[HN Gopher] Film studios lose bid to unmask Reddit users who wro...
___________________________________________________________________
Film studios lose bid to unmask Reddit users who wrote comments on
piracy
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 395 points
Date : 2023-05-02 13:25 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| lemoncookiechip wrote:
| This is a small win for privacy. I actually read it on
| Torrentfreak yesterday, and it always puts a smile on me when
| there's a single positive article there because it's always
| depressing news about people losing their rights to privacy.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| i disagree, that's a BIG win
| DANmode wrote:
| Legally. Not on reddit.
| asimpletune wrote:
| Wouldn't the broadband company have been safe anyways because of
| the safe harbor exception?
| voxic11 wrote:
| To qualify for the DMCA safe harbor exceptions one must:
|
| a. Designate an agent for service of copyright claims (i) on
| their website and (ii) in an online filing with U.S. Copyright
| Office (SS 512(c)(2)); and
|
| b. Write, adopt and post on its website a "repeat infringer
| policy." (SS 512(i)(1)(A).)
|
| c. Set up internal processes and procedures to manage the
| notice-and-take-down process (SS 512(c)(1) (C)); and
|
| d. Reasonably implement its repeat infringer policy.
|
| So that is basically what this case comes down to. Did the ISP
| fulfill its requirements to qualify for safe harbor exception.
| It sounds like the plaintiff wanted to use these reddit
| comments as evidence the ISP failed to reasonably implement its
| repeat infringer policy.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| This doesn't sound like strong evidence. Users rarely
| understand technical matters, base assertions on out of date
| recollections, remember incorrectly, and lie.
|
| A small sample size of users means very little. Meanwhile it
| might be easier to compel testimony on actual policies as
| enforced right now. If they are justified it would be like
| standing in front of the ax murderer holding the bloody ax in
| one hand and a newly collected head in the other and asking
| for his cell phone history.
|
| On the other side of the equation there are folks who have
| been permanently kicked off the only broadband option they
| have at their house in poorsville because the kids downloaded
| movies. Such policies can already be pretty punitive to some
| folks while other more savvy folks simply use a VPN and avoid
| issues. All in all not a very effective policy.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Small discussion on conspiracy I had on HN:
| https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
|
| Apparently having a conversation on planning a crime between 2
| people can result in a charge of conspiracy. So therefore, does
| talking about ways to steal would come under conspiracy to commit
| a crime?
| metadat wrote:
| Also discussed yesterday:
|
| _Court Protects Redditors' Right to Anonymous Speech in Piracy
| Case_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35772583 (4 comments)
| perihelions wrote:
| Worth pointing out that Reddit voluntarily doxxed at least one of
| its commenters to this plaintiff -- when no court order required
| it to do so. This _Ars_ writeup neglects to mention this, and
| leaves the implication that Reddit consistently defended its
| users ' anonymous speech in this dispute: it did not.
|
| https://torrentfreak.com/filmmakers-request-identities-of-re...
|
| - _" However, Reddit decided to share information about
| "ben125125", while protecting the other users. As shown above,
| "ben125125" responded to a thread about piracy warnings and
| specifically mentioned RCN. That wasn't as obvious in the other
| comments and Reddit feels that disclosing their identities goes
| too far."_
|
| edit: The linked court order also mentions this (page 3, lines
| 6-7)
| mnky9800n wrote:
| Reason number 151 on today's "why not to use Reddit" list.
| musha68k wrote:
| The failure that is Reddit is the failure of the web.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| That's interesting because I consider Reddit to be one of the
| great victories of the Internet.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I wish we'd have less of these "victories" that go from a
| half decent forum software to an ad-ridden hellhole full of
| childish gay jokes and regurgitated memes in place of
| actual discussion.
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| [flagged]
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| You may not be old enough to remember the internet before
| reddit. There were many separate forums dedicated to
| specific interests, and quite a few of those communities
| moved to subreddits, and the quality suffered greatly. I'm
| sure someone is going to chime in and say how it was the
| same thing with newsgroups before, but to me it feels like
| that time just before reddit and facebook took over
| everything was the peak of the internet.
| pixl97 wrote:
| There are two different but similar effects occurring.
|
| Dedicated forums for particular topics were generally
| tiny. A forum with 10k+ people was a sizable forum, and
| not many where that large. Small communities got very
| little attention from spammers, and while they had their
| own trolls giving problems they were much less rarely
| subjected general trolls unless something like 4chan or
| whatever came before it picked up on them.
|
| The internet is also huge and has zero degrees of
| separation in most places. I could post a link to a tiny
| forum here and 1000 people may see it. I could post it to
| reddit subthread and a hundred thousand people could see
| it. Or I could get a front page post on Reddit and a
| million+ people could see it. And with it tons of trolls,
| spam, and general idiots will follow and quality goes to
| trash.
|
| This barely has anything to do with Reddit/Facebook
| itself. It's the power of network effects congregating
| people. Facebook was always going to happen, maybe in a
| slightly different flavor, or slightly different form,
| but once we got the computing capability to have millions
| of people at one place at once time, someone was always
| going to build it.
| officeplant wrote:
| At least subreddits are still searchable. I'm running
| into a lot of instances now of forums/subreddits turning
| mostly into Discord servers. It sucks when all of the
| troubleshooting and repair instructions get moved into a
| Discord server and become unsearchable unless you join
| discord.
|
| Video game producers are starting up fan discords that
| also have the troubleshooting/bug reports channels for
| the game on them. Video game mod communities are moving
| to discord.
|
| Its going to really suck when a few years go by and a
| company closes or moves onto a new game and shuts down
| their discord. A lot of community sourced info is going
| to be flushed down the drain if people don't archive it.
