Maybe this will be enough to silence the folks on here who insist that nothing is wrong with Reddit management and that it's just a bunch of angry children complaining without cause. The mods in question are adults and professionals, and they've clearly and succinctly explained their grievances with Reddit management.
This piece doesn't touch on some of the other issues that have angered users, particularly the matter of heavy-handed censorship that appears to be applied inconsistently. That too is a legitimate complaint, one that shouldn't be shouted down or conflated with shameful behavior on the part of relatively few individuals in the community.
No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on.
The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong.
And your claims of censorship are, quite frankly, disturbing. The subreddits shut down last month were all hate groups that were targeting individuals for harassment and posting their photographs without permission in order to attack them. I've personally seen my pictures posted by one of these groups twice, and the day before those subs got banned, there was a very upset mother asking what recourse she had because these hate groups were posting pictures of her underage child and refused to take them down (and I distinctly remember this because I was one of a handful of people who helped teach her how to message the admins).
> The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong.
That's not how I observed the situation honestly. A lot of subreddit mods got flooded with "shut down"-requests and some decided against it, some followed the mass. It wasn't really a hostage-taking, the shutdown has / had widespread support among the user base.
> It wasn't really a hostage-taking, the shutdown has / had widespread support among the user base.
Don't believe this for one second. Like many others have said, it was mostly a vocal minority. /r/pics has 8+ million subscribers and you think a majority of those subscribers wanted it to be shut down?
I'm honestly surprised the mods have the power to shut down a default subreddit.
> and you think a majority of those subscribers wanted it to be shut down?
And you think it didn't? I don't see you offering up any evidence for your position other than assuming they can't have because of the sheer number.
Meanwhile we have at least some indication that there were support well beyond the moderators, in the form of heavily upvoted threads with large number of comments in support of shutdowns for many subreddits.
It's very possible that the majority didn't support the shutdowns, but that support went far beyond the moderators is a fact easily ascertained by looking at the threads.
> Meanwhile we have at least some indication that there were support well beyond the moderators, in the form of heavily upvoted threads with large number of comments in support of shutdowns for many subreddits.
To be honest, it's hard to argue either way. Going by your indication, if we look at /r/all the past week and all the submissions comparing Ellen Pao to Kim Jong-Il or Mao Zedong, would you say reddit widely supports this comparison?
Meta-observation: the fact that it's difficult to divine the intent of users on a site who'se primary claim to fame is being able to divine the intent of users suggess problems with the mechanisms in which the intent of users is divined.
Pretty much the point I'm planning on making to /u/krispykrackers the /r/modnews thread.
>The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power users to treat the majority of users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing the majority of users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong.
Does that fix the problems with the above sentences? Regardless of who was ultimately behind it, the shutdowns were a "I'm taking my ball and going home" move at the expense of the entire Reddit community.
Actually it was a reaction by the Reddit community to management idiocy.
As such, it was entirely justified.
You don't seem to understand how this works. Reddit does not own the community. Reddit hosts the community, and in return the community provides content for Reddit.
The community has already moved from another provider, and if Reddit carries on with more management idiocy, it will move again.
Social is littered with the crumbling ruins of corps that believed they were too big to fail, but which fell off the world after Doing Stupid Shit for too long.
You are defining the community as people who interact with the site (or maybe content creators). I am defining it as people who visit the site. The old 90-10-1 rule suggests the community how you define it is only a small subset of the community how I defined it. If someone doesn't care enough to even create an account on Reddit, what makes you think they have strong feeling about the personnel decisions of the company?
They don't necessarily have to have strong feelings about the community, but if you annoy the 9 + 1% of content creators (curators, submitters, whatever), there's nothing left for the 90% to do, and they'll move on to the next big thing out of a lack of interest.
The people who are complaining the loudest about the site's failures aren't members of the 90% of lurkers - they're members of the 9% of occasional contributors or the 1% of prolific contributors. And they're the ones that will make or break the site, so blowing them off as "not the majority" seems like a really awful idea.
I guess I was thinking of a site that the of entirety (or nearly all of) the 10/101ths of Reddit users which make up the theoretical strong feelers would move to.
As in order to attract most of them a single site would need to both be able to handle the traffic and have a broad appeal across subjects. Maintaining such a site with that much headroom for users with only their current user base to generate ad revenue I assume is problematic and I would be surprised if any single site currently could handle a mass migration like that (except maybe Tumblr which I have my doubts would appeal to this portion of the Reddit population).
