Overnight Donald Trump promoted a video featuring an extreme close-up photo of his face in black and white, and audio of him making an obvious threat: “If you f— around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.” Trump “retruthed” […]
The moderators were recently contacted by u/ModCodeofConduct, who had this to say:
We noticed you recently marked your community NSFW. This action is likely to confuse your community members, as people subscribe to communities based on the content at the time of subscription. This is a violation of the Mod Code of Conduct rule 2.
While we recognize communities can gradually change as they grow, when your content suddenly changes from generally safe for work to sexually explicit, it harms the community members.
While we can see you haven't taken the step of approving sexually explicit content, we need to separate your community from the communities that abruptly become NSFW and post sexually explicit content, situations in which we immediately take action. Please correct the NSFW marking on your subreddit so that we can separate your community from those violating sitewide rules.
Thank you.
As subscribers to r/PICS are aware, the moderators here have worked very hard to ensure that the community adheres to every mandate and message that Reddit has surfaced. Unfortunately, we were unable to state as much to u/ModCodeofConduct, as they disabled the ability for us reply.
We do not wish Reddit to think that we have ignored their attempt at contact (which would be very rude of us), so we will be offering our response here. We apologize for locking the thread, but as Reddit has yet to answer our previous letter, we are operating under the assumption that it went unseen amongst other comments.
We appreciate your concerns regarding r/PICS being marked as NSFW, and we hope that you will be reassured by our response. In short, the shift in question was not a sudden change, nor is there any risk of users being confused… and most important of all, an abrupt reversion would itself constitute a violation of the site-wide rules that you cited.
On June 16th, 2023, r/PICS (then r/Pics) asked its subscribers to vote on the state of the subreddit, and they overwhelmingly decided to feature only “images of John Oliver looking sexy.” On June 20th, 2023, a second poll was held, and it was determined that “any and all media featuring John Oliver” would be allowed. This also precipitated a change in the subreddit’s name from “/r/Pics” to “/r/PICS,” with the latter being an acronym for “Posts Illuminating Comedian’s Sexiness.”
As we moderated r/PICS, however, we discovered that large amounts of profanity and offensive content – both of which are listed as NSFW by Reddit’s policies – were present in non-NSFW threads. This was problematic, as users expecting work-safe experiences were very likely to encounter non-work-safe material. Rather than abruptly alter our rules without first consulting the community (which would have confused users), we asked on June 26th, 2023 for subscribers to refrain from offering any NSFW content in non-NSFW threads.
We also requested a response from Reddit on that same date.
By July 3rd, 2023, the amount of profanity and offensive content in r/PICS had not declined, and Reddit had not responded to us. It was publicly announced that we had no choice but to mark the subreddit as being NSFW, so as to adhere to Reddit’s own mandates. It was also made clear that our longstanding rules – rules which should have seen r/Pics (in any form) being a NSFW community from the get-go – would be unchanged; that neither gore nor pornography would be allowed, but that tasteful nudity, profanity, and “offensive” content would continue to be acceptable. To reiterate, while we do celebrate a British comedian’s undeniable allure, we do not allow anything sexually explicit to be posted.
Our surfaced resources – our sidebar, our rules, our wiki, and our announcements – make all of this exceptionally clear, but since Reddit provides no method by which users can be required to read said resources before participating, the visible marking of r/PICS as NSFW is vital to establishing reasonable expectations. Furthermore, as Reddit assures its partners that their advertisements will not run alongside profanity or offensive content, the aforementioned marking is also in said partners’ best interests. That same assurance indicates that moderators “set their own standards for conduct and ‘appropriate’ content,” indicating that r/PICS is solely responsible for determining what is and is not offensive (and policing accordingly). A failure on our part to appropriately list r/PICS as NSFW would therefore run counter to what advertisers have been told.
We do understand that the shift may have caused some minor issues for Reddit, however, and as we have no desire to harm the platform, we are more than willing to discuss the situation with you. Please respond to our previous request for communication, and we will look forward to exploring productive paths forward. In the meantime, to ensure that r/PICS is adhering to all of Reddit’s guidelines and requests, we would be happy to revert the NSFW setting, restrict posting, and remove any and all content that could be considered “offensive” by anyone. If this compromise does not meet with your approval, please offer a publicly visible comment in response to our open letter. We understand that you are likely very busy, so we will wait until Friday, July 7th before taking any additional steps.
I looooove watching reddit burn. Their CEO is so fucking incompetent but honestly, that's part for the course. Most CEOs are fucking morons fueled by nepotism.
It looks like the current plan is just to archive subreddits, turn off comments, and leave them public until the IPO.
Unless you happen to be r/programming of course and someone noticed the ChatGPT bots that seem to consistently be posting statements supportive of the admins. Then we got to force the subreddit to private immediately.
Unrelated segue, did you know that Sam Altman, current CEO of OpenAI, responsible for ChatGPT, was a long time reddit board member, and despite claims that he left last year, is still listed as being on the board of reddit?
Also, anyone else find it weird that in a lot of the threads talking about the protests on reddit... While the most upvoted comments usually favor the admins, if you look at the sheer number of comments speaking out on a lot of major threads and don't worry about the upvote/downvote ratio, the number of comments in favor of the protests near completely dwarfs the number of comments in favor of the admins. Just another interesting data point.
It's almost like there was a way for someone who owned the website to manipulate things in their favor and then call in a favor from someone with an interest in the company to help them do a very poor job of making it seem like it was all justified by the community.
A movement to weaken American child labor protections at the state level began in 2022. By June 2023, Arkansas, Iowa, New Jersey and New Hampshire had enacted this kind of legislation, and lawmakers in at least another eight states had introduced similar measures.
Reddit + Google: Now tracking users more than ever ( lemmy.ca )
This popped up on reddit when I clicked a web search result. Just what we’ve always wanted.
Trump Promotes Threatening Video: 'We Are Going to Do Things to You That Have Never Been Done Before' ( www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com )
Overnight Donald Trump promoted a video featuring an extreme close-up photo of his face in black and white, and audio of him making an obvious threat: “If you f— around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.” Trump “retruthed” […]
r/places is back up, hopefully there's plenty of this going around this time ( media.kbin.social )
I made a vase for my girlfriend for our anniversary ( media.kbin.social )
This is the Reddit app. They are making it really easy to want to migrate ( lemmy.world )
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/1032247
/r/PICS moderators receive /u/ModCodeofConduct message accusing them of breaking site rules by switching to NSFW; mods can't reply, so post public response instead ( www.reddit.com )
Reddit's API protest just got even more NSFW ( mashable.com )
New, Conservative Push To Weaken Child Labor Protections Is Gaining Steam ( talkingpointsmemo.com )
A movement to weaken American child labor protections at the state level began in 2022. By June 2023, Arkansas, Iowa, New Jersey and New Hampshire had enacted this kind of legislation, and lawmakers in at least another eight states had introduced similar measures.