But there's obviously some middle ground between 'free-for-all' and 'only your subreddits' that allows for moderation of the subreddits that are literally evil.
But the discussion is also not over whether to ban most, all, or even some subreddit's. It's over a fairly targeted removal, though reddit doesn't have a rubric for targeting in the future, which understandably makes some people nervous---people who like a nice, ordered, clear set of rails to ride on. But this is social, and that's not how social works. It still doesn't take much common sense to guess at what's in and what's out.
I mean, what we're basically seeing is this;
Yishan Wong, 2012: "We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it."
spez, 2015: Wow, that REALLY didn't work. So we're not going to do THAT anymore. Tune in on Thursday and we'll talk about what we'll do instead.
Does this mean your favorite subreddits might get killed? Possibly. But probably not. And that's likely to be good enough for an awful lot of users. More importantly, "an Internet with a front page that doesn't have a CoonTown is a better internet" is a pretty easy assertion to buy.
I don't feel like your 2015 phrasing captures the essence of the announcement. The announcement says less that free speech didn't work and more that free speech was never a goal.
That's why the contrast between the quotes is so notable:
"Neither Alexis nor I created reddit to be a bastion of free speech, but rather as a place where open and honest discussion can happen"
I guess I just disagree on what we're basically seeing.
> they will lose the tasty morsel they could currently be enjoying.
That tasty morsel of hardcore racism, rabid misogyny and all sorts of other fun hate groups, and the people that defend them because anyone should be allowed to say anything they want?
I don't understand why so many people think that getting rid of these groups is going to suddenly implode all the thousands of smaller, more focused communities that you mention.
I don't mind if they get rid of the hate groups but you have to be careful -- hate is a very plastic term. If people feel like their self formed communities might come under some sort of 'distaste' police, they might just pack up and go somewhere else. Most people aren't afraid that they'll go after subreddits that are blatantly racist, they are afraid that is just the opening salvo. They are afraid that the whole place and discussions are going to end up being monitored, shaped, and censored to benefit the Reddit corporate image. And what good is a discussion board where discussions must be approved for mass consumption or worse, shaped for mass consumption?
You might say, 'that wouldn't happen' and it probably wouldn't but the leadership has not been very open about what they are doing and where they draw the line so people fill the unknown with the worst case.
They need a policy of containment, not eradication except in the most egregious circumstances or where the content is actually illegal. What they do need is better tools to wall them off and detect brigaiding so that kind of business, where the hate spills out, can be nipped in the bud.
I guess that might be something to worry about if it starts to happen. But I think it's a pretty poor argument to say "well if they ban racism, what's next?"
It's interesting to see what is announced tomorrow.
A lot of people in this thread are mentioning the default subs - how is a mod of a sub with 8 million subscribers supposed to make sure every single thing posted isn't 'offensive'?
> I would like reddit to be a place for completely free, uncensored expression.
This is nice in theory, but it basically requires defending the rights of hate groups to silence those they hate. It's hard to freely express yourself when there are people calling for your extermination, or treating everything you say as if it came from the mouth of a five year old.
They wouldn't be, but neither is that hate speech limited to the subreddits that are dedicated for it.
I am 100% certain that I could go to the comments of any top post on pics, videos, funny, games and probably a dozen other default subs and find some hate speech with a positive score.
Remove the subreddits that these people call home, and they automatically feel less welcomed on the site.
> I am 100% certain that I could go to the comments of any top post on pics, videos, funny, games and probably a dozen other default subs and find some hate speech with a positive score.
You're saying you could go look for hate speech and find it. That doesn't seem all that troubling to me. Don't go look for it, and you will find it much less frequently.
Maybe it's not as troubling if it needs to be searched for. But it doesn't need to be searched for. It's everywhere on the defaults, that's the troubling part. You don't have to go to a specifically racist subreddit to see racism. You don't have to go to a specifically woman-hating subreddit to see misogyny.
I'm saying that it is everywhere. Not "I could find some hatred in some submissions", but "I could find hatred in any submission".
This discussion is not about reddit announcing to more strictly moderate the default subbreddits. I think they would be wise to do that, and I would have very little problem with it (especially personally, since I don't subscribe to hardly any of the defaults).
The discussion here in this specific chain of comment started because I responded to this:
> I would like reddit to be a place for completely free, uncensored expression.
By saying:
> This is nice in theory, but it basically requires defending the rights of hate groups to silence those they hate.