So while a mass exodus could take place people would likely scatter to different sites, which might not make any single other site 'it' enough to attract the remaining masses. Or the exodus takes place over time, which I consider the likely situation, having seen the effective death of many internet communities prior to the beast which is Reddit.
If they leave over time Reddit doesn't need to ask what it should do when the 10 leaves, it needs to ask what it should do when the 10 starts to leave.( my guess would be they need to get them to stop leaving, or get others to step up and take their place as people that feel strongly about the site in its then state, or buy the site they are leaving to).
SA and Fark were both pretty big internet communities back in the prime of Slashdot. In that I remember there were quite a few friendly (and less than friendly) rivalries going between the three.
I would say any regular visitor is part of the community. There is no requirement to give back to a community in order to be a member. It is just a group of people who share a connection due to common interests or objectives.
So it's okay when reddit does it because they're a private corporation and can censor whatever they want, but when the mods of a subreddit censor themselves there's a problem?
I don't think you're correctly characterizing the subreddit shutdowns.
When someone in power silences someone else's speech or expression, then it's correctly a form of censorship, like what management did with r/fatpeoplehate. When the owners, creators or moderators of their own speech or expressions stop producing that content as what many subreddits did in response to r/iama suspending operations, purportedly not out of protest but out of a lack of understanding of a current situation, then it's protest. Censorship is a top-down use of power to silence a majority. Protest is a middle-up form of power to inconvenience a majority to apply pressure to the power holders. They aren't the same.
The problem with shutting down the hateful subreddits is that they didn't communicate clearly. In that, they left a lot of room for rumors and speculation about why that sub was shut down for "harassment" when others that seem more harass-y were not targeted. Remember, most users never visited those subs, and weren't in the know about their modus operandi. Those rumors led to the takedowns looking like censorship of distasteful content to many users. If it was censorship of distasteful or rude content, then there are many other subs that should fall alongside those taken down.
I think if they had said that the people in those subs were posting pictures of people and not responding in a timely manner to legitimate requests by aggrieved people portrayed on those subs, the users who don't really care about those subs would have brushed it off.
I laugh when people complain about removal of /r/fatpeoplehate being censorship. The only reason that subreddit was such a problem is because of aggressive moderation and banning of users - i.e. censorship at the moderator level rather than the admin level.
It's a cognitive bias. The assertion from the admins was pretty clear regarding the harassment of individuals and threats of violence, but rather than acknowledge their prejudice, some have tried to make it into a first amendment issue. On a privately owned website.
Part of the problem was that there was no transparency and almost anything can count as "harassment" - for example, I've seen journalists accuse people of harassment because they've searched their name on Twitter and found people mocking some of their more ill thought-out articles. If you actually dug into the details it was obvious why the admins banned /r/fatpeoplehate, but few did and those details didn't make the news either.
Key distinction for sure, but how would transparency impact the people affected by the prejudice?
If you had evidence of harassment and violent threats against individuals and factored it into your decision to close a 150,000 community, would you release the information about the evidence?
There is no public ground on the Internet. Everything is owned by someone or some corporation. Our ideas about free speech will have to adapt to that reality, or they will be lost entirely.
Just because the Amendment doesn't apply doesn't mean the ideals behind it are irrelevant. I could choose to exclude all individuals of a certain race from my home. No law could prevent me from doing that. But people would still be against me for the same reasons that there exists laws that prevent discrimination by government or businesses. It just seems most people do not articulate the difference between 'wrong because I like the First Amendment' from 'wrong because I like the ideals behind the First Amendment'.
Yes it does. If you banned vandals and violent people from your private property for their malicious behavior, people would not band against you or cry about first amendment "ideals". Ignoring select information, such as the reasoning behind the bans, is exactly what cognitive bias is.
If you honestly think that what Reddit did is the equivalent of racism, then that is very clear proof that you have a bias.
>If you banned vandals and violent people from your private property for their malicious behavior, people would not band against you or cry about first amendment "ideals".
The government is allowed to ban such people from its premises as well. You choose a poor example.
As for the reasoning behind the bans, you are ignoring the unequal application of those bans which shows such claimed reasons to have been lies.
>If you honestly think that what Reddit did is the equivalent of racism
I never called it the equivalent of racism. I used racism as an example of where the ideals that ban the government, while not banning the individual, can be used to cast moral judgment upon the individual. That you could confuse these gives evidence to your own strong bias.
It's a perfect good example because it's analagous to what Reddit did, and you're splitting hairs because it doesn't fit your own narrative on racism and moral judgement that you crafted for your own personal reality.