| m463 wrote:
| I think it worked quite well at first, because it had
| mostly-democratic algorithms. It was distributed curation
| that generally followed common sense.
|
| Before that, I remember slashdot, which was pretty good at
| culling comments, but article selection was not democratic.
|
| But money screws up everything.
| George83728 wrote:
| Slashdot's system works better than Reddit's or HNs, but
| unfortunately Slashdot fell for other reasons (gross
| mismanagement, nonexistent editing, etc) Slashdot's
| moderation was great though.
|
| Specifically, I really like the way Slashdot provides
| more categories for rating comments. _' +5 Funny'_ vs _'
| +5 Insightful'_ is a very useful distinction. _' -1 Off
| Topic'_ vs _' -1 Flamebait/Troll'_ is a useful
| distinction. I don't want to read off topic spam, but I
| often do want to read unpopular dissenting opinions.
| Slashdot let me read the "trolls" (dissenters) without
| having to wade through the literal spam. Great system, HN
| and reddit would be better if they had something similar.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| I was seemingly randomly selected to be a moderator a
| couple of times on Slashdot. I don't remember how long
| each term lasted, maybe a couple of weeks? It seemed like
| a good system to keep anyone from being in the role for
| long enough to be the target of corruption and to prevent
| much damage if the selected person was simply a shitty
| moderator.
| tempest_ wrote:
| If that is the case I suppose we have drastically different
| ideas about what "the Internet" is.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| as well as "victory"
| chakintosh wrote:
| > 92 of top 500 subreddits controlled by same 5 people
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018
| eganist wrote:
| current lead on r/relationship_advice here - none of
| these people actually "control" anything, and gallowboob
| (for instance) has largely stepped away from modding.
|
| There's value in any information-sharing they do in that
| they share trends across subreddits that reddit
| themselves are opaque about, but the subs still operate
| autonomously.
| jamilton wrote:
| The other million subreddits are most of the good part of
| reddit, IMO.
| nbar1 wrote:
| Until you get automatically banned from the top subreddit
| simply for commenting in a completely separate subreddit
| the mods don't like.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| Maybe I have nostalgia glasses on but when I grew up on
| the internet forums only deleted posts that had illegal
| content. They did not remove unpopular opinions.
|
| Reddit is were actual discussion goes to die. Comes with
| the downvote ability I suppose.
| officeplant wrote:
| instantly reminds me of two moments in the early 2000s.
| 17yo me got banned from the then largest synthesizer
| forum in 2004 just because I called a mod named Angus
| "Mr. Beef" one too many times. :)
|
| And another particularly niche forum dedicated to a
| specific range of car chassis with a specific set of
| engine swaps that would permaban anyone who asked a
| question that could be answered via forum search. Which
| was at least mentioned in the forum rules you had to read
| before joining.
|
| Forum mods were notorious power trippers on any forum
| I've been on. Sometimes it was worth it just to keep
| order. Other times it led to flame wars and forum
| splinters where a few people would start their own in
| competition to try and pick up the unhappy crowd.
|
| So really nothing has changed because this is exactly how
| most discord/telegram servers, forums, subreddits, etc
| still function.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > Forum mods were notorious power trippers on any forum
| I've been on.
|
| Back about 10-15 years ago I agreed to be a mod on a
| pretty large and popular forum, naively thinking I could
| help keep the place decent and useful for the users. What
| I discovered instantly were hidden mod forums where they
| made fun of all the users, laughed about arbitrarily
| banning people, and discussed about how they banned posts
| about illegal stuff mostly because it gave away their
| secrets. I gave that up quickly and decided I was all set
| with modding.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Never went to SomethingAwful forums then.
| scrollaway wrote:
| You don't have nostalgia glasses on. You have a nostalgia
| blindfold on.
|
| Mods on the "old forums" routinely deleted posts and
| banned users because they don't like their opinion or
| hell even just as a "fuck why not it's funny".
|
| Source: was a mod and active participant of such forums
| and saw it all the time. Did my fair share too.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| This is true but I vastly prefer having my post
| arbitrarily deleted by a random mod than the current
| climate of ubiquitous narrative enforcement.
| nbar1 wrote:
| 10 years ago we seen a lot of open-discussion platforms.
| That all died when picking a side became profitable.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| <comment removed as it was devolving into a flame war>
| michaelmrose wrote:
| You are right and its actually possible since post
| history is public and some subs have gone further by
| making it impossible to participate if you had commented
| on the_donald. This method can trivially lead to
| collateral damage insofar as people may comment or even
| subscribe in order to needle and torment Trump supporters
| especially around 2020.
|
| A more through approach might to be to analyze the
| sentiment or at least the score of comments or even go
| further and analyze the mix of comments and sentiments to
| decide if someone is an undesirable.
| confoundcofound wrote:
| Congrats, you are the problem.
|
| Half of my hardworking, law-abiding immigrant community
| of doctors, engineers, and scientists were on the_donald.
| These are people who've actually faced hate in this
| country and who likely have way more exposure to people
| of different races & backgrounds than the average
| American.
|
| If that does nothing to make you reevaluate your opinion,
| then you are sadly and ironically a victim of divisive
| indoctrination.
|
| Edit: For context, the parent advocated banning users
| from an entire subreddit as a sound moderation strategy.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > For context, the parent advocated banning users from an
| entire subreddit as a sound moderation strategy.
|
| It is. 100% it is. If a subreddit shows that it's users
| continuously abuse the rules of the site, then yes, 100%,
| it's a sound moderation strategy. Banning regular users
| of the subreddit and just flushing it all out is sound.
