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Let's talk about Orlando (self.announcements)

spez[A] が 投稿

Hi All,

What happened in Orlando this weekend was a national tragedy. Let’s remember that first and foremost, this was a devastating and visceral human experience that many individuals and whole communities were, and continue to be, affected by. In the grand scheme of things, this is what is most important today.

I would like to address what happened on Reddit this past weekend. Many of you use Reddit as your primary source of news, and we have a duty to provide access to timely information during a crisis. This is a responsibility we take seriously.

The story broke on r/news, as is common. In such situations, their community is flooded with all manners of posts. Their policy includes removing duplicate posts to focus the conversation in one place, and removing speculative posts until facts are established. A few posts were removed incorrectly, which have now been restored. One moderator did cross the line with their behavior, and is no longer a part of the team. We have seen the accusations of censorship. We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims.

Whether you agree with r/news’ policies or not, it is never acceptable to harass users or moderators. Expressing your anger is fine. Sending death threats is not. We will be taking action against users, moderators, posts, and communities that encourage such behavior.

We are working with r/news to understand the challenges faced and their actions taken throughout, and we will work more closely with moderators of large communities in future times of crisis. We–Reddit Inc, moderators, and users–all have a duty to ensure access to timely information is available.

In the wake of this weekend, we will be making a handful of technology and process changes:

  • Live threads are the best place for news to break and for the community to stay updated on the events. We are working to make this more timely, evident, and organized.
  • We’re introducing a change to Sticky Posts: They’ll now be called Announcement Posts, which better captures their intended purpose; they will only be able to be created by moderators; and they must be text posts. Votes will continue to count. We are making this change to prevent the use of Sticky Posts to organize bad behavior.
  • We are working on a change to the r/all algorithm to promote more diversity in the feed, which will help provide more variety of viewpoints and prevent vote manipulation.
  • We are nearly fully staffed on our Community team, and will continue increasing support for moderator teams of major communities.

Again, what happened in Orlando is horrible, and above all, we need to keep things in perspective. We’ve all been set back by the events, but we will move forward together to do better next time.

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[–]a_calder 2602ポイント2603ポイント  (156子コメント)

/u/spez, why has Reddit not put more effort into promoting /r/live posts? I find them much more useful than some mega-thread that is difficult to keep track of.

  • Can you make it easier for mods to link to /r/live threads?
  • Could you create a method for merging two live threads if they are the same subject (and the creators want to merge them)?

[–]spez[S,A] 1095ポイント1096ポイント  (135子コメント)

Agreed. We haven't invested in the technology in a while, but even in its current state, they're very useful for these big events, and I regret not promoting one in this case.

[–]mygrapefruit 591ポイント592ポイント  (52子コメント)

How about a sticky on /r/all when there's worldbreaking news like this?

edit: sticky posts are now called announcements, thread here

[–]PineCreekCathedral 249ポイント250ポイント  (18子コメント)

It would be very useful to allow users to mark certain updates within the live thread as "useful" which would then be stickied on the side. When you first join a live thread after it's been up for a while it's difficult to find out what has transpired.

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      [–]Metallics 5068ポイント5069ポイント  (1178子コメント)

      Remove r/news from default subs

      [–]spez[S,A] 2553ポイント2554ポイント  (984子コメント)

      I'm not a fan of defaults in general. They made sense at the time, but we've outgrown them. They create a few problems, the most important of which is that new communities can't grow into popularity. They also assume a one-size-fits all editorial approach, and we can do better now.

      [–]IranianGenius 2168ポイント2169ポイント  (195子コメント)

      Then why not get rid of them? There are plenty of subreddits dedicated to finding new subreddits. I moderate default subreddits and I agree that getting rid of some subreddits being defaulted is a good idea.

      This has been a problem for a long time.

      Edit: There was a screenshot put out by an admin of something similar to what I'm about to say a year ago, but I can't find it. Basically, instead of defaults, a new user should be asked about their interests. They answer a few questions, and they are given a list of subreddits to choose from that are related to their interests. This would work far better than the current method.

      Lists of subreddits can be found at /r/ListOfSubreddits. You can see that many MANY topics have been covered in depth there, and if you want a new list to be made, feel free to make a text post about it.

      [–]CaptainCummings 199ポイント200ポイント  (24子コメント)

      You have a lot of people asking for removal of news as a default and I personally feel the same with regard to default subs in general. I started looking around for a /r/news alternative and ended up modding one of said alternatives. I don't really know what to say or how to say it now without sounding like a shill, but all I really wanted was to come to reddit, check the news, and not have this shitshow... somehow that desire translated to me helping create and build one. Your first two trending subs for today are both alternatives to /r/news because of the actions taken yesterday by /r/news mods. At what point here are you saying officially "We want our link aggregate site to have only one sub for each topic" when you won't even consider the removal of /r/news despite their record subscriber hemorrhaging and the drive to find unbiased reporting causes multiple related subs to go trending.

      I guess I'm just curious how promulgation of one central news subreddit affects your bottom line, if at all. I have trouble seeing how this works for you, in the third person sense as an organization, or you specifically, as a person of principle.

      [–]rafajafar 59ポイント60ポイント  (1子コメント)

      I don't have a problem with defaults. What I do have a problem with is default subreddits being run by people-who-aren't-reddit staff. That's not to say it's a solution if they were reddit staff, but at least it could allow for some moderation transparency which is the real problem I have. Homogeneous content policies and three-strike-rule capability could be nice, too.

      FYI, who cares what I think. I'm actually organizing my active subreddits to be taken over so I deactivate my reddit account. After 9 years, I'm done. But that has nothing to do with default subreddits.

      [–]cahman 445ポイント446ポイント  (59子コメント)

      But removing defaults is only one part of the problem - super mods continue to plague all communities, especially when one specific group takes over multiple subreddits and pushes their agenda. Super-moderators and allowing mods to pretend to be unbiased (when they try to create a narrative) need to end.

      [–]mechanoid_ 95ポイント96ポイント  (11子コメント)

      They are, however, an excellent catch-all. They collect the dross that forms 80% of reddit and prevent it poisoning the 20%. People find small subs that match their interests over time in a natural way. If we just dropped people into those small subs straight away without first making them run the festering gauntlet that is the defaults all hell would break loose. It filters out the lowest common denominator.

      Imagine a reddit without /r/adviceanimals... (actually don't, it's unbearable.) All that... crap ...would have to go somewhere. We saw the same thing with the banning of the hate subreddits, those degenerates were just spread around more, and given a cause to rally behind.

      I'm all for getting rid of the defaults, I hate them with a passion, but there needs to be a way of doing it that stops all the other subreddits contracting the same symptoms.

      [–]djtemporary 634ポイント635ポイント  (61子コメント)

      Please remove it. There has to be something better. Reddit used to be THE place to go to for breaking news.

      r/rupaulsdragrace had better info then r/news.

      Reddit made big decisions when it took r/atheism off the default list. Make another big decision.

      [–]Silly_Balls 163ポイント164ポイント  (16子コメント)

      Then get rid of them. Come on you know the defaults had you by the balls in the blackout 2015. The only reason was because of the size. You just had 19 people cause all this drama. How much money and goodwill did you guys waste today just dealing with this mess of crap?

      You are admitting you can do better. This leaves no excuse for not doing better. You are the leader, lead. You see the issue.... Fix it!

      [–]kakaesque 30ポイント31ポイント  (20子コメント)

      I think the very root cause of a lot of what happened wasn't the defaults, wasn't #Orlando and wasn't /r/news.

      The root cause was that because of the way /r/all works, it's now very difficult to agree to disagree and walk away. That goes for admins, mods and users. Each felt there was too much at stake, because /r/all makes it extremely difficult to ignore disagreement. It's literally in your face for almost all redditors. Consequentially, all the various communities and many of their constituents over-reacted.

      The best solution is to make /me/f/all available to all users, including non-gold redditors.
      This will free people from being at the mercy of others they disagree with whenever they use /r/all.

      The cost of doing it: /me/f/all would no longer be an incentive to buy gold.
      The cost of not doing it: Redditors may feel increasingly alienated on /r/all and over-react or leave.

      Which can you afford less?

