm not sure anyone has an end game here. Someone on UKpolitics posted a basic link to a recent news article and got banned. People are getting banned for mentioning her. This is what most of the controversy is about. They're stifling any discussion of what are quite serious issues, because they hired her. Posting a link to a public newspaper shouldn't be ban worthy. However now that Reddit has been grossly overstepping in their reaction, people are getting very upset about censorship and the perceived conflicts of interest.

Just a job that doesn't involve interacting with and moderating a community seems reasonable. Nobody would be upset if she was, say, a software engineer quietly fixing bugs in application logic for tax software.

Amongst other issues (judgement, personal connections, etc.) she was (is?) a moderator of subreddits tailored towards young, vulnerable people. It's a big safeguarding issue and one that any form of background check should have highlighted.

I think she ought to have zero power over other people and possibly even animals. Given her life record so far, she is not to be trusted with having power over others, no matter how minuscule.

There are plenty of jobs that fit this description.

This is a big general unanswered question in our society when it comes to "disreputable" people whether they be criminals or involved in some serious scandal. The goto answer is to ban them from everywhere. They should not ever get a job, house, or have any associates. This seems dark to me, but most people seem to just accept it.

Wow, that sounds a lot like what happened with Ghislaine Maxwell and theories how she's the owner of one of the most influential powermod accounts on Reddit [0]

The actual content of that submission has by now been removed, linking to it on frontpage subs used to get people banned, with mods arguing how linking to that thread is equal to accusing Reddit moderators of being pedophiles/child traffickers.

Which is a bit of a weird reasoning considering afaik Ghislaine Maxwell wasn't yet convicted of anything.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/hnckn0/umaxwellhil...

What are the tweets which her boyfriend posted? If it's just about his fantasies, I'm not really concerned about that, so long as he isn't committing crimes himself, or encouraging others to do so. It can be an outlet for such predilections. Shaming someone for them doesn't make them magically go away. And I can imagine him being the only one willing to marry her with her association with her father.

Do you mean literal torture? Ouch, sadistic ones are scary.

I'm not surprised she hired her own father. People will do a lot of things, when their own family is involved. This isn't to defend the decision, but it isn't inherently irrational.

Is there anywhere where it would be appropriate for her father to work? A lack of stable employment could contribute towards him committing further crimes. Preferably, somewhere away from children?

You should have googled the situation before you made that assertion. Her father is in jail for 22 years due to the atrocity of the crimes he committed in his attic against that 10 year old girl. Per news coverage of the matter in the Guardian the role Aimee gave him after he had been charged with child abuse and rape(1) quote 'may have allowed him to interact with vulnerable people.'(2)

It is also of note that the claims the 10-year old girl made about the abuse conducted in the attic of the family home aligned with what the police found in the attic on the day of the arrest.

Source: 1. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/aug/31/green-party...

2. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jan/12/green-party...

I presume we're talking about the time he worked as her campaign manager?

If he was placed into a role which brought him into direct contact with vulnerable individuals, that would be very reckless, as sadistic offenders are commonly referred to as high risk in the scientific literature.

I'd like to imagine someone wouldn't risk doing that while on bail (the alternative is very terrifying), and perhaps, he would not, but it would still be very reckless.

Thank you for your post, I got a bit confused as some comments are insinuating the father was the moderator, and others insinuated the husband was.

I'll stand by my points about the husband (as it feels like people are trying to punish him by association + trying to shame him for his personal interests), although I wish Reddit had E2EE or some feature, so that no employee (no matter whether it's publicly known they're dodgy or not) can read someone's private messages. And if there isn't a strong audit trail, there should be one. There shouldn't be one super role with access to everything either.

A stable job can help to keep someone out of trouble. Someone who feels completely hopeless, and that everyone is against them, might just decide to take the step to committing a terrible crime.

The risk of any particular person with such interests committing a crime is very low, and it usually takes additional factors to push that up. I don't see enough things to give me reason to believe he would, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt here.

If it does turn out she turned a blind eye to her father's abuses, then as far as I'm concerned, she is complicit, and shouldn't have the role at all.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26561692#26563602

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