|
| > If that does nothing to make you reevaluate your
| opinion, then you are sadly and ironically a victim of
| divisive indoctrination.
|
| The problem is you are misrepresenting what happened.
| Reddit didn't just "ban users from an entire subreddit."
| They didn't just randomly pick a large subreddit and ban
| all the users. Suggesting that they did that is
| disingenuous at best. So you can play the victim card all
| you want, but if you can't be honest about what happened
| that does nothing to make you reevaluate your opinion,
| then you are sadly and ironically a victim of divisive
| indoctrination.
| confoundcofound wrote:
| Never did I claim it was an arbitrary banning. In fact,
| it indeed was the opposite. I addressed this in a
| downstream comment.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Trump did very poorly with the highly educated and with
| minorities so it wouldn't be shocking to find the
| intersection was even worse. For instance 8% of black
| college grads in 2020 and 30% of Hispanic college grads.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-
| biden...
|
| Doctors had amazing voter turn out in 2020.
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarti
| cle...
|
| I couldn't find an analysis of how they actually voted in
| 2020 but only 26% voted for Trump in 2016 before he
| bungled the pandemic
|
| https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/873266
|
| Then there is the fact that a number of doctors think
| pre-covid trump already was in need of mental health help
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/13/health/trump-mental-
| health-ex...
|
| Only 15% supported a repeal of Obamacare heavily promoted
| by Trump before the worst public health crisis in my
| lifetime.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-obamacare-
| doctor-s...
|
| Far from it being half of America it looks like a small
| fraction of educated folks and minorities and a large
| helping of mostly uneducated white folks. If anything the
| fact that he has any support at all from educated people
| in America proves that being an expert in one field
| doesn't necessarily make you wise.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| <comment removed as it was devolving into a flame war>
| confoundcofound wrote:
| Its worst content was no worse than what you saw (and
| still see) on other subreddits.
|
| You would be disingenuous to not acknowledge the
| political forces at play. Mods were on high alert because
| they knew admins were waiting for the most microscopic of
| reasons to ban the sub. And we know these forces exist.
| Twitter is proof positive of political bias in content
| moderation.
|
| People of all backgrounds were on the_donald, which
| should make you question why they were tolerant of much
| of the content you likely perceived as hateful. If your
| answer is simply that they're bigots, then I suggest you
| have more conversations.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Which political subreddit calls their opponents "fucking
| cuck" or equivalent with extreme regularity? For the
| record, this is devolving into a flame war and that
| wasn't my intention. I suggest this stops here.
| confoundcofound wrote:
| I'm going to assume you're responding in good faith.
| "Fucking cuck" is honest-to-god no worse than the
| numerous insults I've seen hurled at conservatives by
| left-leaning subs. I'm a little surprised that's the
| worst you could come up with.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| You linked to an HN thread which linked to a reddit
| thread as proof of this. I would like you to know that is
| absurd since the reddit thread makes an accusation with
| no proof.
|
| The 'proof' is a screenshot of a post that was called '92
| of the top 100 subbreddits controlled by the same 5
| people' that got removed. Why did it get removed? Who
| knows?
|
| Do better. If you want to be better than reddit don't do
| the same dumb shit that it does and _check your sources_.
| bspammer wrote:
| Given that reddit surprisingly still has a working API,
| this isn't actually a hard thing to check. Here's a
| script that works courtesy of ChatGPT:
|
| https://gist.github.com/bspammer/6b5eff6670e4b839ffea89ce
| aed...
|
| The highest non-bot user moderates 12 subreddits in the
| top 100. There's quite a few users who moderate more than
| 5. I believe the situation was much worse a few years
| ago, and reddit the company put pressure on them to give
| up some of their subs.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Can you provide the data that is output?
| bspammer wrote:
| https://gist.github.com/bspammer/d6059d2bfa222a0f340353ae
| 0be...
| [deleted]
| Eisenstein wrote:
| The highest person on there that isn't a bot moderates 13
| subreddits. The second 12, and down from there. Doesn't
| look like anywhere near '92' for any 5 people.
| bspammer wrote:
| Yes because like I said the fallout from the original
| post caused a lot of the power moderators to give up
| their spots. The biggest one "Cyxie" straight up deleted
| their account.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| alex_sf wrote:
| .. the mods of most subreddits are public. This is a
| trivial thing to verify. It's as valid as any other
| information posted that you haven't _personally_
| inspected. I have no idea why you 're so belligerent
| about this, but it's odd.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| If it is so trivial then verify it and come back with
| verification instead of stating your confusion as to my
| tone.
| alex_sf wrote:
| How am I supposed to do that? You don't accept other
| people's verification of information.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| The person above you just did it. It's called 'show your
| work'. And it doesn't show what the parent says, at all.
| alex_sf wrote:
| Almost like if you read the followups, those few power
| mods created multiple alt accounts in the wake of the
| post.
|
| But keep acting super weird about this, I guess.
| nostromo wrote:
| For the record, I'm not a fan of Reddit.
|
| But there is something to be said about having the censor
| cabal out in the open for everyone to see. Compare that
| with Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, where there is no
| record of who is determining what is and isn't ok to say.
| HaZeust wrote:
| Why do I care? That it's 0.0001% more transparent of its
| top-operators? If anything, I at least can see who works
| under the VP of Integrity at Facebook via LinkedIn - I
| have no idea who GallowBoob would be if he didn't make it
| explicitly known.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| Being very active in the Facebook groups/pages scene, I
| can tell you that very similar situations happens there.