      PS: If you think you can fix this problem by tinkering with the /r/all algorithm or by moderation tweaks (=live/sticky posts; paying $$$ to beef up Community staff), good luck. You cannot moderate, police and filter reddit to please everybody. You can however give people the power to filter and moderate their own input. You'll be surprised: Allow people to moderate their own input, and you'll get a much more moderate output out of them. Try to do it for them because you think you know best what's good for them, and you will find out the hard way that you don't. In part, you already have.

      [–]PyourIdiology 280ポイント281ポイント  (50子コメント)

      So will we have like a tumblr-style 'pick your interests' when you first sign up?

      [–]Zebba_Odirnapal 715ポイント716ポイント  (128子コメント)

      Remove /r/news from the default subs.

      It's a simple request. We're not asking you to fire Ellen Pao all over again. Just move /r/news to a place where the mods can push their agendas without dragging Reddit Inc's good name through the mud.

      Maybe change their name, too. Calling it /r/news makes it sounds awfully official.

      [–]DelWhenIDie 173ポイント174ポイント  (15子コメント)

      You've lost a ton of trust, now is not the time to save face, remove /r/news from the default subs.

      As a redditor and a gay person, I'm extremely taken back by the lack of support for unbiased reports in NEWS. I'm not saying everyone has to be a gay supporter, but I deserve to know about the happenings in my community IMMEDIATELY and not at 3PM while talking to a stranger!

      Mistakes were made, make it right.

      Also, the snoo icon change does not make a DAMN difference to me right now.

      edit: format & observation

      [–]Agent4nderson 93ポイント94ポイント  (95子コメント)

      What do you put on the home page of someone who's not logged in the? Just /r/all?

      [–]jcvynn 15ポイント16ポイント  (5子コメント)

      Perhaps instead of defaults set up categories for sub reddit to fall under using tags like "entertainment", "news", "humor", etc and when users create a new account they can select relevant tags and get automatic subscriptions to both popular and trending subreddits relevant to their tag selection?

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          [–]BlarpUM 712ポイント713ポイント  (89子コメント)

          What's Reddit's policy on posting pictures of events like this as they're unfolding?

          [–]spez[S,A] 458ポイント459ポイント  (82子コメント)

          There's no policy against this beyond our existing Content Policy.

          [–]Double_A7 500ポイント501ポイント  (50子コメント)

          There should be a policy update for pictures of events that may harm individuals involved.

          To prevent what that news station once did (When they gave away people's positions in france during the shooting)

          [–]spez[S,A] 425ポイント426ポイント  (28子コメント)

          We of course reserve our right to use our discretion in these situations. There will always be exceptional situations.

          [–]BlatantConservative 123ポイント124ポイント  (7子コメント)

          Will there be a way to report these things to the admins and have that be quickly dealt with? During quick paced breaking news stories, there is way too much information for an entire mod team to be curating stuff like that, much less a few admins.

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                  [–]thebaron2 4988ポイント4989ポイント x3 (843子コメント)

                  A few posts were removed incorrectly

                  Isn't this the understatement of the century? The amount of DELETED comments in those threads was insane and it turned out many of them didn't come close to violating any policy. Identifying where to go to donate blood?

                  We have investigated

                  Will this be a transparent investigation or is this all you guys have to say on the matter?

                  it is never acceptable to harass users or moderators

                  While I agree with the sentiment, it's really bad form, IMO, to include this here, in this post. Part of the disdain for how this was handled included the /r/news mods blaming the users for their behavior.

                  This is a responsibility we take seriously.

                  This is hard to take seriously if theres a) no accountability, b) no transparency, and c) no acknowledgement of how HORRIBLY this whole incident was handled. This post effectively comes down to "One mod crossed the line. And by the way, don't harass mods ever."

                  We–Reddit Inc, moderators, and users–all have a duty to ensure access to timely information is available.

                  What happens when you - Reddit Inc and moderators (I'd argue that regular users do not have a duty to provide access to info) - fail in this duty? If it's a serious responsibility, as you claim, are there repercussions or is there any accountability, at all, when the system fails?

                  *edit: their/there correction

                  [–]spez[S,A] 223ポイント224ポイント  (604子コメント)

                  Honestly, I'm quite upset myself. As a user, I was disappointed that when I wanted to learn what happened in Orlando, and I found a lot of infighting bullshit. We're still getting to the bottom of it all. Fortunately, the AskReddit was quite good.

                  All of us at Reddit are committed to making sure this doesn't happen again, and we're working with the mods to do so. We have historically stayed hands off and let these situations develop, but in this case we should have stepped in. Next time we will get involved sooner to make sure things don't go off the rails.

                  [–]SilverNeptune 1300ポイント1301ポイント  (151子コメント)

                  I appreciate the reply but /u/suspicousspecialst was a sock puppet, alternate account, for /u/nickwashere09 and the mod post you reference directly says this. For grins check back once a week for the next 2 or 3 weeks and I'll bet the user reappears with a new name. He's just a symptom of the real problem anyway; and that is you have unaccountable moderator teams in default subreddits. These default subs, and their moderator teams, are the face of Reddit, Inc. and they got you a whole boatload of bad press worldwide today. How many more scandals like this are you willing to tolerate? This one wasn't the first and if you don't solve this it will eventually sink you.

                  edit: in the interest of transparency this isn't my comment

                  [–]tipsana 92ポイント93ポイント  (9子コメント)

                  I found a lot of infighting bullshit.

                  I understand this post is to specifically address the Orlando-r/news moderation problem. But I have another moderator problem that is related, specifically to the "infighting bullshit" between moderators of various subs. Since i haven't found another way to bring this up with admins, I'm bringing it up here.

                  I would like you to address the policy of certain mods to automatically ban users from other subs.

                  Let me start by acknowledging the tremendous work that nearly all moderators do for reddit. I recognize that they are as necessary to the success of this site as the users. That said. Months back, I posted a comment in r/tumblerinaction. Believe it or not, it was a comment about not 'judging a book by its cover'. I instantly received a msg. from r/offmychest telling me I was now banned from that sub. Clearly a bot action. My request for review went unanswered.

                  I understand that admins want to empower mods and allow them to run their own subs their own way. However, by allowing this type of mod action, these volunteers can now control and moderate all of reddit. (Slippery slope, I know, but I think this is a valid concern.) Certainly, it allows mods to control subs that are not their own.

                  I look forward to a reply on this.

                  [–]Rhamni 586ポイント587ポイント  (42子コメント)

                  From the OP:

                  One moderator did cross the line with their behavior, and is no longer a part of the team.

                  Was this the account that was only four months old and told complainers to kill themselves? Because I find it extremely unlikely that a four month old account got to be moderator for a default unless it was just someone's alt. Could you admins confirm whether or not the IP address behind the sacked account is still modding one or more default subs? Because I think we'd all prefer the person stepped down on all their accounts, not just the throwaway they used to tell people to kill themselves.

                  [–]snobbysnob 453ポイント454ポイント  (48子コメント)

                  As a user, I was disappointed that when I wanted to learn what happened in Orlando, and I found a lot of infighting bullshit.

                  The catalyst for much of that infighting was the constant removal of posts.

                  My question is how can the systematic removal of certain posts be called anything other than censorship? Any post that made mention of the shooter's religion, which is relevant to the story regardless of the unfortunate tone some of the discussion took, was removed. Perfectly benign posts that were in no way hateful were removed. Then posts about things like where people could donate blood were removed.

                  That looks to be about a clear an attempt to stifle the news as there can be.

                  [–]razorsheldon 382ポイント383ポイント  (21子コメント)

                  There was no infighting. You had /r/news mods that were removing any reference at all to the largest mass shooting in U.S. history and telling users complaining about their removals to kill themselves and stop crying about censorship.

                  Then these same mods claimed they were being brigaded... by all of reddit looking for info on this situation? And you call that infighting? Pull your head out of your ass for once.

                  [–]Fabianzzz 361ポイント362ポイント  (18子コメント)

                  That's a nice speech, but you aren't addressing any of the points /u/thebaron2 made, which, in list form, are as follows:

                  • There was censorship. This is as undebatable as heliocentrism.

                  • Will we be included in this investigation?

                  • What are tangible ways of "making sure this doesn't happen again", rather than just saying such? People want /r/news to no longer be a default sub. People want the mods to be turned over.

                  [–]Jumba 424ポイント425ポイント  (15子コメント)

                  What the fuck /u/spez? Is this your answer? Can you PLEASE go back and answer his questions? Most notably about transparency.

