Reddit CEO on banning leaked celebrity nudes

1. Full Movies On YouTube, a subreddit dedicated to streaming copyrighted films,

2. Plundered Pics, where stolen nudes from phones are passed around,

3. Self Harm Pics, where people post photos of themselves self harming,

4. Cute Female Corpses, which is exactly what it sounds like,

5. Sexy Abortions, which is photos of abortions,

6. Watch People Die, which is a subreddit dedicated to videos of people being killed,

7. Pics of Dead Kids, which is again what it sounds like.

> While current US law does not prohibit linking to stolen materials, we deplore the theft of these images and we do not condone their widespread distribution.

The images in question were obtained illegally, and it was deplorable that they were circulated so widely. But in this instance reddit seems to have simply cowed to the pressure of publicity and dressed it up as a morality thing.

I'm glad they banned the subreddits distributing the photos, but I wish they'd just be honest about it and ban other highly questionable subreddits too.

(Oh and they should fucking engage with people who comment: most of their blog posts and self.posts read like celebrity AMAs gone wrong, where they ignore the incredibly popular dissenting voices.)

Right around the time Yishan posted this, the subreddit they're alluding to and all related subreddits were banned without further explanation.

Reddit's had something of an existential crisis for years. Should it be free, or not? They're not sure. The administration tries to plot a careful course between being a free-wheeling no-holds-barred network, and presenting itself as a more normal community. The result is this really peculiar, slightly nauseating situation where the very same site that collects some of the web's most alarming content (pics of dead babies, for example...) also has an administration that writes blog posts focusing on things like community service and donations for teachers.

Before it was banned, the subreddit they're talking about was becoming the most popular subreddit on the site. Even more popular than the defaults. Even though it wasn't being linked elsewhere on the site. Exactly what audience do they think they're lecturing to?

There's this undercurrent of moral authority in Yishan's post that shouldn't be there at all, because the administration's actual policy seems to be, "anything is fine with us, until it gets too much bad press, and then we'll ban it."

Maybe the post should have said instead, "look, we want to support free speech, but we also can't afford to deal with DMCA complaints and lawsuits and advertiser boycotts all day long, so we had to ban the following subreddits because they were causing a problem for the rest of the site."

That, at least, would be honest. It would still be a slightly vile policy, but at least it wouldn't also come dressed in mealy-mouthed messages about morals.

That seems a bit strongly worded. But, contrast Reddit's handling of this with 4chan. They both have a huge overlap in their userbase at this point, which means they share a lot of similar content, although Reddit does a better job of cultivating some of the worst stuff. They both have had to take action following the celeb leak situation; 4chan now has filters in place blocking the uploading of certain pictures for DMCA reasons.

But 4chan's actions don't come with a finger-waggling message from moot. Moot, in interviews, readily acknowledges the uglier bits of 4chan, but also stridently defends it as a successful experiment in anonymity and free speech. Reddit, on the other hand, tries to be a little bit like 4chan, but then becomes horrified at the result -- but only after there's a sufficient amount of negative publicity -- and then claims a defense of free speech while banning the associated sections of the site and giving a moral lecture to its users.

Oh, well. Where would we be without our soap operas?

My opinion aside, here's the rough timeline of the events based on reddit posts:

* the reddit blog post [1]; it has a timestamp of 2014/09/07 00:39 UTC.

* which claims "approximately the same time, activity in that subreddit starting violating other rules we have which do trigger a ban";

* the actual time of the subreddit ban (based on [2], it happened more than 5 hours ago, so before 2014/09/07 02:16 UTC

* the explanation of the bans [3], which (based on the time stamp) was posted 15 minutes ago, so around 2014/09/07 07:49 UTC.

and here's the paragraph explaining the bans, also from [3]:

> It became obvious that we were either going to have to watch these subreddits constantly, or shut them down. We chose the latter. It's obviously not going to solve the problem entirely, but it will at least mitigate the constant issues we were facing. This was an extreme circumstance, and we used the best judgement we could in response.

The lesson here is probably "declaring support for specific subreddits while imposing new rules on them will never work, as the contributors to those subreddits will inevitably rebel".

[1]: http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-f...

[2]: http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/2foqu1/reddit_bans_all...

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/2fpdax/time_...

All they say is that they were breaking some other law - and clicking their linked post on reddit itself gives me a huge wall of text. Where did they say why it was removed? Could anyone sum it up?