| Same thing for Discord. Even back in the 90's, it was
| common for people who enjoy being a moderator or admin to
| be all over the place.
| [deleted]
| musha68k wrote:
| It definitely is one of the great victories of the
| _commercial_ internet (in "mobile" 2023 sans web for the
| most part, mind you).
|
| BBS like systems and forums had been successfully in use
| since the early 70s. Usenet is more than 40 years old by
| now IIRC? Very similar function and open by design.
|
| Even without falling into "Endless September" rose tinted
| glasses I would argue that we _really_ , _really_ could do
| a whole lot better in 2023 and going forward.
|
| I guess _someone_ must work on Ted Nelson's ideas at least
| (Xanadu, etc)?
| rrdharan wrote:
| How so? I thought they had terrible monetization?
| nomel wrote:
| That's generally a good thing, from the user perspective.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Reddit most closely reminds me of ezboard:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Or proboards:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProBoards
|
| But Reddit is really bad at long on-going conversations
| unless it has enough to support its own subreddit.
|
| Car maintenance forums are something I feel doesn't work
| well on the Reddit system.
|
| Or anything you'd want chronological or heavy in-like
| image/video embedding
| officeplant wrote:
| Too bad so many older car forum posts are useless outside
| of their text now.
|
| Everywhere you go its just large swaths of
| photobucket/cardomain embed failures for the forums that
| didn't do image hosting.
| glonq wrote:
| In the same way that Walmart is one of the great victories
| of the retail industry.
|
| It snuffed out small independant competitors, dominates an
| industry, and wields its tremendous power in a negligent,
| self-serving, and irresponsible manner.
| bufio wrote:
| It has been a great victory for centralisation.
| skilled wrote:
| Please. Are you saying people would not have figured out
| how to host personal communities if it wasn't for Reddit?
| Oh wait... They did that long before Reddit even existed.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I think Reddit can claim credit for making an easy
| framework for creating new communities, unifying the UI
| experience, and making discovery somewhat easier.
|
| I still think it has devolved into one of the biggest
| tire fires on the Internet, but it was a cute idea. Maybe
| the next attempt will suck less.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Do you mean in terms of adoption, revenue, growth, etc., or
| do you mean something else? I can see that the business is
| successful, but from where I stand it's a bit of a mixed
| bag in terms of quality of discussion, experience as a
| user, treatment of its community, and perhaps its overall
| effect on the culture. Would like to hear more about what
| you mean, in other words.
| tornato7 wrote:
| There's a reason it's a meme that people always append
| "site: Reddit" to the end of web searches. It's one of
| the greatest sources of genuine, peer-to-peer information
| out there. They also have open APIs that allow everyone
| from researchers to developers to access it.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Thanks to ChatGPT that is about to become a thing of the
| past. First the APIs, and then the content. There was
| already quite a lot of paid fluff on Reddit, but it was
| fairly easy to recognize. Now it's easier to make and
| more plausible sounding, and it's going to completely
| drown out the humans. The value of "site:reddit.com" is
| plummeting.
| bezier-curve wrote:
| If all your research can be handled by whatever Open AI
| trained ChatGPT on, sure.
| ysavir wrote:
| I think the GP means that soon ChatGPT-generated content
| will be flooding reddit and drowning out the human-
| created content. Whether you use ChatGPT yourself or not
| isn't relevant when all the search results are ChatGPT
| authored pieces of content.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Yes, this is exactly what I mean.
| catiopatio wrote:
| It's demonstrably false that it's a source of "genuine,
| peer-to-peer information".
|
| What you find on Reddit represents the views of a small
| number of moderators and PR organizations.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Hmm, fair point.
|
| I think the main reason people search Reddit from Google
| is more that Google's search results are _bad_ , not that
| Reddit is great. When I search Reddit instead of Google,
| it feels like a hack to work around the fact that Google
| is overrun with spam.
|
| And, to the extent that Reddit is an essential
| information source, it's largely because Reddit (and
| other social sites) destroyed the small websites and
| blogosphere where this information used to live. Reddit
| is now kind of the only game in town, which to me is a
| success for that business, but overall a failure for the
| web. Compare it to Walmart and Amazon in the retail
| space: is the fact that we now only shop with those
| massive companies a victory for the wider retail
| landscape, or just for those corporations?
|
| Anyway, good point, thank you for the response.I would
| still like to hear what the original commenter has to
| say.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Reddit (and other social sites) destroyed the small
| websites
|
| I disagree here, Reddit didn't destroy the small
| websites, the users leaving the small websites destroyed
| the small websites. Reddit did not put any duress on the
| users and force them to leave. Instead having everything
| they wanted in one place without 20 different logins
| motivated the users to stay on Reddit instead.
| Convenience motivates individual action.
|
| Also, coming back to your first point on Google, but
| tying into Reddit. Spammers are destroying the internet.
| The reason Google is failing is spammers are expending
| far more energy to spam than Google is willing to spend
| to detect spam. Reddit is still very willing to expend
| energy to prevent spam on their site, hence becomes a
| higher quality source of information than the average
| search.
|
| The size of Google and Reddit both make them targets for
| spammers, and I believe eventually their success will be
| mostly eaten by the costs of preventing spam from ruining
| their services.
| cmh89 wrote:
| The saga of Violentacrez and /r/jailbait showed that the
| folks who run Reddit have zero integrity.