                  /r/news is the only default where US news is allowed, you admit that you're going to "step in". Can you tell us what that exactly means?

                  If, god forbid, the same thing happens tomorrow. What are you going to do to prevent the /r/news mods to delete "off topic/duplicate" threads? Which is fucking bullshit anyway because between the police releasing the statement about it being a possible terrorist attack and /r/AskReddit making their post, there was literally nowhere to have a decent discussion about the event.

                  [–]iEATu23 228ポイント229ポイント  (56子コメント)

                  How are either of these relevant? This smells of the same Ellen Pao trickery. She was an intermin CEO all along, and reddit's ways haven't changed. Create a bunch of drama, act like nothing happened, and switch in a bunch of new rules.

                  • We’re introducing a change to Sticky Posts: They’ll now be called Announcement Posts, which better captures their intended purpose; they will only be able to be created by moderators; and they must be text posts. Votes will continue to count. We are making this change to prevent the use of Sticky Posts to organize bad behavior.

                  • We are working on a change to the r/all algorithm to promote more diversity in the feed, which will help provide more variety of viewpoints and prevent vote manipulation.

                  I've never cared much for /r/The_Donald, but you should be aware that they had more than 2/3 of the top posts on /r/all, and were the only source of information for a long while, along with /r/undelete.

                  I remember /u/drunken_economist, joked about how vote manipulation for memes doesn't matter. And now you bring in this rule when there is no vote manipulation and the content does matter. You're all still frightened over the last time fatpeoplehate took over /r/all.

                  I don't like either of those subs, but at least they have the ability to talk about the important stuff when it happens.

                  [–]Laughmasterb 45ポイント46ポイント  (5子コメント)

                  Why not, instead of getting involved "sooner", get involved before something like this happens again and actually put the moderation teams of default subs under the direct scrutiny of Reddit staff? I understand that this would require hiring more employees, but right now you're basically allowing your website to be controlled by clearly irresponsible individuals who have almost no accountability whatsoever.

                  Putting this off until "next time" is the best way to guarantee that nothing will ever be done about this kind of behavior.

                  [–]SleepingLesson 96ポイント97ポイント  (3子コメント)

                  Your "stepping in" at this point looks far more like putting out a PR fire than it does legitimately trying to improve the site. Can you give a specific reason the other /r/news mods are not being removed, or why it would be a bad thing to do so?

                  [–]aRVAthrowaway 80ポイント81ポイント  (19子コメント)

                  So...make it right:

                  1. Remove /r/news from the defaults
                  2. Remove all moderators, put an admin in charge, and take applications for new mods.
                  3. Ban /u/suspicousspecialst's IP site-wide.

                  Pretty easy situation to fix. There's virtually no one saying not to do at least one or more of these three things, and everyone saying to do so. Listen to your users.

                  [–]TRFlippeh 92ポイント93ポイント  (4子コメント)

                  How are you going to make sure moderators that have been banned don't stay moderators on alt accounts

                  EDIT: Doesn't look like we'll be getting an answer boys :(

                  EDIT #2: Can we not let this be buried? I really want to know the answer, it's a very important question. How can we let this get answered

                  [–]Mallemer 58ポイント59ポイント  (0子コメント)

                  All of us at Reddit are committed to making sure this doesn't happen again...

                  From your first post:

                  We have seen the accusations of censorship. We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims.

                  With respect, you're going to have to provide more than that. It's not enough to say the problem doesn't exist - and won't again - because posts that were censored have now been restored.

                  [–]Qazerowl 44ポイント45ポイント  (1子コメント)

                  I'm not supporting harassing moderators, but when moderators harass and censor users, and admins don't step in in time, what are we to do?

                  Reddit is supposed to be community driven. That doesn't mean admins should let moderators act however they wish, it means admins need to step in if the community demands it.

                  [–]thatpuck 44ポイント45ポイント  (3子コメント)

                  How can you say that you are still getting to the bottom of what happened and still say with certainty that there was no censorship on the part of the mods?

                  [–]thebaron2 92ポイント93ポイント  (9子コメント)

                  /r/Askreddit was awesome, so it can be done.

                  Thanks for the response. It's easier to ask the questions than answer them. I get that. I hope we hear more from you guys on this issue soon.

                  [–]AdamBombTV 11ポイント12ポイント  (1子コメント)

                  Just throwing this out there... what if, when some major shit goes down, the Admins make the thread themselves and mod it, make it the top sticky thread of /r/all, and only have them control it?

                  That way accountability is with the top brass, if anything crazy happens it can be dealt with in house rather than just getting rid of some faceless moderator, and it'll be taken super seriously because the thread creator will have that fancy red box around their name, slap on a [SERIOUS] tag like they do in AskReddit, and you can cut all the jokes, and memes that pop up with impunity.

                  Or I'm I just reaching too high?

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                      [–]ghostsnstufx 1610ポイント1611ポイント  (728子コメント)

                      Is there an official response from the /r/news mods? Do we know what was removed and WHY, or was it just everything?

                      [–]spez[S,A] 240ポイント241ポイント  (599子コメント)

                      Their response is here.

                      [–]CaptainDogeSparrow 926ポイント927ポイント  (490子コメント)

                      What do you have to say about one of /r/mods telling a user to "Kill yourself"?

                      [–]spez[S,A] 904ポイント905ポイント  (484子コメント)

                      It's totally inappropriate and that person is no longer a mod.

                      [–]Buelldozer 2251ポイント2252ポイント  (290子コメント)

                      C'mon, none of us here are stupid. That mod account was 4 months old, it was clearly someone's sock puppet and it's highly likely that person is another mod on the team. No account goes from new to moderator of a default sub (with almost no history) in 4 months.

                      This kind of crud threatens your business, the business of Reddit Inc, and you'd better start taking it more seriously.

                      [–]spez[S,A] 485ポイント486ポイント  (208子コメント)

                      My understanding is it was a new account from an old mod. His original account is also gone. He stepped down about a year ago when he got a new job, and returned a few months ago.

                      [–]Buelldozer 1247ポイント1248ポイント  (122子コメント)

                      I appreciate the reply but /u/suspicousspecialst was a sock puppet, alternate account, for /u/nickwashere09 and the mod post you reference directly says this. For grins check back once a week for the next 2 or 3 weeks and I'll bet the user reappears with a new name.

                      He's just a symptom of the real problem anyway; and that is you have unaccountable moderator teams in default subreddits. These default subs, and their moderator teams, are the face of Reddit, Inc. and they got you a whole boatload of bad press worldwide today.

                      How many more scandals like this are you willing to tolerate? This one wasn't the first and if you don't solve this it will eventually sink you.

                      Edit: Apparently it didn't take that long. According to some he's already back - https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/4nsiw1/state_of_the_subreddit_and_the_orlando_shooting/d46nram

                      [–]CarrollQuigley 91ポイント92ポイント  (1子コメント)

                      What are you guys going to do about all the people who were banned from /r/news?

                      More importantly, reddit needs to do something about the unaccountably of mods. This site gets over 240 million viewers per month and there are a few thousand unpaid "power mods" who effectively control what content can be seen on reddit with almost no accountability.

                      Every default subreddit should be required to have a public moderation log to make it harder for mods to shape public opinion in favor of their own political leanings. This public moderation log should be accessible from each default subreddit's sidebar.

                      [–]speedofdark8 37ポイント38ポイント  (2子コメント)

                      Shouldn't there be a minimum account age for a subreddit with a size over <some large number>, regardless of prior arrangements? The original account /u/nickwashere09 has no searchable or navigable history for a user to look back on. For all I know at this moment, the comments and posts that became disassociated with that username could have been awful, hateful, distasteful, etc vitriol. He "left because work stuff" like the /r/news admins say, and then he rejoins a few months later with a fresh account. There's no reasonable way for a user to know the history of this mod, in this instance. I'm sure there are other cases of this with all the hundreds and hundreds of mods.

                      Furthermore, how do you know that the old /u/suspiciousspecialist wasn't using the /u/rnews_mod account? If you look at that account, it looks like a generic account that is shared by the /r/news mods, and is only used to mask the actions that the user is taking. How is this allowed?

                      On all my points above, do they break any of the following excerpts from the user agreement and content policy?

