Daily Bard Digest 2024-09-30

At 09/30/24 12:03:18 in modnews with a score of 9 points:

Letting mods restrict their subreddits was never a problem until

I know of dozens of examples where bad actors used public / private switching of subreddit types in attempts to hide their activity.

One example being a community of neoNazis who had their community open to recruit members & then went private to prevent their subreddit & subreddit content from being reported under the then-revamped policy against targeted harassment in 2019. That subreddit never went public again and afaik is abandoned but — never got recycled.

There's another subreddit I know that started private, built up a large quantity of content that violates sitewide rules, then went public to pull off their operation goal.

Historically, subreddits that were normally public would go private to prevent community interference, aka brigading. Or they'd do so because the moderation team would have a personal crisis. Both of these cases are now solved problems with respect to moderation cowtools and sitewide moderation policy.

I also know that the 2015 blackout - the one that set the tone & use case for blacking out subreddits in protest - was protesting the site banning racist subreddits & non-consensual intimate media sharing groups, under the bad faith claim of "concern" for "freedom of speech". Some of those subreddits were trading stolen CSAM; some were run by a now-convicted terrorist.

The people running that "protest" in 2015 have now largely left the platform, but they were really eager to leverage the power they still had to push for the "API protest" blackout, to punish the corporation for cutting them off from the cowtools they abused to platform disinfo & hatred, run harassment campaigns, exfiltrate moderation data under the guise of "transparency", and otherwise abuse moderation privileges to undermine everyone else's experiences.

There's other reasons this change by Reddit is a good thing - an example is preventing criminals & bad actors from covering up their trails before law enforcement / investigators can collect evidence. I could go on for an hour. But I'm going to rest here, with this:

I've spent about six years now shouting at Reddit users to demand proper moderation features & user safety from Reddit admins.

Every time they've moved to fix the mistakes they've made, bad actors have found ways to swindle y'all into harassing the admins for doing it.

Maybe we can start seeing people not launch into the historic "zomg this is the death of free speech" mouthfoaming bad faith claims of discrimination, for once.