| trehalose wrote:
| I hadn't heard of this guy, so I just looked him up. He ran
| a subreddit for sharing photographs of children for the
| express purpose of jerking off to, and the CEO of Reddit at
| the time (Yishan Wong) defended that? That's bad indeed.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| On the flip side, the knee jerk reaction "think of the
| children" has resulted in many awful policies which do
| more aggregate harm than good. It is useful to have
| someone defend things which are distasteful but not
| illegal. When we snuff out a particular bit of speech we
| should have to think about it, however briefly.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I don't think so. The legal and moral principle of free
| speech is meant to protect different political,
| scientific, philosophical, etc. views. It's not meant to
| protect a pedophile's right to sexualize children. What
| do we lose by censoring those people?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Everybody has a group they consider 'those people'. It is
| at least best we have a discussion before banning any of
| 'those people' before we realize that the people in
| charge consider 'those people' whatever group you are in.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| You misread my point. I did not say we could not decide
| to censor such people, only that it is useful to have
| people willing to offer up a basic defense that pushes us
| to justify the actions we take. "Think of the children"
| is a way to instantly shut down opposition and win a
| moral argument without having to justify that your policy
| is well considered.
| officeplant wrote:
| >What do we lose by censoring those people?
|
| The aftermath of r/jailbait getting shutdown was also the
| shutdown of any adults only subreddit focused on
| "smaller" women. I helped mod xxsmall and other small
| breasted / lithe / petite focused adult subreddits at the
| time. Reddit didn't care that we explicitly stated
| everyone must be of legal age, and had age verification
| in place for the gone wild style subreddits. I put in a
| lot of my spare time trying to make sure illegal shit
| didn't end up on our pages and banning people trying to
| maliciously post images to get us taken down.
|
| It didn't help that this was around the same time
| Australia started talks of banning A-Cup adult actresses
| as part of a conservative "protect the kids" push.
|
| In the end they blanket banned all of the small breast
| subreddits because of the shitheads over at r/jailbait.
| Some of which had stories from the girls posting about
| how they never felt attractive or realized they'd
| actually get attention from men/women online because of
| their smaller shapes. Not just younger women either, we
| had women in their 40/50's saying the same thing.
|
| I still think killing off r/jailbait was needed. I just
| wish they hadn't kneejerk banned every legit sub because
| they were being blasted in the main stream media.
| Eventually most of these subreddits came back with new
| moderation/names and I gave up on subreddit modding
| because it was stressful trying to fend off illegal
| posts.
| cmh89 wrote:
| >It is useful to have someone defend things which are
| distasteful but not illegal.
|
| I'm sorry, providing a space for pedophiles to find each
| other and share content to build community is not
| 'useful'.
|
| > When we snuff out a particular bit of speech we should
| have to think about it, however br
|
| Reddit is not the government. They can't "snuff out"
| speech. They have no social responsibility to provide a
| community space to pedophiles.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| That was back when reddit was 'absolute free speech'
| oriented and nothing the guy posted was illegal.
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| Reddit is one part of the web. It's a privately controlled
| company. It should never have accumulated as much importance
| as it has. We need to design the next Reddits so they're
| credibly neutral parts of the internet with their own,
| distributed controls.
| [deleted]
| dporter wrote:
| The way I read it, the only reason Reddit didn't hand over the
| information on the other users was that the comments didn't
| specifically mention RCN. If all the users had mentioned RCN,
| it seems like Reddit would have handed them everything they
| wanted.
| [deleted]
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Reddit only requires a username and password. What info are
| they even collecting for doxxing purposes? Is this outlined in
| the terms of service?
| jsyolo wrote:
| IP address, DMs, probably lots more.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| I'm looking at the sign-up process for Reddit now, and it
| seems to have a "Continue with Apple", "Continue with Google"
| and "Continue with e-mail" options. Even with Apple's e-mail
| obfuscation, there's still an e-mail associated with newer
| accounts, I think.
| mhitza wrote:
| Things like mailinator work for reddit sign ups.
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| If you don't verify your email a lot of the site is
| unavailable to you. This is not disclosed on sign up.
| computerfriend wrote:
| They suspended my account, reactivated it and then
| suspended it again for not having an associated email
| address.
| quikoa wrote:
| Same for me and my account is >5 years old and never had
| any problems.
| DefineOutside wrote:
| I requested my GDPR data and they didn't have much data on me
| - not even stuff such as links that I've viewed in the past.
| The most private information is a history of IP addresses
| that I've logged in with recently and the IP address I
| registered the account with.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Very interesting, more like a theoretical law question. As the
| judge cited first amendment rights, to my knowledge, broadly
| speaking that only applies to American citizens. I wonder if the
| judge was actually made aware of the identity of the commenters
| in question or at least their citizenship?
| dwallin wrote:
| Many rights apply broadly and not just to citizens. The
| following article covers some of the nuance:
|
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/what-constitutiona...
| ricardobayes wrote:
| You are perfectly right and thanks for the link. Rephrasing
| my question - which shouldn't have been about citizenship at
| all, rather I wonder what makes it relevant that the
| constitutional rights are being invoked here. As Reddit is an
| open site, users come from all over the world. Is that so the
| alleged crime has been committed on US "soil", aka Reddit as
| an American site or at least the server is hosted in the US?
| I don't even want to bring CDN's into this, haha.
| toast0 wrote:
| If the case is being heard in a US courtroom, the US
| constitution generally applies. There's some gray area
| re:'enemy combatants', but that's not relevant for a
| copyright case.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| >There's some gray area re:'enemy combatants',
|
| Orange, not grey.
| voxic11 wrote:
| Because this is a US court deciding if it has the power
| under the constitution to compel reddit to expose these
| commentators.
| anilakar wrote:
| As I understood it, these individuals had at most mentioned
| receiving piracy warning letters from an ISP; they hadn't posted
| anything illegal per se on Reddit.