                      • You may not license, transfer, sell, or assign Your Account without our written approval. (Account sharing?)
                      • You may not enter into any form of agreement on behalf of reddit, or the subreddit which you moderate, without our written approval. (Promise to give him mod later?)
                      • Creating multiple accounts to evade punishment or avoid restrictions (I couldn't point a finger precisely, but whichever mod runs their own account and the /u/rnews_mod one)

                      Maybe I'm splitting hairs with those excerpts, but my point is, how are you managing the moderators? You say you have a fully staffed community team, but there are some long, long standing issues with individual moderators be it abusive power mods, squatters, evasion, etc. that don't look like they have even been started to be addressed. Thanks for your time if you happen to read all of this.

                      [–]nolimbs 25ポイント26ポイント  (0子コメント)

                      It's very clear he's back on reddit and is calling the previous sub he modded for 'shit before he got there'. Please, spez, prevent this guy from modding ever again. He clearly doesn't give a damn about his responsibilities as mod and is pushing a personal agenda.

                      That being said I'm glad you opened up a discussion about what happened yesterday. I came online mid morning and was really disappointed to see the state of the news coming from reddit.

                      [–]HOEDY 103ポイント104ポイント  (8子コメント)

                      This is not how Reddit participation should work. There are thousands of dedicated volunteers on all parts of Reddit and some guy can just flip flop back and forth on his decision to moderate /r/news with brand new, unseasoned accounts. Subs like /r/news may be as important to information flow as the front page of sfgate.com and you're just completely ok with these people manipulating it to their will? It's not just some hobbyist sub with a few hundred users who can self-govern, there were nearly 9 MILLION subscribers before this started and you have to assume that every single one of them was fed misinformation and lied to because of these moderator habits.

                      [–]negajake 165ポイント166ポイント  (22子コメント)

                      Will his IP be permabanned so he can't just return after everyone forgets about this? Even as a normal user that's generally not cool in most contexts, but as a mod of a default sub, that's just unacceptable.

                      Looks like he's already back: https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/4nsiw1/state_of_the_subreddit_and_the_orlando_shooting/d46nram

                       

                      IP bans do nothing, got it.

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                          [–]JBHUTT09 310ポイント311ポイント  (20子コメント)

                          Are they really no longer a mod? Or have they just switched to a different account? The account was 4 months old and was a mod there for that same amount of time. It's obvious it was an alt account or a replacement account (more likely as they probably had to hide from something they did in the past, considering how they reacted in this situation).

                          Can we be sure this individual will never be a mod at /r/news again with any account?

                          [–]bluesatin 85ポイント86ポイント  (7子コメント)

                          Will they be banned from the site entirely?

                          And/or will they be able to continue moderating subreddits under other accounts?

                          If so, what's to stop them becoming a moderator for /r/news again?

                          EDIT: Rephrased my question to 3 separate ones to help clarify my questions and help with clarity of answering.

                          [–]realfinkployd 88ポイント89ポイント  (3子コメント)

                          Let's not play pretend. That account was a sock puppet for another mod and everyone knows it. Otherwise do you have an explanation for how a nobody account a couple months old suddenly moderates some default subs?

                          I'm assuming that person is still a mod on their main account and will just create another one to be salty when they feel like it.

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                              [–]Tom_Stall 42ポイント43ポイント  (12子コメント)

                              How do they know they were "brigaded by multiple subreddits shortly after the news broke"?

                              A big news story broke and a lot of people went to the sub supposedly dedicated to news which ahs 8 million subscribers and they call this brigading? This doesn't make sense.

                              And what is the policy on brigading? I got banned from /r/bestof because I pointed out they were brigading and I've said it to you before in one of these in hugely upvoted comments but there is no response.

                              Why are some subs allowed to brigade and others are not?

                              [–]Meltingteeth 173ポイント174ポイント  (5子コメント)

                              Are there any policies governing joint accounts, like /u/RNEWS_mod? It seems like an easy way to offset any accountability. For instance, if it was that account that behaved in the way that the now removed moderator did, how would the situation be rectified?

                              [–]GEORGE_RR_MARTlN 173ポイント174ポイント  (9子コメント)

                              /u/spez . Your post is condescending enough to convince me to quit reddit.

                              No, not just a few post and comments were removed. Threads were virtual graveyards of censored comments.

                              The malicious mod wasn't actively removed by either the mod team nor the admins. He deleted his account. Stop implying ( and you know you are regardless of what you explicitly stated) that he was removed as a consequence. This is a faerie truth ( a phrase I learned recently in one of these threads) .

                              This mod was obviously was an alt to another mod. While this doesn't violate any specific rule, it violates our trust in the Reddit product, especially since it seems that this alt was used as a vicious troll. This alt account removes any sense of permanence we'd expect from removal of a mod from a default as a means to make amends with your users. Hell, it makes it seem like such accounts are used for the inevitable fall guy when such a controversy occurs. What change can occur when the change in mod leadership is as cosmetic as this?

                              All of these grievances are either demonstrable facts or are so patently obvious to everyone.

                              Not even acknowledging them, and instead chastising us for our treatment of the mods is condescending to the highest degree. We are not children who you can trick and scold. We are your source of income. Ignore us at your peril.

                              [–]Jim-Samtanko 51ポイント52ポイント  (4子コメント)

                              What does it say about a mod team when one mod, one without much power to do anything, is the one who makes that post?

                              Don't you think that moderation of very large default subs is more important than the amount of time/effort/etc. that these mods can put forward on a volunteer basis?

                              That is, maybe your "users moderate other users" idea is flawed and prone to this kind of bullshit.

                              [–]Gusfoo 12ポイント13ポイント  (2子コメント)

                              I appreciate, because of how this site has evolved across the few years that I have been using is, that it is somewhat difficult to go outside protocol, but may I ask that Reddit Inc starts a new set of defaults that are Admin curated rather than the 'it just happened like this' set?

                              [–]not_a_throwaway23 148ポイント149ポイント  (2子コメント)

                              I saw this happen in real time. Their response is nonsense. Then they and their friends report brigaded the post I made to /r/undelete and had it removed automatically. The mods there put it back.

                              If you can't remove these abusive mods, then remove /r/news from the default list.

                              [–]bernredditdown 412ポイント413ポイント  (30子コメント)

                              That was a pretty terrible response.

                              Your own response is false too:

                              A few posts were removed incorrectly

                              They removed everything. Even blood donation information and condolences.

                              /r/news botched it, you guys botched it too.

                              [–]linuxwes 37ポイント38ポイント  (3子コメント)

                              The correct response here IMO is to replace all mods of /r/news, or remove /r/news as a default sub. Users come to reddit for news, and I learned about Orlando from the washington post despite having been on reddit all morning. That means /r/news is completely broken.

                              [–]BetterThanYou 91ポイント92ポイント  (6子コメント)

                              The whole "brigade" thing is unfalsifiable. It is trotted out without fail. There is no evidence provided, and there never will be. And the timeline doesn't work. The moderator in question was removed way, way after the actual problems happened. Everyone knows what is going on here.

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                                  [–]-run 606ポイント607ポイント  (301子コメント)

                                  This thread will go well.

                                  [–]spez[S,A] 172ポイント173ポイント  (271子コメント)

                                  I'd say it's going exactly as expected.

                                  [–]QuinineGlow 959ポイント960ポイント  (85子コメント)

                                  Well, honestly, when you say that you admins didn't find any 'censorship' going on in the news sub when, for a very long time during the unfolding crisis, no posts were allowed that referenced the event at all, or even links to blood donation information, and the one individual megathread they allowed for discussion (to keep the contents off the frontpage) was a graveyard of nothing but deleted comments, one could be skeptical of that analysis.

                                  When AskReddit has to become Reddit's source of news information for a day, because r/news refuses to allow any coverage of a story, the very least that was going on is 'censorship'...

                                  EDIT: On that note, if r/news was legitimately shutting down all talk on the shooting because of overwhelming brigading by racist hate-speech, how did AskReddit manage to successfully cover the incident without devolving into the Stormfront-grade nightmare the r/news mods said was going on?

                                  [–]RichAfterTaxes 228ポイント229ポイント  (10子コメント)

                                  Yep. It's pretty predictable that a comically passive non-apology would generate a general sense of disdain.

                                  I like this site. Honest to God, I do. A lot of people here get caught up in anti-jerking about how "terrible Reddit is" and how moronic Redditors are. Contrary to this sentiment, I feel like there's plenty of good content, discourse and insight here, and I've been more than willing to go to bat for it in the past.

