I’m trying to transition off of reddit completely and I dislike what they have done. But that being said, I thought it was quite honorable of them to not censor the ‘fuck spez’, be it comments throughout the site or on /r/Place. They even left the giant fuck spez ending in the official time lapse of /r/Place and the highest ranked post is a screen shot of the same.
They have many reasonable sounding excuses available to censor excessive use of the word ‘fuck’, and I don’t see how they benefit by leaving it up there. It’s not like censoring swear words is beyond the pale compared to other things they have done. They didn’t even need to do /r/Place, they knew full well what was going to happen but they did it anyways.
I know many people think this is some 4D chess move or a fear of the Streisand effect. They are not that clever.
I just wanted to point out that it does in fact look like they have a line that they won’t cross and they are holding to it.
Also, fuck spez.
I think reddit probably prefers that the hate is concentrated on spez. In their view, a giant FUCK SPEZ is probably way better than a giant FUCK REDDIT.
It’s a little sad that it’s become the catchphrase of this whole situation. Of course Reddit wants you to just hate that one guy, he’s the fall guy. I would hope people don’t expect the company to do any different without him, they’ve proven time and time again that they’ve got one direction to go in regardless of who’s running it.
It’s just impossible to get people to say “fuck reddit” en masse because of the separation between Reddit the website we all upkept and created the content of, and Reddit the company making all of these decisions
Yep, and eventually they’ll fire him just like they did Ellen Pao and he’ll take that heat with him.
Good point. A lost opportunity there.
Their hand was forced. It was already bad PR, but it would have only been worse and fanned the flames if they vandalized it any more than they already did.
Yall realize that it doesnt matter how many users on the platform say fuck spez.
But the fact that those users are still using the platform is what investors/shareholders care about.
If people really want to fuck spez, then they wouldnt be on reddit. But who am I kidding, these are the same people who said fuck myspace, fuck facebook, fuck twitter… and still have accounts on them.
Spez is know to alter comments. There is no line they won’t cross.
I’m sure this is the exception, not the rule.
I don’t want to defend spez, buuuuut, it was /r/the_donald, and it was kinda funny. It was not like a covert operation to change the dialog, it was obvious what happened when it happened, it was a troll move. Still inappropriate no doubt, but like, not the same as a disinformation campaign.
The problem is they have opened Pandora’s box. That trust can never be won back in my opinion.
fair point
as they took over more subs, even with automated tooling, time starts getting pulled to dealing with those subs in one way or another, no indication they have hired a bunch of new people and they have had to take on the work of thousands of mods.
Good point, they are probably short on resources as they scramble to retool their staff to cover for the absent mods.
Even though Reddit knew that r/Place would attract an obvious message, what’s left after it’s done?
Reddit has already shown they’re contemptuous of their users and do not care about their opinions.Is a protest that boosts site engagement really effective to a site that exists because of engagement?
I don’t think I’m being cynical when I say I think bringing back r/Place was a means to juice their numbers - a way to cover up falling user engagement.
My suspicion is they’re trying to buy time to come up with a better plan. r/Place represents another month of fooled advertisers.I think they believed it would be a way for users to air out their frustrations and now that they got all the ‘fuck spez’ out of their systems, Reddit will be just fine.
I’m not sure they’re correct.
They only left it up because investors don’t realize it’s referring to Huffman.
Nothing reddit has done lately qualifies as “honorable”.
Delete this post. I’m embarrassed for you.
DELETE THIS POST 😂 Hey this isn’t twitter, but you can try 👏 adding 👏 claps 👏 between 👏 words 👏 if you think it will help.
Is a valid point to say they haven’t done anything honorable. Maybe my post is the equivalent of saying a murderer is honorable for telling the cops where he put the bodies? I like to give credit where credit is due, but I can see your point. Anyways, I feel bad that you have been downvoted to zero, I’ll give you an upvote.
I don’t use Twitter. Are claps a thing there? Sounds obnoxious.
The downvoting bit is weird to me, too. I guess there’s a bug somewhere, because I don’t see them.
It’s more of a cliche, I don’t think anyone actually does it, but it shows up in those cropped images of tweets people post on reddit. Downvotes should show right next to the upvotes (at least, on desktop). Is a nice feature to show both, so if it’s like, negative 1, you can see, Oh it’s actually negative 10 and positive 9, that is like 50% dislike ratio. Feels a lot better knowing its a split crowd.
edit: A word
I think leaving it up is just the path of least resistance to them. Censoring such an ever-present message is going to have more catastrophic consequences for their PR. Think of all the media talking about how Reddit’s violent censorship is supressing what users have to say?
Plus, they’re not honorable at all. They definitely have been deleting dissenting comments and deploying bots to astroturf all conversations about their new policies. The only reason why they’re leaving the “fuck spez” messages is because it’s purely symbolic while users feel vindicated and don’t make a bigger stink.
Interesting point, that they are actually censoring dissent, it’s just that they are focusing on what can actually harm them and they have deemed fuck spez to be a good vent. So in effect it looks like they are giving free range to words/text protests, but really that is the only they leave up.
It’s a ploy for their users to take out their anger and hope it passes.
I’m pretty sure they removed the giant “fuck spez” texts, leaving only the smaller ones to make themselves seem “honorable”.
lol
Glad Reddit did.
Lol so cool and honorable. Tell spez it’s also super honorable to eat your own poop haha, he’ll be SO cool and respectable if he films himself and puts it on YouTube. That’s the stuff the cool people do.
