I think it would go without saying on HN, but with all the focus on the negative at Reddit lately, the positive gets lost. Just like there is some horrible stuff on reddit, there is some really amazing places. /r/askscience comes to mind immediately. or /r/suicidewatch or /r/randomactsofpizza. A very long list of very good things are hosted on reddit, and I think it's important to keep that in mind. The presence of these things does not negate the horrible things. Like most things in life, the goodness or badness of something is more nuanced than a simple yes or no.
It is not important to keep those things in mind. Not in the slightest.
All the free pizzas in the world don't make up for the fact the admins knowingly provide hosting for a community which encourages men to follow women around in public trying to take pictures up their skirts or down their blouses.
There are upskirt videos on youtube as well. I remember people trading them on AOL chatrooms, random popular forums, and Usenet before that.
The only way you can stop it is by censoring the Internet, thus human thought. That's going to prove unpopular no matter where you fall politically, but especially bodes unwell here.
I don't think there was a dedicated one then (at least I never took time to look for them when I was a teen, more focused on whatever piqued my interest at that point) but you could find people requesting and filling requests for them throughout alt.binaries.pictures.erotica and associated subgroups. My teens were mid-late 90s.
I just googled and see there is an a.b.p.e.upskirts one now, but I don't know when that was created. Could've been there all the while.
The issue isn't that communities can form on Reddit, but rather that the staff of Reddit welcome the creation of communities that actively perpetuate extremely harmful behavior. Ultimately the Reddit staff is free to run their site as they see fit, but the larger community of the Internet is rightly quite pissed about the fact that Reddit is supporting people who are actively violating others.
Should the people advocating for legalization of marijuana lose their community? Should /r/atheism be silenced for being offensive? Should MensRights be removed? Should MyLittlePony be banned for being vaguely creepy?
I don't agree in the slightest with the CreepShots subreddit and what it stands for but blatantly offensive subreddits might be doing a service as lightning rods for censorship advocates. If those firewalls fall we may find ourselves fighting for subreddits that might actually have some value even if some people don't agree with the views that are bred there.
I know I responded to you elsewhere in another thread, but you said something here that wasn't said there, so I want to speak to just that:
> I don't agree in the slightest with the CreepShots subreddit and what it stands for but blatantly offensive subreddits might be doing a service as lightning rods for censorship advocates.
This issue isn't about censorship, even though there are always those folks calling for censorship when stories like these break. The highly offensive subreddit communities that perpetuate racism and sexism are not helping anyone, but are instead creating a space that encourages continued racism and sexism, esp. physical actions like stalking that are directly harmful to people. These subreddits do not create a stronger community or provide some kind of example of how Reddit can or should be. That the Reddit staff continues to condone those subreddits while profiting off of that user traffic is the worst kind of behavior the owners of a site can take.
You should probably know that most of the groups clavalle named - in particular, MensRights, /r/atheism, and probably MyLittlePony - are ones that the people behind the current campaign against Creepshots have specifically said they want to see banned next. (And the targetting of MensRights isn't specific to that community either. From what I can tell, any community that actually considers forcing unconsenting men to have sex to be a form of rape has the same problem.)
"highly offensive subreddit communities that perpetuate racism and sexism are not helping anyone"
I disagree. They have helped me. How? I live in a very nice bubble, for the most part. In many ways, these issues don't exist in my day-to-day life. It is valuable to me to see that there are still assholes in the world. Granted, I know this on a very abstract level, but sometimes it is good to get smacked by the reality of a situation. It enhances my empathy and keeps me from the easy path of dismissal. This is also the reason, to a lesser degree, that I visit news sites that I know I will disagree with and I occasionally get in pointless internet arguments with their die-hard fans. Is that enough to keep them from censorship? Probably not, but there is /some/ value there.