                                  If the moderation team of /r/news is not wiped clean and started anew, or /r/news is not removed as a default sub, I will no longer be a member or even a visitor. I'll miss it. I won't be mad about it. But I'm not going to be supporting this type of administrative run-around either.

                                  [–]druglawyer 797ポイント798ポイント  (56子コメント)

                                  Yes, possibly because you're choosing not to respond to any of the top posts that would require a genuinely transparent answer.

                                  To quote from the (currently) 2nd from the top post: "theres a) no accountability, b) no transparency, and c) no acknowledgement of how HORRIBLY this whole incident was handled. This post effectively comes down to "One mod crossed the line. And by the way, don't harass mods ever.""

                                  How's that popcorn?

                                  Edit: I appreciate that he eventually responded to the post I referenced. Would still like to see some actual transparency on what went down. If the whole shitshow was that one mod, let's see the mod log proving it. And if not, why is the rest of that mod team still running a major default sub?

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                                      [–]amanforallsaisons 1411ポイント1412ポイント  (56子コメント)

                                      You titled this post "Let's talk about Orlando" when it really should be "Let's talk about /r/news."

                                      People in /r/news were trying to talk about Orlando, and 17,000 comments were deleted.

                                      • What percentage of those comments do the admins agree should have been removed?

                                      • Care to share a bit more of the details of the admin's "investigation?"

                                      ETA: /u/spez In your post, you talk about how death threats are NOT OK. I wouldn't disagree. But then you hand wave a mod telling someone to kill themselves with "Oh, they're gone now. Let's talk about Orlando Rampart."

                                      • Are users held to a higher standard than mods?

                                      • A mod can tell someone to kill themselves whilst deleting posts about where you can give blood, and we need to focus on how the mods got death threats?

                                      • Has the offending mod been banned from reddit?

                                      • Were they another mod's alt?

                                      • Will they be back in 6 months?

                                      Edit: /u/spez, as /u/blown-upp points out here, these were ten comments that were deleted. Given you state that:

                                      A few posts were removed incorrectly, which have now been restored.

                                      /u/blown-upp linked to ten comments.

                                      • What does "a few" mean to reddit admins, is it proportional?

                                      • If it was 1%, which is an understandable error rate, if not even nearly Six Sigma, then were 170 comments removed without cause?

                                      • If so, were those comments all removed by the one rogue mod who we're supposed to blame for all this?

                                      Edit: /u/spez here's a quote of one of the "few" deleted posts:

                                      My friend brian fitzgerald is currently missing atm. I know he went out last night with a friend he met on grindr and his parents dont know where he is. If anyone knows anything about the names of the people that were killed please. I just want to know if hes ok.

                                      Read that for a minute. Let it sink in.

                                      • Then please come back here and explain to us, since you are admins and have all the data, whether this comment was deleted by a moderator, or by automod?

                                      • If it was deleted by a moderator, which one?

                                      • Was it conveniently the one who's been put in timeout?

                                      • If it wasn't, how many more of these types of comments did your "investigation" uncover?

                                      ETA: If/When Reddit launches an IPO, buy one share. When the money from Conde Naste and venture capitalists run out, and these people need to launch a publicly traded company so they can retire on reddit money, don't buy gold that month. Buy one share. You're guaranteed access to their shareholders meeting each year, whether in person, or on a conference call. You can ask them questions.

                                      [–]m777z 185ポイント186ポイント  (6子コメント)

                                      Hi /u/spez. I genuinely appreciate that you're taking the time to reach out to the community, even though this comment is going to be critical of you and the /r/news moderation team. Since you mention that there was no censorship outside of now-restored posts, I assume that means you agree with the removal of comments that have not been reinstated. I saved a couple from the megathread when practically everything was being deleted, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on why they break the rules of /r/news. Mods of /r/news are welcome to chime in too.

                                      1. First, the comment by /u/unrave that was reinstated: "Here is a mainstream British media news item about the incident. The gunman is a 29-year-old Omar Mateen, an American citizen whose parents are from Afghanistan." I'm happy that it was reinstated but I cannot fathom how it was removed in the first place.

                                      2. Second, a comment by /u/VitaleTegn that remains removed (you can visit his user page to read the comment for yourself): "Moderators of /r/news: This is highly inappropriate and morally detestable. At this point, you're just deleting comments that don't suit your world view. Your job is to allow discussion (especially on a breaking news story like this) and not pick and choose the comments you want to be seen. Go ahead, delete mine; you'll just be making my point stand true." I don't think this breaks any of the rules; perhaps you could argue that it's "unnecessarily rude or provocative"?

                                      3. Third, a comment by /u/Lunagray that remains removed (again, visit user page to verify): "Biggest shooting in US history, not even front page. What a joke." Again it's unclear what rule this breaks. Many users were rightfully disappointed that discussion was hard to find.

                                      4. Finally, one more comment that remains removed, this one by /u/redconsensus: "'While investigators are exploring all angles, they "have suggestions the individual has leanings towards (Islamic terrorism), but right now we can't say definitely," said Ron Hopper, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's Orlando bureau." While the user did not link to a source, a Google search of this reveals mainstream sources like CNN with basically this exact quote. Which rule does this break?

                                      [–]airmandan 990ポイント991ポイント x2 (111子コメント)

                                      Let's talk about Orlando.

                                      That's what people were trying to do as the event was unfolding. Reddit was completely useless as a platform during that time. People were dying, and Reddit was sanctioning the removal of people posting where to give blood.

                                      The time for talk is over. It's time for action now. As a moderator of several of your default subreddits, I've seen my fair share of default meltdowns. I instigated May May June with my well-intentioned but tone-deaf "Stop Think Atheism" spiel. I watched GamerGate unfold in front of my team in /r/gaming while well-intentioned but poorly-considered actions turned what should have been a single deletion into something resembling a grand conspiracy.

                                      I've done my own fuckups and been on teams that have fucked up.

                                      All of that pales in comparison to the shameful response from /r/news and Reddit Inc's subsequent complacency in their actions. Hundreds of gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans were gunned down in a blaze of hatred. Half of those died, including an eighteen year old high school graduate celebrating her success:

                                      The 48th victim of the Pulse Orlando mass shooting has been identified as Akyra Monet Murray, 18.

                                      Murray, who was from Philadelphia, was in Orlando with her family, celebrating her graduation from West Catholic Preparatory High School. Her mother, Natalie Murray, she was on the phone with her wounded daughter as she cowered in a bathroom stall hiding from the shooter.

                                      Natalie Murray said Akyra sent a text message at 2 a.m. on Sunday, pleading for her parents to pick her up from the nightclub because there had been a shooting.

                                      Moments later, Akyra called her mother screaming, saying she was losing a lot of blood.

                                      The 18-year-old was an honors student who graduated third in her class last week. She was headed to Mercyhurst College in Erie on a full basketball scholarship.

                                      Reddit's reaction to this has been to enable and empower xenophobia by endorsing and embracing the wanton disregard for human life exuded by the moderators of /r/news during this indescribable, indefensible attack on the city that hosts the Happiest Place on Earth. Because what Reddit did during this whole fiasco was a fuck ton of nothing, and the result was people flocking to a quasi-satirical hub of fascist demagoguery because it was the only place they could have the discussion.

                                      50+ people are dead, including that college-bound young woman, whose mother's last memory of her daughter is hearing her agonized screams as she bled to death.

                                      And you want to talk? You want to make THIS the time you finally stand up for a moderator team?

                                      If this is the line in the sand you're going to draw, you might want to notice you're defending a landfill.

                                      [–]cheald 1491ポイント1492ポイント  (77子コメント)

                                      It's pretty bold to say that there is no evidence of censorship when community undeletion logs pretty clearly show mods removing posts which contain nothing except links to related stories or headlines (ie, "FBI: Orlando Gunman 'May Have Leanings' Toward Radical Islamic Terrorism"). I watched completely appropriate posts (and even entire sub-threads) disappear between page refreshes.

                                      It was abundantly clear to me watching yesterday that there was an agenda at play to shape the narrative in the /r/news threads. The moderator agendas in certain subreddits have been a running joke for a while now, but after that display yesterday, I have zero confidence in the ability of the /r/news moderation team to objectively moderate the sub. Locking threads because they're getting a lot of attention is a horrific way to manage such a scenario - saying "we can't control this, so we're going to just shut it down" is hard to read as anything except censorship. Reddit has plenty of community tools to help curate discussion content, and a bunch of people voting in a way that you don't agree with isn't necessarily brigading.