| [deleted]
| sva_ wrote:
| It's funny to me that the article mentions their usernames and
| when you look them up, they're still happily posting. I wonder if
| they're aware of all this
| bannedbybros wrote:
| [dead]
| stefan_ wrote:
| Since this is just a silly civil action, surely Reddit can
| notify them?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| The problem with these cases is that we only hear about the
| requests that get fought, but not the ones where providers
| silently give up all their data anyway.
|
| There was a satellite piracy site operator where Google got a
| legal request to Doxx them for a lawsuit. But since Google
| notified the operator, they successfully got a lawyer to convince
| the judge to quash it for $7k under 1st amendment. The operator
| now thought they were in the clear.
|
| "Tragically as I was soon to find out, none of this even
| mattered."
|
| "Nobody else even bothered to tell me. And by nobody else I mean:
| Paypal, eBay, 3 domain registrars, merch makers, VPN providers,
| and every other online service I had used with that email in the
| last five years."
|
| They were still fucked.
|
| https://anons.ca/p/i-used-to-operate-a-dss-hacking-network/
| russdill wrote:
| I would love a legal requirement to generate a Twitter 1.0
| style quarterly transparency report. Never going to happen of
| course
| techwiz137 wrote:
| And I would like to know why the US has jurisdiction in
| European countries. What allows them to do this?
| [deleted]
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Sadly, most big tech companies have substantial US
| operations, if not headquarters.
| jkingsman wrote:
| I found that article fascinating. If you're like me and were
| curious what they were actually doing with these cards
| technically, check out
| https://twitter.com/akacastor/status/1053172196057604097 with
| some additional threads at
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1054964796506939392.html
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Was a wild-time (as someone not high-up in it), but I
| probably underestimated the knowledge I gained in my teens
| that I could have built upon.
|
| That same fellow did a ground up compromise of a previously
| (officially) uncompromised system that's still in use:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ConTalks/comments/5kw4m5/how_do_i_c.
| ..
| gorby91 wrote:
| Australia recently took a massive step backwards in this field,
| passing laws to allow courts to compel platforms to identify
| users who made allegedly defamatory posts. This was done under
| the dubious auspices of "preventing cyber bullying".
|
| Australian defamation law is already extremely plaintiff friendly
| and has a significant chilling effect on free speech here,
| especially as against the rich and powerful who can afford to
| threaten lawsuits against anybody who wrongs them
| parksy wrote:
| Are you referring to the Online Safety Act 2021?
|
| https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2021A00076
|
| Or something else?
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| I remember around the time of the first new "cyberbullying"
| legislation (around 2016 if I remember right), it was almost
| immediately used to hinder the Carlton Breweries strike by
| accusing organizers of bullying and cyberbullying for reporting
| on scab tactics. It's all very two faced.
| Zak wrote:
| I don't get the impression from this case that US law would
| behave much differently. This case involved reddit users who
| had nothing to do with the litigation and were not, themselves
| being sued. The court saw fit to protect their right to speak
| anonymously.
|
| In the case of a person making a defamatory post, that person
| can be sued and reddit would likely be compelled to identify
| them to the best of its ability.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| There's a python script[1] (long abandoned) called shreddit that
| allows you to delete old comments. It first wipes out the comment
| (edits them and saves a blank string, or whatever string you
| choose), then deletes it. Reddit devs have said before that their
| backups don't keep previous versions of comments.
|
| Someone rewrote shreddit in Rust[2]
|
| I'm currently rewriting it in JS for Deno. Still in early stages
| so not worth posting the mess that it's in now.
|
| As soon as I'm finished with mine I'm going to setup a cron job
| and have it delete any reply older than a year (with some
| exceptions you can set either by subreddit or by comment ids). I
| don't have any comments about pirating so I'm not worried about
| that, but I also don't think comments on social media need to
| last forever, especially with all of the data-mining being done
| on them (remember Cambridge Analytica). I think something similar
| exists for Twitter and Facebook but I don't remember their names
| at the moment, maybe someone here does.
|
| 1. https://github.com/x89/Shreddit
|
| 2. https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit
| ricardobayes wrote:
| What a sad world we live in that we need to self-censor
| opinions on the Internet. I long for the "good old days" which
| were in fact not that long ago.
| randomdata wrote:
| For what reason? Once you can establish a firm opinion no
| additional value can be gained by continuing to talk about
| it, so any opinions you give are obviously hypothetical.
| Hell, they are bound to be contradictory from one comment to
| the next as you can't learn from only hypothetically
| opinionating one perspective. What can be taken from that?
|
| Even if someone wanted to use your opinions against you,
| there is no way for them to figure out what your opinions are
| because, again, there is no value in talking about your
| actual opinions. They are already established. There is
| nothing more you are willing to learn from them, so there is
| no remaining communication value.
| cellularmitosis wrote:
| what?
| randomdata wrote:
| In order to allocate your precious time writing a comment
| over doing one of the many other things life offers there
| has to be a return on investment. Otherwise, why bother?
| When it comes to opinions, the return on investment in
| sharing them is being able to receive the responses
| around the opinion shared in which to learn from.
|
| Once you have accepted an opinion as your own, however,
| you have had to believe that you understand it to the
| greatest extent possible and spending more time learning
| about it is going to be unfruitful. As such, there is no
| remaining value in talking about the opinions you
| actually hold.
|
| Only the opinions you don't hold are those you are going
| to share, as those are the ones that are still out there
| able to be learned from. They are merely hypothetical,
| and are likely to be contradictory as you explore
| different angles.