You even admit that you don't think that what reddit did is the equivalent of racism, so you admit your analogy isn't even relevant to the situation. Just as if you gave the analogy of "people judge a bar that doesn't let you bear arms because of second amendment ideals!", it's still moot, because while yes, they do pass moral judgement, it's completely irrelevant from people selectively ignoring safety reasons behind the firearm ban.
Passing moral judgement that resulted from a bias is still a bias.
One of the point of subreddits is to let people create their own rules (whatever those rules might be) and enforce them at their own discretion. As long as people aren't breaking reddit's global rules then subreddits should have the right to implement whatever rules they see fit, including heavy moderation. What the parent post was complaining about was censorship performed at the admin level (reddit's management), not the moderator level. Stuff like shadowbans (which have been increasing a lot lately), removing posts from /r/all and so on.
I don't know, quite a few users were in full support of the move. The likely ones who were not simply knew nothing of what is going on as a great many users are simply not interested or unable to understand.
It was selective censorship. There are many subs,some quite well known, who are more flagrant than some of the subs shut down. FatPeopleHate was the most famous that was canned and it was likely at the request of IMGUR staff as they were having a pissing contest with content posters. There are quite a few very racists and sexist subs left so this was highly selective. As, a SJW dream hit which many labled the Reddit Wedding.
Personal stories aside, individual posters are who should be banned for violating site rules, not entire subs and certainly not their mods as many of them were trying to enforce rules only to be shot down by reddit admin
> No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on.
As stated in the article, this was one of the reasons. The other reason is as you would suspect:
> The secondary purpose of shutting down was to communicate to the relatively tone-deaf company leaders that the pattern of removing tools and failing to improve available tools to the community at large, not merely the moderators, was an affront to the people who use the site.
Your language is pretty strong and one-sided -- 'petulant moves...to treat their users as pawns'? Have you even been paying attention? A lot of those moderators actively sought the opinions of their subreddits before blacking out. It was often the communities, and not the moderators, instigating those decisions.
The censorship claims do not just apply to the hateful subreddits that were shut down -- censorship happens in more insidious ways, too. A lot of posts involving the Reddit debacle have been swept away, comments deleted, users shadowbanned. I think this is the kind of censorship that's being highlighted.
> They shut downs of other subs was overwhelmingly supported by the users.
r/Cooking went down. They had a vote, and 209 out of 230 people voted to go dark. That sounds like an overwhelming majority! But when you realize that the subreddit has 310,000 subscribers, it means that it went dark because less than 0.1% of the subscribers wanted it to. You can't draw any conclusion of support from that.
Given a population of 310,000 and a sample size of 230 you would have 95% confidence that 91% +/- 7% of your userbase is in support of shutting down the subreddit with your numbers.
So yes, you can draw a conclusion of support from that. This is how polling works.
From what I saw the shutdowns began on Friday evening and subs started coming back on the Saturday morning (EST, and it was a holiday weekend in the US).
As it was a spur of the moment thing, subreddit mods couldn't have polled users for more than an hour or two or the momentum would've been lost
Yeah, that comes across as a hand-waving dismissal. 203 out of 230 voters in a one hour window in a community of 31,000 is -not- indicative of consensus, no matter how you slice or dice it.
Can't edit my original post, so here will have to do.
Do you honestly think that every sub which went dark for a few hours (when a large percentage of their users were probably asleep) should've held a week long 'should we go private or not?' poll?
That really echoes the response by Ellen Pao herself in the New York Times article [1]:
> But Ms. Pao says that the most virulent detractors on the site are a vocal minority, and that most of Reddit users were not interested in what unfolded over the past 48 hours.
That may be true as the "lurkers" main interest is to consume the information made available by voluntary work of the contributors and moderators) and they, of course, don't benefit in the short term from the blackout.
But it is important to remember that this "vocal minority" is the part of the audience that contribute the most to the success of the site, and they > do it for free.
And, being charitable and assuming that the demands of these volunteers are valid, the shut down was a minor inconvenience to the passive audience but one that can bring change and improvement in the long term.
It's not as simple as that. I'm a moderator on several subreddits and, via moderator mail and private messages, monitored events during the shutdown. The impression that I got from speaking to other moderators and users of diverse subreddits across the site is that many of them feel a sense of pent up frustration toward Reddit. The mismanagement of AMA was the straw that broke the camel's back, and so many of them closed in solidarity with IAMA, and as a form of protest. It was not a witch hunt by any means, but simply an expression of "We're all fed up with this. Something needs to change". The protest was effective at getting Reddit leadership to rethink their actions and change course.