Allowing the hate groups a home on reddit makes them feel comfortable. Deleting the hate group subreddits reduces their ability to silence others. It sends a message to both the haters and their targets that the hate is not welcome.
If it's a choice between censoring a bunch of evil bigots, and letting their uncensored speech censor the people they hate, I will pick censoring the bigots every time.
Except that's not a fair analogy to what happens on reddit. Sure, the shouty horrible people have a corner that they hang out in, with couches and televisions and snacks.
But they're also free to wander around the rest of the store shouting whatever they want. They hang out by the front door with the greeters even! Up until now, Costco hasn't cared that they're providing a comfy space for these loudmouthed assholes to congregate.
You can't just not go to the corner if you want to avoid them, you have to avoid all the parts of the store that they are shouting in.
Maybe admins don't want their site to be somewhere that stormfront considers to be their biggest recruitment center. It's not like the users who subscribe to coontown etc keep their opinions to themselves when they are using other parts of the site.
There is no containment. There is a comfy room that the FPHers or the stormfronters can hang out in and pat each other on the backs, and then there are open doors to everyone else's room that they can just walk through and spew their garbage. Removing the walls just makes them less comfortable, it doesn't suddenly release them from a prison.
Only users interested in /r/stormfront would visit tho. Its not like removing /r/stormfront somehow deletes racism or prevents stormfront from recruiting in the comments, news post, etc.
That's true, but it does make it clearer that they aren't welcome on the site. If Reddit deleted the subs that I visit and care about, I'd definitely feel less like giving them pageviews.
> Companies that 'actively look to correct that imbalance' make things worse and reinforce stereotypes with token hires.
Looking to correct the balance doesn't mean having some sort of quota for hiring women. It means getting rid of the bias that exists already, not tilting the scales in the other direction.
If I have a list of true statements, that is a list of facts. If some of them become no longer true, and some other statements become true, the facts have changed.
If the statement changes from true to false, then it wasn't true in the first place. If the statement was dependent on some other criteria, and those other criteria change, then the fact doesn't change as it was dependent on the criteria that changes.
e.g. My rooster crows in the morning.
I ate my rooster.
My rooster no longer crows in the morning.
The criteria is that the rooster must be alive. When the rooster is no longer alive, the above fact should have been stated as "My rooster crows in the morning while it is still alive".
That's completely ridiculous for a number of reasons. First, the usage of fact is not regulated by SI or something, it has a number of definitions and connotations. Second, stating that all facts must be stated with tautological and temporal boundaries is beyond pedantic.
"I have two legs at this moment of Planck time, and not before they were formed in the womb and not after any possible incident in the future where I lose one or more legs."
No. If you measure something, those measurements can change. Yes, the new measurements do not overwrite the existence of the old, that's generally understood. If your measurements change, you change clothes. That makes sense.
On top of all that, the original quote is "When my information changes, I alter my conclusions."
So what if some company did something similar to Zediva, but with a model where customers "buy" the DVDs and then sell them back to the company when they are done streaming it? Basically use first sale to set up a streaming service where you don't need to deal with licensing issues.
I pay $20/month for access to the servers and infrastructure. I get $10 of that to use as purchasing credit. Movies cost anywhere from $1-$5 depending on popularity, and the company buys them back for some small amount.
The company would probably need to have some system in place for dealing with people that actually want the DVD that they 'bought'. Maybe something as simple as letting people know that they own the DVD, but the company is not responsible for shipping it to them. If the customer wants to come pick it up at the office, he can feel free to swing by and have someone pull it from the data center for him.
I doubt this particular solution would end up being looked kindly on. This is one of those places where the edge cases get weird. Netflix, for instance, is well entrenched as legal. And Zediva was basically Netflix with the latency removed. But because of the streaming nature, the one-copy-to-many-eventual-viewers thing was able to be labeled a "public performance." When really the difference in a "spirit-of-the-law" way is that the lack of latency would require the service to need far fewer DVDs than Netflix, which would result in less payments to the content creators for the same amount of people watching their stuff. Which gets back to the mess that copyright law has evolved into -- in terms of compensation for content, is there any reason that a Netflix service should be worth more to a content creator than a Zediva service? It creates a really perverse incentive in terms of creating more useful services.
So going back to why I think this would most likely be struck down: I think the most likely way it would be shut down would be by calling the "purchase" system (while a clever hack) not legally meaningful. Especially since the only person this hack enriches is the service provider: now if someone wants to watch more movies, they have to "buy" and then "sell back" more "discs", losing some small amount of money on each of those transactions.