                                      Regarding the "rogue moderator", name and shame and point out what they did, why what they did was inappropriate, and any internal policies the team has taken to prevent that from happening again. There's a moderation log - make it public, so that when content is removed, people can see when, by whom, and possibly why. Maybe even consider something like HN's "showdead" flag to permit readers willing to brave the dregs of the comments to see things that have been removed, so as to improve accountability and diminish the capacity for moderators to operate in secret. You have pretty damning evidence that the current system allows for abuses that are withing your technical means to mitigate.

                                      Shame on everyone involved in suppressing conversation that didn't support their biases yesterday.

                                      [–]o11c 3517ポイント3518ポイント x2 (223子コメント)

                                      Two things that are absolutely needed, that you haven't addressed:

                                      • It's against the rules for a user to create an account to circumvent a moderator's ban. So why are moderators permitted to create a new account to moderate major subreddits after one of their moderator accounts disappears for one reason or another? (Also, for defaults, purging of inactive mods needs to be automatic and entirely dependent on activity in that subreddit.) Also, forbid shared moderator accounts (definitely against the rules already!) from doing anything except make stickies.

                                      • The quality of Reddit is entirely dependent on the quality of its community - not the quality of "algorithms". Vote manipulation was not a notable problem at any time yesterday. Rather, the problem was that one or more moderators decided to stifle discussion from its ordinary community (Since it's a default, the community is already everybody! Brigading fundamentally can't happen on something everybody checks regularly!), and all the rest of the mods were perfectly happy to let it happen.

                                      Or, to put it shortly - previously, it was possible for me to trust Reddit to inform me of any major news story (it doesn't matter that updates aren't perfect!), but that is no longer the case. I didn't know about this at all until I heard about it from other media, which is frankly embarrassing.

                                      [–]adadadafafafafa 3411ポイント3412ポイント  (146子コメント)

                                      Live threads are the best place for news to break and for the community to stay updated on the events. We are working to make this more timely, evident, and organized.

                                      Is it just me, or do live threads suck? They're fine to hang out on after you've read news articles and other reddit threads to get yourself up to date. But as a primary source of info they're just too... unfiltered and empty.

                                      If you come to reddit 2 hours after an incident has started, a normal reddit post will have (a) a link to a good article covering the scenario, and if the primary link is insufficient or inaccurate, the top comment is likely to be a better source, (b) several top comments with context and discussion, pretty representative about what reddit and a chunk of the world are thinking at the time (c) a fairly responsive bubbling up for new information, along with a "new" sort option to check the latest.

                                      While on the other hand, a "live" thread will just be random and often inane comments, lots of repetitive comments, and zero attention on all the background info its assumed "everybody already knows"

                                      [–]hsmith711 597ポイント598ポイント  (47子コメント)

                                      So when a news event happens and a megathread is created.. initial comments/reactions get voted to the top.

                                      Any new information and updates may or may not be edited into the main post.. and is usually just going to be a buried comment.

                                      Every post at all related to the same news event is deleted.

                                      In other words... 30 minutes after something happens, Reddit is literally the WORST place on the internet to get news. The only thing in front of you will be a single post that the event is happening and "best" or "top" will be the most popular comments from the first 30 minutes and "new" will be ignorant reactions.

                                      That doesn't seem like a good idea at all. If there were a subreddit with moderators that knew the difference between "contributing to the discussion" and not.. and would just remove 100% of parent comments that don't contribute to the discussion... that would be a good start.

                                      Edit: To those saying livethreads fix the problem.. I agree they are an improvement.. but that still doesn't explain why new articles/stories with new information are automatically deleted just because a megathread or live thread exists. How many hours after an event until new stories with new information are allowed as new content? 1 hour? 3 hours? 24 hours?

                                      Simply put, if I wanted the most up to date information about this story and several others in the recent past, news.google.com or any other actual news site was far easier to find what I was looking for than Reddit. Reddit is just the best place to find out how the reddit (or specific subreddit) hivemind is reacting to a particular story.

                                      Duplicate news stories muddy the water... but removing all posts that have anything to do with a topic limits the amount of information that can be found about an event on this website.

                                      [–]DownWithPastryarchy 114ポイント115ポイント  (57子コメント)

                                      edit: just quickly, this isn't a comment intended to be a jab at you /u/spez, I'm just still pretty pissed at the situation, as the ramifications of such a situation could be huge - There was already one person who said that they first heard of the event on the news *in their car on the way to work after they had already checked Reddit... Imagine if that had been a relative of a victim, and they had yet to know.* - I have to also admit, I'm a little sick of the blatant mod abuse, too. The agenda driven shit that I've seen, and been a blatant target of in posts I've made, and having been on Reddit for almost 8 years, this place used to be a wonderful place for insightful and intelligent debate, not agenda pushing tripe by entire mod teams.

                                      So, /u/spez, what I got from your post is that...

                                      A few posts were removed incorrectly ... One moderator did cross the line with their behavior, and is no longer a part of the team.

                                      They did nothing wrong, but one moderator was an asshole and is no longer on the team (he deleted his own account with no punishment...) - Let's be serious, that account was clearly an alt, and the mod team runs on cronyism (something that pisses me off the most with mod teams in general)

                                      Live threads are the best place for news to break and for the community to stay updated on the events. We are working to make this more timely, evident, and organized.

                                      We're going to try to focus on ensuring that Reddit Live is integrated more thoroughly - A system which is, when created, fully dictated by a small number of submitters with no means of stopping clear agenda pushing. I couldn't possibly see how that could be used for nefarious purposes...

                                      We’re introducing a change to Sticky Posts: They’ll now be called Announcement Posts, which better captures their intended purpose; they will only be able to be created by moderators; and they must be text posts. Votes will continue to count. We are making this change to prevent the use of Sticky Posts to organize bad behavior.

                                      Define preventing bad behaviour? in what way are stickies used to encourage bad behaviour? The mods at /r/pics posted one to ensure there was a place for people to discuss the events. The mods of /r/askreddit did the same - The mods at /r/news after they had finally got their act together decided to set one up as a sort of "oopsie, hurr hurr guys stop brigading us plebs!" post with a hollow apology, but where was the undesirable behaviour?

                                      We are working on a change to the r/all algorithm to promote more diversity in the feed, which will help provide more variety of viewpoints and prevent vote manipulation.

                                      This to me looks like a blatant poke at /r/The_Donald (a sub which I had little interest in prior to this fiasco, as I don't live in the US and don't give much of a shit about your overall politics) - You're mad that /r/The_Donald became pretty much the only place where people found a open forum to discuss the tragedy, and now you're punishing them for it, by declaring what they did "vote manipulation"? Fuck me, spez, you aren't that dishonest? I don't care if they don't align with your political views, at least they had the balls to offer people a place to discuss things while /r/news were busy running around a burning house.

                                      We are nearly fully staffed on our Community team, and will continue increasing support for moderator teams of major communities.

                                      Something you guys repeat every time something like this happens. I can't wait for the next time it happens and you say it yet again. Have you considered, you know, focusing on the people you hire, and not the number you hire?

                                      [–]istorical 751ポイント752ポイント  (60子コメント)

                                      We have seen the accusations of censorship. We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims.

                                      If you don't call thousands of comments being deleted because a moderation team doesn't like them censorship, what do you call it? Oh that's right, you call anything you don't like brigading. Because it's not possible to read and comment in multiple subreddits, you're only allowed to have and share opinions in your own home turf.

                                      Reddit of 2016: Non-circlejerk opinions aren't allowed in any subreddit. Expressing a contrary view is brigading. There's no such thing as censorship, the mods are always right, and remember, we've always been at war with Eastasia!

                                      Edit. Since I'm getting a bit of traction, this is the real problem as I see it:

                                      1. A sub like /r/news normally has a consensus that A is right and B is wrong (spoiler alert, the mods usually also agree with A and disparage people who believe in B!)
                                      2. A big thread appears and people who wouldn't normally comment or vote show up. This is normal. You might normally lurk in most subs, but when something big happens you want to participate. It's not brigading.
                                      3. Some comments in support of B start popping up, and gasp, they get upvoted! This angers the mods!
                                      4. This is the part where the mods start deleting shit like crazy because opinions they don't like are actually prevailing. The public discourse is shifting towards an unacceptable direction. So they exercise editorial control over public opinion. What gives them this right?
                                      5. Reddit users rebel and get super pissed off.
                                      6. Admins don't admit that the mods did anything wrong, they victimblame people who had their comments or posts deleted, and instead divert attention from the manipulation of discussion using "brigading", "death threats", and "harassment" as a scapegoat and boogeyman.