It's true that many Reddit users are "lurkers" who simply read the site and never contribute. These people probably never have had cause to become frustrated by the Reddit admins. However, among those who actively contribute, a surprisingly high fraction, from my personal observations, seem to be upset.
I can also say that there was debate among moderator staff on a number of subreddits. It's not as if everyone went along with it unilaterally. However, when moderators of other subs learned how poorly the situation was being handled, and learned how condescendingly Reddit staff responded, the backlash surged. Take for example the snide comments that Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanion wrote to users who expressed concerns: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riam...
Or the unhelpful, brusque way that Reddit handled AMAs during that time: http://i.imgur.com/ICSz7Xp.jpg (After reading, compare to statements from AMA mods about how helpful, supportive, and responsive Victoria was.)
I was initially skeptical about the shutdown, but seeing this evidence with my own eyes was enough to swing me into the "pro shutdown" camp or at least the "I don't oppose the shutdown" camp.
The responses from the community in these threads does not give me the impression of a witch hunt:
Reddit and Alexis subsequently apologized and said they didn't realize the "depth of the frustration", but actions like this certainly contributed. Treating people with contempt is always going to make a situation worse. If Reddit had responded promptly, professionally, and respectfully, I doubt so many subreddits would have shut down, and it would have been resolved much sooner. I personally had no complaint with Reddit staff prior to the shutdown, but their handling and response to it concerned me. A company's staff should never treat their users that way. It should not take a massive backlash for admins to think, "Maybe I shouldn't be snide and condescending." The people running an organization need to be the mature ones in the room. The shutdown was Reddit users calling them out on their behavior.
Edit: Why the downvotes? Is this comment not constructive?
I don't think poster knows for sure but you can assume based on traffic levels to comments and just general web stats. A majority of users don't comment on anything. Most people don't even create an account to vote. They probably don't even know what was going on.
That seems like a pretty silly argument. You can literally use it as an argument against any sort of change because "most people don't vote."
In fact they do vote, not with upvotes and comments but with their views. Those views indicate the place is somewhere they like spending their time, which is primarily a function of the moderators and the people posting content to the subreddit in the first place (the "vocal minority"). Since they already show they appreciate the work of those people by regularly viewing the content, it's actually more likely they agree with that minority by default than disagree.
Maybe they do agree? We don't really know because they are the "non-vocal majority". I'm willing to bet a large portion have no interest in reddit's internal politics or the mods struggle. They just want their cat pics. I do agree that they find value in the content or they wouldn't keep coming back and that the content comes from the minority. Reddit is really walking the edge. Things like this are why a bunch of users switched to reddit from digg in the first place. I don't think they will hesitate to do it again. They will follow the content submitters.
Most social sites seem pretty similar as far as user interaction other than click through. I got 60k page views from one top HN post, a couple hundred upvotes, and probably less than 100 comments on the thread and my blog.
The other subs shutting down "in protest" I found laughable. I had a hard time understanding what exactly they were protesting and the vocal minority sounded like a lot of people just raging against the machine. Reddit the company is the power structure and people just want to tear them down.
But why exactly? Not sure. This reminds me a lot of Occupy Wall Street. People see one protest breaking out then pile on with their own grievances. There was a lack of communication to the /r/iama mods about Victoria being let go...ok...now we're complaining about mod tools and censorship??
I'm sorry that you were harassed by Reddit users; I certainly don't approve of that behavior. Like I said before, however, conflating those rotten actions by certain individuals with the larger ideological issues is not constructive. My complaint wasn't against censorship per se, but rather against what appears to be biased censorship. Certain harassment subreddits continue to exist, and it appears that they do so because their ideology is more closely aligned with Reddit management/admins than the ones that were banned. Rules need to be applied equally.
Really? That's the level of thinking that those who claim censorship on reddit are operating on?
It wasn't about views people disagree with (hence why the chimpire subreddits are still active). FPH actively engaged in harassment of individuals by both subscribers and moderators. And speaking of censorship the FPH mods would ban any "sympathetic views" of ridiculed individuals.
Just flag. Don't reply. Replying makes the troll comment more prominent (as, obviously, does quoting it!). In cases as clear-cut as this, you can trust that the flag button will quickly and reliably do its job.
(Happy to delete this comment when you delete yours.)
