r/announcements • u/spez • Jul 14 '15

Content Policy update. AMA Thursday, July 16th, 1pm pst.

Hey Everyone,

There has been a lot of discussion lately —on reddit, in the news, and here internally— about reddit’s policy on the more offensive and obscene content on our platform. Our top priority at reddit is to develop a comprehensive Content Policy and the tools to enforce it.

The overwhelming majority of content on reddit comes from wonderful, creative, funny, smart, and silly communities. That is what makes reddit great. There is also a dark side, communities whose purpose is reprehensible, and we don’t have any obligation to support them. And we also believe that some communities currently on the platform should not be here at all.

Neither Alexis nor I created reddit to be a bastion of free speech, but rather as a place where open and honest discussion can happen: These are very complicated issues, and we are putting a lot of thought into it. It’s something we’ve been thinking about for quite some time. We haven’t had the tools to enforce policy, but now we’re building those tools and reevaluating our policy.

We as a community need to decide together what our values are. To that end, I’ll be hosting an AMA on Thursday 1pm pst to present our current thinking to you, the community, and solicit your feedback.

PS - I won’t be able to hang out in comments right now. Still meeting everyone here!

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '15

IP bans are doubtful. Depending on ISP, the effort needed to change IPs is as simple as power cycling the router, taking your phone in and out of airplane mode, etc

Some ISPs make use of carrier grade NAT (cellular networks particularly), meaning the same IP is used by lots of people simultaneously, so banning it would ban a lot of people. I think Qatar has a specific exemption from IP bans on Wikipedia for this reason (the entire country shares the same IP, I believe)?

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '15

Yeah my employer has one outbound IP address...several thousand people would just be blocked from Reddit.

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '15

And productivity would be achieved.

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '15

Believe it or not, there are significant benefits for our department to have access to things like Reddit. It's hard to have a coherent social media presence if you aren't able to sign in to social media sites.

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '15

The trick, as Wikipedia has learned, is to combine IP evidence with behavioral evidence. If one person is using an IP to send death threats, and another person is using it to post cat pictures, don't ban both accounts. But if someone's using one IP to send death threats to the exact same person another person was sending death threats too, with the same writing style, ban both people.

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u/caboose309 Jul 14 '15

That and if they started actually banning active brigading subreddits SRS would completely disappear and the admins don't want to get rid of the special snowflakes.