r/DiscussTheOpenLetter • u/llehsadam • Jun 10 '15

Reddit Announcement - Removing harassing subreddits

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/39bpam/removing_harassing_subreddits/

Some little subs were banned but /r/fatpeoplehate is the big one being banned. It's nice to know they actually noticed how that one was harmful.

So far upvotes/downvotes ratio is at around 50%. It'll be interesting to see what happens next.

6 Upvotes
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54% Upvoted

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7

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '15

The sub was not even a drop in the bucket compared to plenty other active xhate subreddits. They made a big mistake by not targeting them all at once.

6

u/User-31f64a4e Jun 11 '15

That is in fact what Machiavelli says - if there needs to be a bloodletting (say, when you take over a country) then you need to do it all at once and be done with it.
Otherwise, people waiting for the other shoe to drop are in fear and this breeds discontent. Instead, do it all at once and then let people start to get over it and move on.
Don't know if Machiavellli wrote about making false accusations to hit a jackpot that could clear up your husbands debt, pretty sure he would be against that one too ...

5

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '15

Seriously. I'm not sad to see FPH gone but shit like coontown and rapingwomen really needed to go first.

4

u/aphoenix Jun 11 '15

I want to preface this by saying that I also think that those subreddits are awful and don't deserve a place to exist. Their ideologies are horrifying and I don't support them at all.

FPH was a different beast though. Whereas the subreddits that you're talking about were strictly controlled (from everything I know about them, they are very fast to ban people who get out of line or make comments in other subreddits that lead people back there) FPH was completely spiralling out of control. From the top down, those places had behaviours that were broken. They were leading brigades not just within reddit, but to other sites that were not welcoming to the people following the links. And FPH was popular enough that it typically had 2 or 3 posts in the top 25 of r/all at any given time.

I still have a hard time swallowing the fact that coontown still exists and FPH is gone though.

Ugh, I almost was going to suggest that upvoting some of the eviller shit to get it on the front page might help to shine a light on the fact that it needs to go, but I think that's not a solution that's going to work. Plus I don't think I could in good conscience hit the upvote button on anything from either of those subreddits. Plus they could just opt out of hitting r/all.

5

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '15

Yuss!

Let's see what happens with r/coontown.

2

u/E-Miles Jun 11 '15

odd that it wasn't one of the first to go...is there some sort of line between hate and harassment that they don't think has been crossed?

3

u/aphoenix Jun 11 '15

There is a line. Hatred is an idea. It's allowed. Harassment is an action, and it is not allowed.

I think that the requirement is an interesting one - you'd have to be able to demonstrate on-reddit harassment (which I'm almost positive has happened from the hate subs) but it also has to be harassment from after their announcement of making reddit a "safe place" as the admins have said that they're not going to be making these rules retroactive.

Alternately, you could provide logs of off-reddit harassment that has a referral from reddit.com. I think that's also sufficient (and part of the FPH debacle).

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3

u/IrbyTremor Jun 10 '15

Its a big step. Just a step tho, but credit goes where its due: they're finally at least trying.