That's basically how /r/fatpeoplehate thought - anyone who disagreed with them was obviously just a fatty, and therefore subhuman. (The moderators literally banned anyone who showed any empathy to a fat person - it was even in the rules - and this seems to have resulted in about the culture you'd expect.)
>The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong.
Reddit is a free chat site with a decentralized power structure (in theory). Reddit can be useful, and I know there are supportive subs there, but /r/gaming and /r/science going down for a day was not harmful. People probably got a bit more sun that day.
It's quite obvious that you have a greivence against part of the reddit user base since, as you mentioned, you have been the focus of their hate before.
I appreciate your opinion on why the other subreddits were taken offline but I must remind you it's just that, an opinion - only that, it means nothing in the bigger scheme of things.
> No, the shutdown of /r/iama was necessary so the moderators could regroup and figure out how to do their scheduling and coördination from now on.
Well the moderators say that was only part of it, but after reading your whole comment it seems you're just here to push your authoritarian political agenda under the guise of social justice by ignoring half the facts.
>And your claims of censorship are, quite frankly, disturbing.
Half your comment history is disturbing. I support the removal of /r/fatpeoplehate, but you're trying really hard to paint the parent comment in bad light to push your political agenda. They never said they support FPH, but you make it seem as if they must be a "disturbed" individual. They said that the censorship is heavy-handed censorship that appears to be applied inconsistently.
It would be pretty hard to push your authoritarian political agenda without demonizing others though.
> Maybe this will be enough to silence the folks on here who insist that nothing is wrong with Reddit management and that it's just a bunch of angry children complaining without cause.
"Reddit management and that it's just a bunch of angry children complaining without cause."
Anyone that makes these sort of decisions based on absolutely no evidence besides that she was fired, is childish and should not be a moderator.
"The mods in question are adults and professionals, and they've clearly and succinctly explained their grievances with Reddit management."
They might be physically adults, but emotional intelligence for many of the mods seems to be lacking.
"particularly the matter of heavy-handed censorship that appears to be applied inconsistently"
The mods are just as bad when it comes to censorship...decisions based on pure emotion, political views, and personal grudges. Exactly what you don't want when it comes to someone moderating a community.
Reddit is what the world was like in the middle ages and the reason we don't solve all of our issues with a lynch-mob.
Many don't see it because they don't like the people that are being silenced, bullied, and marginalized.
This actually reminds me of when Unidan was shadowbanned.
Unidan was a super-popular redditor who loved educating people about science, and he would pop up everywhere and deliver useful information written in a way most laymen can understand. People loved him.
He got banned right after getting in an argument with somebody, where he was being really aggressive and heavy-handed. A lot of people flipped out and claimed he was banned just for getting into a heated argument. They attacked the admins, and then they proceeded to stalk and harass the girl he got into an argument with. They followed her around, downvoted all her comments into the negative triple digits, and effectively made her account useless.
A day later, it turns out that for his entire history as a redditor, he had been using five sockpuppets to upvote his posts and downvote all the posts around him so his posts could become more visible, and that was why he was banned.
So the community turned against him. All his posts on his new account were being aggressively downvoted, the word "Unidan" entered popular use as a slang term for someone who uses vote bots to puff up their karma, and he ended up pretty much disappearing from reddit after a while (he tried to come back a few times, but nobody wanted to hear what he had to say anymore).
As for the girl who got stalked, the admins removed the limits on her accounts placed by the downvotes, the community followed her around upvoting her for a while to restore her karma, and the devs introduced new anti-brigading measures to make sure an organized downvote brigade like that can never fuck somebody's account up again.
I have a feeling that when we find out why Victoria was fired, the community will turn on her and start apologizing to the admins, because this sounds like the exact same situation.
The fact that Victoria was canned accounts for maybe 10% of the outrage. The other 90% is the way the firing was done (uncommunicated, disruptive, and all around poorly handled), and is what led to the annoyance boiling over.
Oh, that's a perfectly valid complaint, and it's one I agree with.
But there are a large amount of people treating Victoria as a saint. I've seen a lot of posts going "They fired the one admin everyone actually liked!", and I'm worried there's going to be a huge backlash when the reason she got fired leaks out.
And at a minimum, it'd mean that reddit is poor at handling communication. Most likely that they aren't paying attention past, just stepping into things now and then. Who the hell bans Unidan just like that? You couldn't put some checks into your bot?
Vote manipulation is a serious, big, huge, possibly the single biggest no-no on the site.
