(You can tell I'm a leftie because this is long, lol. Feel free to trim down.)
Well, to be blunt, our community fundimentally disagreed with the direction that the Conde Nast owned and operated website was heading. From the start, there were fundimental differences of opinion between the community volunteer moderators and the corporate-assigned accurate to say? Reddit 'content curator' Moderator staff.
Many of our members believe that promoting justice for all Americans also means nessicarily confronting uncomfortable events from our national past in a critical light and asking "how can we do better as a nation in our current political climate".
The particular incident that got our community exiled from Reddit were a number of positive posts about the abolitionist John Brown. Our members found him admirable because he selflessly advocated against the horrific enslavement of African Americans - at no benefit or need for himself - even at the cost of his own freedom and life.
Our assigned Reddit Admins (who are responsible for overseeing dozens of other different communities) took the very cursory and rushed opinion that our community was "condoning violence." This led to our community eventually being kicked off this corporate platform after a long "probationary period" with very little recourse to explain our position.
We believe that on large corporate social media platforms, the real-world humans that post their thoughts and opinions there are nowadays too often just treated as numbers to feed into an algorithm. When these sites become too large, they struggle to personally and thoughtfully moderate their platforms, and err too conservatively.
With Chapo.Chat, our goal is to provide a fully community-led experience free from corporate meddling that respects and includes it's members in the decision-making process.
My only argument is that glorifying John Brown was just one aspect of the ban. There was a lot more going on which "technically" broke the rules, and we should be prepared to answer for it and defend it. There were the landlord memes as well.
Ultimately I think what did us in was was the BLM protests and our refusal to clamp down on revolutionary discussion. We got banned for "hate" and "promoting violence," but at worst we were just talking about the self defence of oppressed communities. Self defence entails violence. It was our tenacity and lack of hesitation to side with the freedom fighters resisting oppression by whatever means they had at their disposal which lead to us getting banned.
The John Brown memes were a marvellous PR coup, but no one really gives a shit about an abolitionist who died 150 years ago (except nerds like us). We were banned because we wouldn't get with the program with regards to events that were happening at the current moment. We were banned for openly celebrating the people's ability to frustrate the forces of state oppression in realtime.
And I don't know the inner-workings of Reddit... but just from my average poster POV it really does seem like the John Brown stuff is what did us in. That's sort of the event directly traceable to the eventual ban. Out of curiosity, after a sub is quarantined, has there ever been a circumstance where it's been "un-quarantined"?
Seems like the Reddit higher-ups plan all along was to quarantine - with no intention of re-opening - and ban the sub at an advantageous time to them. If the quarantine discouraged new users, then that was just a bonus. Just a theory.
(You can tell I'm a leftie because this is long, lol. Feel free to trim down.)
Well, to be blunt, our community fundimentally disagreed with the direction that the Conde Nast owned and operated website was heading. From the start, there were fundimental differences of opinion between the community volunteer moderators and the corporate-assigned accurate to say? Reddit 'content curator' Moderator staff.
Many of our members believe that promoting justice for all Americans also means nessicarily confronting uncomfortable events from our national past in a critical light and asking "how can we do better as a nation in our current political climate".
The particular incident that got our community exiled from Reddit were a number of positive posts about the abolitionist John Brown. Our members found him admirable because he selflessly advocated against the horrific enslavement of African Americans - at no benefit or need for himself - even at the cost of his own freedom and life.
Our assigned Reddit Admins (who are responsible for overseeing dozens of other different communities) took the very cursory and rushed opinion that our community was "condoning violence." This led to our community eventually being kicked off this corporate platform after a long "probationary period" with very little recourse to explain our position.
We believe that on large corporate social media platforms, the real-world humans that post their thoughts and opinions there are nowadays too often just treated as numbers to feed into an algorithm. When these sites become too large, they struggle to personally and thoughtfully moderate their platforms, and err too conservatively.
With Chapo.Chat, our goal is to provide a fully community-led experience free from corporate meddling that respects and includes it's members in the decision-making process.
deleted by creator
My only argument is that glorifying John Brown was just one aspect of the ban. There was a lot more going on which "technically" broke the rules, and we should be prepared to answer for it and defend it. There were the landlord memes as well.
Ultimately I think what did us in was was the BLM protests and our refusal to clamp down on revolutionary discussion. We got banned for "hate" and "promoting violence," but at worst we were just talking about the self defence of oppressed communities. Self defence entails violence. It was our tenacity and lack of hesitation to side with the freedom fighters resisting oppression by whatever means they had at their disposal which lead to us getting banned.
The John Brown memes were a marvellous PR coup, but no one really gives a shit about an abolitionist who died 150 years ago (except nerds like us). We were banned because we wouldn't get with the program with regards to events that were happening at the current moment. We were banned for openly celebrating the people's ability to frustrate the forces of state oppression in realtime.
And I don't know the inner-workings of Reddit... but just from my average poster POV it really does seem like the John Brown stuff is what did us in. That's sort of the event directly traceable to the eventual ban. Out of curiosity, after a sub is quarantined, has there ever been a circumstance where it's been "un-quarantined"?
Seems like the Reddit higher-ups plan all along was to quarantine - with no intention of re-opening - and ban the sub at an advantageous time to them. If the quarantine discouraged new users, then that was just a bonus. Just a theory.