                                      We've been seeing this time and time again: If 3% of users are brigading, or harassing, or doxxing, or death-threating because they believe in B, then Reddit admins and mods decide it's OK to delete all comments that express support of B. If the mods do something shady and get called out by the community, then immediately they (and the admins) go find some occurrences of the outgroup sending harassing messages (newsflash, it's gonna happen in a site with hundreds of millions of active users!) and try to entirely change the subject to talk about that and sweep everything else under the rug.

                                      As these things keep happening, citizens of the internet are learning that Reddit isn't a forum for open and earnest discussion of ideas, it's a place where you can only say what's acceptable to mods and admins. This isn't about harassment, or hate speech, or doxxing, or brigading, it's about moderation teams shutting down opinions they don't agree with.

                                      Moderators are not meant to shape public thought or push their values onto others. Better to have no mods than mods who remove things they disagree with.

                                      [–]D0cR3d 132ポイント133ポイント  (29子コメント)

                                      Edit: See admins post here but they removed the requirement that for sticking a self that it had to be made by a mod.

                                      So what happens to regular sticky posts. A few of my subreddits use sticky posts as a gathering of information. Can only mods make sticky aka announcement posts? What if a news info like E3 for the gaming subs, a user makes a post first, and we want to honor that by making a collective discussion thread? Are we not able to do that and we as mods would have to create our own announcement post just to sticky it?

                                      Examples when we would sticky a users post:

                                      1. They create a really detailed helpful post with information, and we want to direct users to it
                                      2. Mods are asleep and a user gets the drop on a game update, or E3 coverage, or some other bit of information. We like to reduce redundant threads, so direct discussion to a single thread and make this a stickied megathread.
                                      3. An important new story breaks out (current event) and the mods want to sticky that for visibility.

                                      Users kinda get angry if mods remove threads to make their own, especially when users get a big drop on the mods in terms of time. Not exactly the best PR for us to remove a post and make our own just so we can sticky it to get users attention.

                                      So what are we supposed to do? Make a announcement thread with a link to the users thread and lock our thread just as a redirect?

                                      [–]TheCavis 71ポイント72ポイント  (5子コメント)

                                      We have seen the accusations of censorship. We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims.

                                      http://i.imgur.com/muq4NmH.gif

                                      Every post was locked, deleted or a comment graveyard. It's one thing to say that you don't want multiple copies of the same story when moderating, but someone or something was clearly going nuts in the moment trying to keep the front of /r/news free and clear from any stories of the shooting.

                                      We needed an AskReddit thread for updates. They shouldn't be forced to cover for another subreddit's massive failings and people who aren't subscribed to that subreddit shouldn't be forced to dig around to try and figure out why there aren't any news stories on their homepage.

                                      Not only that, but /r/news abandoning the story made /r/the_donald the go-to place for coverage, as it was the only subreddit that had a continuous stream of updates coming in, so it started dominating /r/all.

                                      If you are going to, as a company, promote a subreddit as the place for news by giving them default status, they must demonstrate a certain level of competence during a gigantic news story. If they can't, Reddit admins must either take steps to ensure that they will be competent in the future or remove them as the default location for news stories.

                                      One fall guy, a couple of tweaks to stop bridgading (which addresses the response to the whitewashing but not the actual whitewashing) and some /r/all algorithm tweaks (unless deleted posts are going to stay in /r/all, that seems irrelevant; also, I tend to browse my homepage or the default homepage, not /r/all)... you haven't really done anything. You haven't even identified the problem.

                                      [–]FirstSonOfGwyn 81ポイント82ポイント  (2子コメント)

                                      I have to express disappointment with this statement. You guys had more transparency over the whole Pao situation than you are showing here. Your site, the place I previously went for my news, actively censored the worst terror attack in America since 9/11.

                                      And your response is-- "well guys, you did post a lot of duplicates, and 1 guy was a little out of line" No- your site actively censored information. You are literally lying to our faces, I saw the posts and comments that were deleted, many others did as well.

                                      Its baffling how unimportant you feel this display of censorship was. I do not accept the story that it was 1 lone mod, where were the actual paid employees and admins during the whole situation? The same way journalists come in on a sunday when a fucking national disaster occurs so should you all.

                                      You didn't take your responsibility as a news source seriously, and you have now done very real damage to your credibility as a source.

                                      You were the "front page of the internet". Now you have not only actively censored the dissemination of news and information during a national crisis, you have come back today and said "we investigated ourselves and found no wrong doing, we will use live threads more in the future"

                                      Would you trust a news station again pretended 9/11 wasn't happening for half a day? And then they come back the next day and say-- "o yea 1 intern goofed, don't worry we canned him, all good". Very disappointing

                                      [–]mobiusstripsearch 219ポイント220ポイント  (14子コメント)

                                      Their policy includes removing duplicate posts to focus the conversation in one place, and removing speculative posts until facts are established.

                                      They deleted and banned a lot more than this, and /r/news was not the only offending subreddit. /r/Worldnews banned the story as a "local news story". /r/news banned posts about blood donations and anything that mentioned that the killer was Muslim. (This is something that has never been done when the killer is White.)

                                      It already sounds like you're dodging blame by saying that this is just "their policy" at /r/news. The whole issue is that a default subreddit like /r/news, which controls such a huge portion of traffic at reddit, is able to censor, delete, insult, promote, over-moderate, under-moderate, or ban without any oversight or action. Is /r/news going to change their policies? -- it's great that you're talking to them and "trying to understand," but what about the thousands of users who want something new? Do we all go to a new sub, cut our losses, and accept that the promoted, default subs have no effective check? Do we have to make a new sub every time a subreddit displeases us? Why should /r/news remain the legitimate news subreddit? Are you listening to the concerns of /r/news subscribers, or just the mods?

                                      Without rushing to judgement: it sounds like you really don't have anything new to say.

                                      Edit: People are pointing out that /r/Worldnews doesn't allow US stories and they try to steer users toward /r/news. Fair enough -- I like /r/Worldnews. I wonder if that makes it a worse problem: /r/Worldnews gives /r/news a wide berth, which makes /r/news even more of a chokepoint. If default subreddits defer to other defaults, that makes each default even more important in its own niche.

                                      [–]thatpuck 279ポイント280ポイント  (37子コメント)

                                      What will you do about the user /u/rnews_mod which is a shared account for the moderators which tried to spin yesterday's censorship to about not caring for yesterday's shooting?

                                      /u/rnews_mod:

                                      Only comments breaking our rules are being deleted. If you think its more productive to cry about censorship then it is to discuss this horrifying event, we suggest you try another subreddit.

                                      Why are there even shared mod accounts,? Don't you see how this could easily be abused by moderator teams so they never take responsibility for their own actions.

                                      EDIT: Proof of what /u/rnews_mod wrote

                                      http://i.imgur.com/rqZfi76.png

                                      Also here is a example of how they treat their users

                                      http://i.imgur.com/nfjxsPq.png

                                      http://trmp.us/images/rnews.png

                                      [–]bruppa 22ポイント23ポイント  (1子コメント)

                                      Whether you agree with r/news’ policies or not, it is never acceptable to harass users or moderators. Expressing your anger is fine. Sending death threats is not. We will be taking action against users, moderators, posts, and communities that encourage such behavior.

                                      This is the excuse every single time, I hope people see through this and are sickened by it by now. Its as silly as lecturing all Muslims for the shooter's actions, I've seen plenty about this incident but have seen nothing about users pointing to the idea of harassing the r/news mods as being a solution. There's so much distrust for that excuse I'm unfortunately inclined to think it might just be a front for removing the posts, accounts, and subs that have drawn attention to the coverup by r/news and than excusing it by saying they were "harassing users". Was r/bannedfromme_irl encouraging harassment by their users (that was never evidenced) even though their subreddit rules and mods explicitly discouraged harassment?

