Daily Bard Digest 2024-07-07

At 2024-07-07T14:36:16+00:00 on /r/u_Bardfinn with a score of 1 point:

At the time, Reddit had maybe 12-50 employees (?), much fewer than it has now, and the user agreement & content policies at that time did not prohibit that content; there was I think a rule about not using the site as a marketplace, not facilitating prohibited transactions (guns, booze, drugs at the time, I think) and no targeted harassment, which at that time was enforced/interpreted as "nothing that makes a judge serve us a restraining order to enforce against the user".

This was before Ellen Pao, and Ellen's tenure is when the "hey there is a lot of problems with the culture and the policies, and the legalese of the user agreement" started to get thrown into sharp relief.

Before then, the dark side of Reddit was a few hundred horrible people, was easy enough to ignore, because mods would just ban them if they dragged their horribleness into the light.

And then G*merGate happened, & the admins didn't do anything about them camping on Reddit, which opened the flood gates & shattered the illusions about what the limits of volunteer composable moderation would do without a central trust & safety department and policies that excluded certain content & behaviour