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Comment by Loveaway | Hacker News Reader

What's up with the war on Hyperlinks. Can't post them anywhere anymore. Reddit has a whitelist of a handful sites, everything else will get removed. Twitter will not allow a lot of either. Can't put links in dating profiles. Web sucks so much these days. Arbitrary rules, made by people who need something to enforce.

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>Reddit has a whitelist of a handful sites

That is not true. I have submitted plenty of links from new domains (side projects) to reddit.

Isn't this kind of obvious though? Money grubbing management wants to ensure you're not using their product to promote a competing product. What is a competing product? Anything that takes a user away from spending time on their product. Spending time with family is a competitor. Driving to work is a competitor. They can't do anything about that kind of stuff, but they can prevent users from providing links to other sites that will fight for the user's attention using their own internal games/tricks.

Do you really believe that makes sense for GitHub's management?

Maybe not for those exact reasons, but by limiting links, you lower your liability. If people are associating a site with the linked sites, then you can try to remove that association by removing the links.

The question wasn't about GitHub's specific reasons. The question was "war on hyperlinks" which is a much more general/broad question.

I don't think reddit uses a specific approved site system though I'm sure some are banned. Are you maybe referring to specific subreddits with their own rules?

Yeah, it must be specific subreddits they've posted to. Other than spam flagging, I've never seen reddit itself restrict links. It's pretty common for subreddits to use AutoModerator to enforce a link allowlist, however.

Reddit should probably take some steps to help users understand the difference between Mods and Admins. It's extremely common on reddit for users not to know the difference. They are always taking the heat for something some random user did to a subreddit they moderate.

“Everything in (content) moderation, including (content) moderation.”

― Oscar Wilde

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/22688-everything-in-moderat...

Reddit does not use a safelist, you can post just about anything. I imagine there might be a blocklist for known malicious domains. Individual subreddits will have their own rules, and automod can be pretty easily configured with your own safe/block lists.

The blocklist is quite stupid though, the .ru TLD is totally banned, for example.

Russia is obviously hated due to their war, but banning .ru is just dumb.

> banning .ru is just dumb.

Why? Is it perfect, no. But perfect is the enemy of good. If it noticeably reduces posts and votes which Reddit's teams have to deal with, while also no having a material effect on the general user experience, then why not use geo-blocking?

I would say > 95% of .ru domains I come across are malicious so it doesn't seem that unreasonable.

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