I don't really understand the restriction that was used against Zediva. Is the key point that the same company that's renting out the DVDs is also renting out the means to perform them?
Hypothetically, a company could set up a datacenter where you rent DVD players by the hour, provide your own disc, and stream the output to your computer over the internet. It seems that this would be allowed based on the Cablevision ruling. Then, I could rent one of these players for three hours, look up someone who lives near it, and pay them to go to a Redbox, pick up a DVD for me, and pop it into the DVD player, so that I can stream it at home. It seems this would be legal and not even completely impractical.
Does it only become an issue when the player, the courier, and the Redbox are all provided by the same company?
That reminds me of my very first programming job, using a source control system (Rational ClearCase, I think) at a company that had licenses for a certain number of concurrent users. When you tried to check your code in, the client had to check out one of the license keys to use during the interaction with the SCM server. If they were all in use, the check-in would fail: "no license available, try again later."
I think that was a licensing scheme offered by Rational and not a clever hack we devised for screwing Rational out of license fees, but I wasn't sure and wasn't brave enough to ask.
Seems like a nice hack, assuming nobody made an argument that it constituted "public performance" or something similarly crazy.
Plus, you get automatic coverage of damaged disks: the company will buy back undamaged disks for what you paid minus the rental fee, or for full price in the case of an all-you-can-watch service.
Except anything with a low/bid ask spread becomes money and that comes with its own set of problems. What would happen if the DVD was sold back for more than it was bought for? It's the intersection of Banking + Copyright + Tax Law. The trifecta of screwball legal areas.
Courts aren't stupid. Judges in particular get really annoyed if you think they'll fall for it. "I'll just do X' instead of X and then everything is legal!"
It did? When did a court rule that a slight change in Zevida's practice would make it legal?
Lots of people are trying/hoping to change the First Sale Doctrine into something that can destroy copyright. That simply isn't going to happen. If some court someone rules that I can own a virtual copy of "The Avengers" and trade it around with my "friends" on the Internet, Congress will recognize that as a bug and modify the law.
Isn't this exactly how ReDigi operates? Is it different if the first sale is to a consumer rather than a company?
My reading was that ReDigi facilitates the "sale" of a song form one user to another by switching a DRM bit. Couldn't Zevida have done the same thing? Transfer ownership of the file to the user before pressing play on the dvd player?
It's not "exactly" how ReDigi operates, since there is a distinction that matters about where the "performance" happens. (And that distinction matters because Cablevision, which is what allows you to offer the home-DVR as a cloud-DVR, also said that the cloud-DVR was okay because of the fact that there was a copy for each customer.) EDIT I'm not so sure about that distinction now, but there are other differences, like Zevida actually having physical media.
Nor has ReDigi been found to be legal, unless the article failed to mention the resolution of the legal action against it.
I was talking about the companies mentioned in the original article which have stood up to judicial scrutiny despite having ridiculous setups that exist solely to circumvent prosecution. Judges clearly don't mind that.
> Congress will recognize that as a bug and modify the law.
I consider it fairly obvious what Congress would do if ever became legal that one person with one copy of a movie or song can legally and instantly share it with millions of his "friends" online. The same way I consider it fairly obvious what Congress would do if it somehow became legal to manufacture your own dollar bills.
Some people would say it's because of "Big Hollywood" or "the mafIAA" or whatever, but regardless of the spin, Congress would still act.
But Congress obviously isn't doing anything about filling a data center with thousands of antennas and temporarily assigning them to individual customers in order to circumvent public performance restrictions.
At least in this case, talking about what decisions will "obviously" be made beforehand seems unwise.
Well you neglected to mention the aspect of it being a large number of shares in your last post. Congress doesn't know who my friends are and I should be able to loan out a movie to a handful of people over time if I want to.
I think that would work. That would be like renting. Do renters have to pay a different license? Zediva would have to deal with people that buy and not sell back.
Someone should start an Airbnb/Zediva mashup and make software to automatically buy/stream/sell DVDs from other people.
Whoops, sorry guys engaged in the main attraction, opening up a 98 year old time capsule is too boring for this audience. Go backstage and come back later to tell us what the interesting stuff was.
I feel like this could have been organized better, maybe someone MCing the opening could have been getting people excited about each new item.
Is the text in italics from an earlier version of the council's statement? The linked page seems to have language that is as supportive of the student's blog as is possible.
After this, the shitstorm intensified, and the council leader appeared on Radio 4 to state that this would be reversed. Shortly after that, a version of the statement was put out that was pretty much the opposite of the original one.