|
| Indeed, you may come to hold those once-hypothetical
| opinions in time as you learn more about it. As that
| happens, the value in sharing them will diminish. There
| is good reason why we don't spend our days sharing that
| we believe "1+1=2" and "the sky is blue". One's own
| opinion has no communication value.
|
| So, what is to be gained by censoring a hypothetical
| opinion that may not be held by anyone and certainly not
| you? If it were your opinion you wouldn't have to worry
| about censoring it because there would be no value in
| sharing it in the first place.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| > Once you have accepted an opinion as your own, however,
| you have had to believe that you understand it to the
| greatest extent possible and spending more time learning
| about it is going to be unfruitful. As such, there is no
| remaining value in talking about the opinions you
| actually hold.
|
| Is there no such thing as a strongly held opinion vs. a
| weakly held opinion? Different people might change their
| mind given different amounts of contrary information. I
| don't see the value in reducing this process to a binary
| divide between "actually held opinions" and "opinions not
| held at all".
|
| Also, even if someone does hold an unshakeable opinion, I
| don't see why they couldn't express it while trying to
| convince someone else of their opinion, unless they don't
| care what opinion anyone else holds. And there are many
| people who (seemingly) care quite a lot about what other
| people think.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Is there no such thing as a strongly held opinion vs.
| a weakly held opinion?_
|
| Yes, there are the opinions you hold and opinions you are
| exploring. This was established previously. You can't
| explore opinion without hypothesis.
|
| _> Different people might change their mind given
| different amounts of contrary information._
|
| During the exploratory phase. Once opinion is established
| in your mind, you will tune out further information as no
| longer being interesting. Collecting information is hard
| work and there is only so much energy to spare, so it is
| prudent for the brain to tune out information that it
| deems no longer useful. If you have formed an opinion,
| the mind has declared that further information is no
| longer useful.
|
| _> I don 't see why they couldn't express it while
| trying to convince someone else of their opinion_
|
| Functionally it could be done, but what is to be gained?
| The time and effort required is in competition with other
| things one can do with their time, so there has to be a
| value proposition.
|
| > And there are many people who (seemingly) care quite a
| lot about what other people think.
|
| Sure. That's what exploration is all about. If there
| isn't probing other people to find out how they respond,
| how are you going to derive the learning that provides
| the value for your effort? But you are only going to care
| so long as you haven't formed an opinion to call your
| own. If you are certain you've got things figured out,
| there is nothing else you can gain from continuing.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| > Functionally it could be done, but what is to be
| gained? The time and effort required is in competition
| with other things one can do with their time, so there
| has to be a value proposition.
|
| For one, someone can care about others' well-being. If
| Alice is of the firm opinion that binge-drinking is bad
| for one's health, then does she have nothing to gain in
| trying to convince her good friend Bob that he should
| stop binge-drinking? Is the whole concept of giving
| advice an illusion?
|
| Or in politics. If you believe that a certain oppressive
| tyrant ought to be overthrown, then would you not try to
| convince other people of this, so that you can form a
| large enough conspiracy to carry out that goal?
|
| (For other political movements, simply replace "an
| oppressive tyrant" with some abstract idea, e.g., car
| ownership, or monopolies, or whatever. That might seem
| silly, but humans are not creatures of pure reason, and
| nothing's stopping people from valuing any arbitrary
| thing.)
|
| Or for personal gain. If a candidate for some political
| office runs a campaign telling everyone why they should
| vote for him, then is he really doing that for the sole
| purpose of probing for reasons why he shouldn't be voted
| into office?
|
| Or just for fun. Are there not people who simply love to
| hear the sound of their own voice, as the saying goes?
|
| I don't deny that people sometimes express opinions that
| they don't hold strongly, but you seem to be suggesting
| that there is never (or hardly ever) any good reason to
| express an opinion that one does hold. There are all
| sorts of situations, especially in politics, where
| someone thinks it would be better if others were of the
| same opinion.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Feels like a wash compared to the 2000s, 2010s, or whatever.
| First off, I'd only be worried about my school or employer
| finding "bad" things, not the govt. Maybe more things are
| politically incorrect now, but some things are more
| acceptable than before, and web security is much tighter than
| it used to be.
| sli wrote:
| Freedom was long bought and paid for, this is just a natural
| consequence of not reigning in corporate power.
| bloopernova wrote:
| reveddit and unddit (and many more) archive copies of comments
| very frequently. To not have your comment archived/copied,
| you'd need to delete it within just a couple of minutes of
| submitting it. Reddit itself has no real way to prevent this
| from happening.
|
| I don't know if there is a way to have a forum-like reddit
| clone that would allow comments to be truly deleted and
| forgotten. Heck, I'd like it if there was infrastructure
| available for sites to verify GnuPG-signed comments.
| sli wrote:
| Uneddit and Reveddit, at least, do not archive comments
| deleted by the user that posted them. They archive comments
| deleted by moderators and admins.
| 0l wrote:
| This is not true: these sites rely on Pushshift, which
| archives ALL comments (at the time of their creation), and
| Pushshifts data is then compared with Reddits data,
| allowing it to work out which comments have been deleted.
| someNameIG wrote:
| You can request your account not to be (publicly)
| archived on Pushshift.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Ah, I didn't know that. Thank you for the new information!
| hot_gril wrote:
| At least deleting from the main site reduces the chance of
| someone stumbling upon something "bad" that causes them to
| target you.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Instead of deleting the comments, could you just replace it
| with some gibberish that includes "RCN" and other ISP names and
| some piracy adjacent terms?
|
| One thing we all know about Reddit is that their search is
| garbage.
