If you guys wonder where your local spam-bot goes when he's not here, I go to reddit where I can troll all day with random new people. But today something was a bit different. Something that might be entertaining enough for some of you to read. I'm posting here because we're judging the ethics of the users and admins involved and I'm adding my own personal commentary as a three year member and mod of 20+ "subreddits" on the site.
I logged on after work and things were a bit different. At the moment of writing this, everyone is after the CEO's head. It's not just the users. An advertiser is also vowing to never return unless the CEO resigns.
What happened? A subreddit was banned.
Years ago there was a forum section (known as a "subreddit" or "sub" by redditors) called "fat people hate". This forum would make fun of fat people using photos and video from places around the Internet. It was banned after the “admins released this announcement post, declaring that a prominent subreddit, /r/fatpeoplehate, ... [was] banned in accordance with reddit's recent expanded Anti-Harassment Policy.”
The short end of it is, the managers at reddit decided that making fun of others was a danger to people's health. They claim that "We will ban subreddits that allow their communities to use the subreddit as a platform to harass individuals when moderators don’t take action. We’re banning behavior, not ideas."
The consensus seems to be "bull★■◆●. Every single sub dedicated to the idea of hating fat people has been banned, and all of the (former) moderators of FPH have been banned. This is banning ideas." Which is true. The admins are going above and beyond in banning every new variation of /r/fatpeople hate, since the banning of the original "forum section". This makes reddit look like a site full of overly sensitive admins. As a result, the community have focused on a single person.
Redditors are hevily blaming the CEO of reddit, Ellen Pao, who might not be completely at fault or even aware of what's going on.
People have started a poll for her resignation, have photoshoped her face into pornography, made chinese comunist propaganda with her illustrated face, and her face is plastered all over a sub called “punchablefaces”.
But is the CEO really to blame? I don’t think so. There’s a good chance /r/fatpeoplehate brought this on them selves.
This starts not on reddit, but on a different site, redditors depend on, called imgur. Reddit doesn’t host images, sound, or video so things like that have to linked to a different host and domain that provides the service. Imgur hosts images for free. It was made by a redditor for redditors, who was sick of crappy image hosting sites that came before Imgur, like imageshack. Admins of Imgur never cared about what was uploaded to their servers and did little to keep track of it all. They used some automated sorting, but for the most part let all kinds of filth be uploaded. However, they did not like the content that was coming from the users of reddit.com/r/fatpeoplehate. Admins began deleting images that angered them. The users in /r/fatpeoplehate were well aware of the censorship and focused on the staff of imgur, making fun of anyone overweight in company photos. Imgur reported this to the staff of reddit.
Here’s another user explaining it all:
My lord. Does NOBODY in this thread really know what happened?
Alright. I'm late to the party but here is what really went down.
Yesterday imgur decided it would be a good idea to block /r/fatpeoplehate images from reaching their frontpage.
/r/fatpeoplehate did not like this. They got details of the imgur staff and put them in the sidebar for the users to attack imgur staff with.
Reddit responded by banning /r/fatpeoplehate for encouraging attacks on individuals, as well as a bunch of other subreddits for the same, I presume those subreddits had some spurious links to the same drama in some way.
And he or she is right. However, this is one little voice in a huge mob. And if reddit likes to do one thing, it's to get mad. The damage has been done.
Should the admins ban because they don't like people being mean to one another? Are users doing anything wrong? The admins have every right to do this, however, users have every right to leave.