The difference between a post never making it to the front page and making it to position #1 can be as small as one or two votes when the post is new. Unidan selfishly crowded out other content for his own, and the ban was fully justified.
They fired the relationship manager for the AMAs. The way the did that harmed/ruined some relationships. The 'how' is as important as the what in that case, so your comment seems bizarreley off base.
This is a wholy different issue that the dust up a month ago. Thats why a petition for the CEO's resignation has 200,000 signatures. The incident 1 month ago promted onlt 10K or so, so this latest issue is a 20x increase in pissed off people.
"The 'how' is as important as the what in that case, so your comment seems bizarreley off base."
You forgot the 'why'. Why was she let go? Reddit, the company, was paying her salary and they have the right to let her go if they feel she isn't doing her job. You don't even know the whole story. You are defending the mods based on biased and one-sided information.
"Thats why a petition for the CEO's resignation has 200,000 signatures"
This can easily be manipulated online, so I don't even know if I can trust it.
They're not mad that she was fired. They're mad because she was fired aND reddit leadership had no plan to help the communities that depended on her work. Instead they left them high and dry. That's a very important distinction.
You like many people seem to not realize something that the other side is saying: WE KNOW REDDIT HAS THE RIGHT TO FIRE THEIR STAFF, AND NO ONE IS COMPLAINING BECAUSE REDDIT CHOSE TO RESTAFF.
Now, go back and read the all caps like five times, because people keep trying to say that to you, and you keep shouting about how reddit has the right to fire people.
People are upset because reddit corporate did a shitty job of managing reddit corporate, and it caused reddit corporate to fall through on several plans they had made with the public and other parties.
This particular instance of shitty management and execution on the part of reddit corporate is just the latest in a long string of bad management, and people finally got sick of it.
"People are upset because reddit corporate did a shitty job of managing reddit corporate, and it caused reddit corporate to fall through on several plans they had made with the public and other parties."
Shouting louder and using caps doesn't make me believe you or add to the discussion.
I just don't think this was a planned and orchestrated protest as a result of mis-management. There might have been 1 or 2 mods that felt this way, but the rest did it in "solidarity"..more likely a pure emotional decision to feel like they were part of the group (reminds me of the occupy wallstreet mentality..which accomplished nothing and just made the protesters look foolish).
If they really wanted to make a change, they should have all gotten together and contacted management..like mature adults. But this takes intelligence, discipline, maturity and doesn't give them the desired effect of rebellion. It feels good to rebel because it gives a person a sense of power that they probably don't normally have in their life.
It's the difference between a government discussing change and a mob of people burning down the city because they aren't getting what they want. A step back in terms of social change.
I also didn't see any of the explanations that you claim when it was happening. It's just back-pedaling to try to justify the actions of the mods.
Most inexperienced people don't don't how to play politics...and may get what they want in the short-term (the company just wants to put out the fire until they can figure out a good strategy) but will be pushed aside in the long-term.
The mods have no leverage except the power to make a sub-reddit private...and that can easily be taken away. If they let all of the mods go today, there would be people lining up to replace them tomorrow. But, this would be a bad PR move for Reddit...so it won't happen this quickly.
The censorship is not happening by the community, it is coming from the admins that are on the reddit payroll. There are some posts that are auto-deleted based off of keywords during some of the more turbulent times in reddit.
I was specifically asking about times the admins did it.
And, for the record, I have no problems with the /r/technology mods implementing such a filter. I want to read about technology, not politics. I actually unsubscribed from /r/technology some time before the filter was put in place (it was one of the very few defaults I'd unsubbed from, actually) because I was sick of it being overrun by political content.
Do you have a source? My understanding is that the "censorship" is much more varied and inconsistent than that.
It's hardly what I'd call true censorship either way, since people are freely and openly discussing the very "censorship" and the content being censored elsewhere on reddit.
Also adding to what Stefan said, the admins have been deleting subreddits too, sometimes the wrong ones (for example they deleted an Whale Watching subreddit believing it was a fat people harassment subreddit...)
Bullshyt. They deleted a Whale Watching subreddit because it got taken over by users from FPH looking for a new home. Some of the mods of that sub were FPH admins and were communicating to other users that it was a "backup sub" they could use when they got banned. As soon as the furor died down, the sub came back.
This piece doesn't touch on some of the other issues that have angered users, particularly the matter of heavy-handed censorship that appears to be applied inconsistently. That too is a legitimate complaint, one that shouldn't be shouted down or conflated with shameful behavior on the part of relatively few individuals in the community.