| sli wrote:
| Any good account scrubber for reddit will edit your comment
| to some pre-defined text before deleting it, shreddit is no
| different.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| These remind me of those status updates copywriting your
| facebook messages. If you put it on there, its out there
| whether you delete it or not, archived on a dozen plus
| crawlers.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Those were hilarious. "I agreed to Facebook's ToS, but I own
| the content, <insert copy-pasted legalese that I don't
| understand>."
| neuronic wrote:
| Until those go down or are abandoned...
| lebski88 wrote:
| I used the rust one a few weeks ago to shred my almost 17 year
| comment history. I was quite sad to do so but someone started
| harassing me for stopping them from scamming on the sub I
| moderate and I realized that it was just a liability.
|
| On another note the Reddit admins wouldn't ban them despite
| them literally and repeatedly scamming money from users by
| pretending to need food. Despite them also posting at the same
| time about the weed they just bought. And also harrasing me and
| others across the site. One of the admins kept pushing it for
| me but apparently the team in charge thought it was a difficult
| case and only sent them a warning. The whole thing was just
| disgusting.
| 7speter wrote:
| >Reddit devs have said before that their backups don't keep
| previous versions of comments.
|
| Reddit (devs) are saying they don't do this, but are other
| companies doing this? Reddit kinda confirmed that this is at
| least possible by announcing they want money from parties that
| are using their API at scale.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I hate when people do this kind of purge on Reddit instead of
| just deleting the account and letting the comments stay. So
| much useful information has been destroyed thanks to these
| tools. I'm glad that dang does not allow this to happen on HN.
| Klonoar wrote:
| We literally had a project on the HN front page a few months
| ago that could identify users from commenting styles.
|
| Removal of the comment itself matters, nobody owes you
| information forever.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| It sets a dangerous precent because these tools make it
| seem like you can remove stuff from the internet for good,
| when you cannot. They don't do anything for services that
| crawl reddit and archive all your posts.
| zzzeek wrote:
| so, then "So much useful information has been destroyed"
| claimed by grandparent post is not actually correct then?
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| Plenty of information is archived after being deleted
| from its original source, it's just common that the
| _particular_ information you 're looking for is not
| included in any archives at all, much less any archives
| you can access.
| marktangotango wrote:
| As someone who's been commenting on various sites for 20
| years, I consider my comment history to be the very
| clearest representation of self and who I am. Like if my
| progeny ever wanted to know about me they could go read
| what I've written over the years. But then, I never crap
| post (some may disagree), and I usually always write
| sincerely. So the idea of shredding all that is kind of
| startling.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Crap is definitely measured by the eye of the beholder,
| and not the depositor :D
|
| Of course these days with AI able to do analysis of
| everything we've ever wrote, duplicate our speech, and
| mimic our look, we may find out that leaving all this
| information in public was a foolish mistake.
| Klonoar wrote:
| I generally use my real identity on the internet and have
| a similar story to yours.
|
| That said, our stories are nowhere near representative of
| why it's important to be able to delete comments. ;P
| circuit10 wrote:
| Preservation of obscure knowledge is important, please
| don't do this
| Klonoar wrote:
| No.
|
| People's ability to preserve their own safety and
| identity is important. Obscure knowledge can be
| reproduced; people cannot be.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Exactly. Preservation of obscure knowledge _is_
| important, but it does not take priority over peoples '
| privacy, security, and personal choice.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| that would be neat though
|
| imagine going to your account section and seeing the
| 'worth' of your comments
|
| if you want to delete your account, you would be offered
| that amount for the site to be able to keep your output
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| There are already businesses that will buy an established
| reddit account from you. These arrangements exist for
| anything with accounts with rep, whether they be reddit
| accounts or instagram or runescape accounts.
| privacyking wrote:
| Blame the script kiddies who like to dox people. This is one
| of the best ways to defend against that.
| system16 wrote:
| > edits them and saves a blank string, or whatever string you
| choose), then deletes it
|
| My account is 15 years old and I've been manually doing this
| for some time now.
|
| A few years ago, I had a comment get upvoted to the top of a
| popular thread in a major sub, but it had some mildly
| identifiable information about myself, so I deleted it.
|
| A few months later, Reddit had this personal "year in review"
| page you could click through, shamelessly similar to Spotify's
| year in review (I have't seen it in recent years so I think
| they stopped doing it).
|
| For "most popular comment" surprise, surprise, it was the
| comment I deleted, there in full text.
|
| After this I started using the method described above: editing
| every comment I make, saving a blank string, and then deleting.
| I usually do this once a week. It's tedious, but at least I can
| reasonably assume my comments are actually deleted.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If you're going to this much trouble, why are you even
| bothering to participate on that site at all?
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think there is a huge difference between participating in
| an ephemeral conversation about some topic and having your
| comments permanently and irrevocably archived and
| searchable.
|
| I would much prefer comments here to automatically delete
| after some reasonable time period (a week?), or provide an
| API I can use to go in and scrub every so often. But HN
| decided that it doesn't work that way so I live with it. I
| don't really see how the site benefits from keeping
| comments alive forever. Do a significant number of people
| really go back and read comments on articles from 10 years
| ago?
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| I do this frequently. One thing to watch out for is that some
| communities will be very annoyed that your profile is
| periodically deleted. For example, cryptocurrency redditors
| love to opine based on what other subs you are active in.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Was wondering about this. You keep the karma at least, but
| yeah, Reddit can be exclusive. I only care about my account
| the rare times I need to ask a question without being auto-
| banned or algo-downranked.
| rybosworld wrote:
| This is surprising as I've perceived Reddit as becoming very
| anti-user.
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