                                      "The challenges in their (r/news mods) actions"?? You mean covering up the largest mass shooting in American national history and stifling discussion by bias?? You mean one of the lead mods telling other users to kill themselves?? You mean the r/news mods accidentally posting on a community moderating alt calling someone a classic r/The_Donald poster?

                                      We have seen the accusations of censorship. We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims.

                                      I'm sorry but people can use multiple sites to see the comments removed enough to see through that blatant lie.

                                      Why don't you tackle the issue honestly? What reason do you have to play phony PR boy who doesn't know whats happening and won't acknowledge it?

                                      [–]Feignfame 239ポイント240ポイント  (19子コメント)

                                      I don't know if I like being told that what I witnessed on r/news yesterday didn't happen.

                                      Because it did. A subreddit full of people dedicated to immaturely cheerleading a political candidate was on the ball on disseminating breaking news while a sub specifically MEANT to do that and almost 100 times bigger was doing its best impression if MH370 and no where to be found.

                                      There is only one moderator of that failure of a sub's mod team actually addressing any concerns actively and most people are screaming out how little confidence they have in that mod team without being heard.

                                      This whole mess needs a seriously bigger response than some announcement posts that you'll 'do better' because frankly anyone who's been on Reddit the last few years know how worthless that phrase has become.

                                      [–]ReluctantPawn 308ポイント309ポイント  (11子コメント)

                                      What an absolute garbage, non-explanation, non-apology. Also, what a catastrophe of damage control. So you (contrary to overwhelming evidence and first hand accounts of thousands on this site) found that no censorship occurred? A few posts were removed incorrectly? One moderator is to blam? But also oh the poor mods are the victims here? Spez, your /r/news mods have lost all credibility and you need to clean house. You are now losing all credibility yourself by making bullshit excuses for them and protecting them. Don't do it. It's time to finally own up to what happened (and is happening) to a once-good website, apologize and take drastic action to correct things. Do you think there is any chance at all this would have happened on 2005 reddit? 2008 reddit? 2010 reddit? This place is going to end up like digg if you don't make changes. People are already searching for alternatives within the site and to the site as a whole. The writing is on the wall and you keep digging yourself a deeper hole.

                                      [–]KSBadger 285ポイント286ポイント  (11子コメント)

                                      Many of you use Reddit as your primary source of news, and we have a duty to provide access to timely information during a crisis. This is a responsibility we take seriously.

                                      Prove it.

                                      A few posts were removed incorrectly

                                      Way more than a few. You're out of touch.

                                      have not found evidence to support these claims.

                                      sooooo out of touch

                                      Whether you agree with r/news’ policies or not, it is never acceptable to harass users or moderators. Expressing your anger is fine. Sending death threats is not. We will be taking action against users, moderators, posts, and communities that encourage such behavior.

                                      The mods were totally the victims in all of this.

                                      We are working with r/news to understand the challenges faced and their actions taken throughout, and we will work more closely with moderators of large communities in future times of crisis.

                                      Translation: You're going to stall and hope people forget.

                                      Until you produce tangible results like removing /r/news moderators, announcements like this will be seen as nothing more than hand waves at a larger problem. You're just paying lip service to your pissed off users and most people can see that. If you continue to ignore your audience and cater to a few power users this site will go the way of Digg.

                                      [–]MauldotheLastCrafter 62ポイント63ポイント  (4子コメント)

                                      This is just really bad PR speak in general.

                                      You somehow managed to mitigate the damage /r/news did to Reddit as a whole (deleting posts with blood donation information, really? forcing us to go to /r/The_Donald and /r/AskReddit for breaking news, are you serious?), somehow shift blame to phantom death threats against the moderation team, and introduce technology "changes" that sound more like you want /r/The_Donald off of /r/all than you actually want to do something about the problem at present.

                                      /r/news as a whole yesterday was and continues to be a shithole because mods actively censored discussion once the information that Omar Mateen was a radical muslim. Full stop. If you as admins could look into what happened yesterday and not see what thousands of people not subscribed to /r/news, and the ~10,000 people who have unsubscribed since yesterday can see, then I just don't know what to say. Maybe get a new pair of glasses that aren't covered in corporate splooge and the sweaty desperation of trying to make the mainstream media believe that your /r/news sub isn't complete and utter trash.

                                      Oh, and even titling this "Let's talk about Orlando," when the obvious problem at hand is your /r/news default, is despicable. Fuck you for doing that.

                                      [–]iEpicsaurus 60ポイント61ポイント  (4子コメント)

                                      Hello u/spez, you stated that a few posts were removed incorrectly however this is not the case. Thousands of comments were removed for no reason (they did not violate any rules) and asked for fellow redditors to donate blood to local centers etc... we ask you to be transparent in your public statement and not give us some nonsense which is obviously false and you are in full damage control.

                                      Furthermore, several mods on r/news lied about the mod in question and stated that this individual was not an alt account and later the mod in question revealed the removed mod's official account.

                                      We, the community, are appalled to how your response and the moderation team has handled the situation and are asking the whole moderation team to be replaced. This was not an isolated incident with only one moderator, instead, the whole moderation team failed the community.

                                      EDIT: I meant comments (my apologies)* which can be readily viewed on the r/news posts and comments such as the following one: http://i.imgur.com/OGaPNij.png

                                      [–]Monetizewhat 35ポイント36ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      Spez,

                                      I have been a very heavy browser /lurker on this site for four years. I had to create an account just to post here. I don't mean to sound too abrasive but your post reeks of bullshit corporate PR damage control where the author has no respect for the reader's intellect.

                                      The reason people were upset last year about the censorship regarding FPH was not because they agreed with them but because the same person who needs to silence opinions they disagree with when they are in the right will do so when they are wrong. Let's be honest, people like these mods aren't capable of realizing that they CAN be wrong. So as a fat guy who is/was indifferent to criticism that the mods were "protecting " users from, I have to at least admit that maybe you had to clean up certain areas of the website to make it a viable business that can be monetized or made attractive to advertisers.

                                      But in a situation like yesterday your mod team crippled one of the most popular subs and subs like it are why users are here to begin with. And for just one moment cut the damage control bullshit because it's not doing the site any favors.

                                      Do you think you will continue to have users lurkers or advertisers if you become known as a content aggregator that shuts down content during major events? Who will want to use a site like that?

                                      Will advertisers want to be associated with a web site that suppresses pleas for blood donations to help save lives? I may not be a steady subscriber and this might be my first post but make no mistake: there are many accounts and lurkers/browsers that are questioning what use this place is as a news content aggregator if this can happen even once during a news story like this .

                                      I know I'm going to make the conscious decision to use this site a lot less. I don't expect things to change very much until many others do. Censoring should happen only lightly and only where absolutely needed.

                                      Other wise wtf is the point? I can have uncensored conversation in the real world and I had to go elsewhere for news because the "FRONT PAGE OF THE INTERNET " forgot what it's role was and why users are by here at all:

                                      Content aggregation with a community to discuss the content in the comments section. When you shut both content and conversation down, you are left with nothing for the users and nothing to monetize. Pull your head out of your ass.

                                      Edit: unsubscribed from news even though I don't intend to do too much posting on this account because I'd rather get my news from the Huffington fucking post.

                                      [–]CAxVIPER 19ポイント20ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      How can you say there was no censorship? Every thread until the one in /r/askreddit made front page was deleted and several users reported being muted by the mods for asking why they were deleting post. I saw one thread when I first got on in the morning and within an hour it was locked. Within another hour it was deleted. There was another one within a couple of hours which was also deleted. Finally a post from /r/the_donald and /r/askreddit made it to front page and /r/news finally decided to create a megathread and quit deleting the threads. Then they followed up by deleting blood bank info which might have been done by a bot but if so then there needs to be a better review process put in place for those deleted post. Regardless the mods of /r/news should be removed and new team put in place. I understand when it is a default sub there is going to be a lot to moderate but if they couldn't handle it or simply didn't want to then more mods need to be brought on. Saying you will work closer isn't going to change anything because in reality we know nothing is going to change and it is just a way to make people happy.

                                      [–]KimH2 155ポイント156ポイント  (15子コメント)

                                      So a sub's mods pull some shady crap yet again and the admins back them up and hand-wave it away as nothing...

                                      If you continue to breed feelings of mistrust and disdain your user base will eventually get sick of it and leave.

                                      For now you might feel secure thinking "Where are they gonna go?" but you push people to the breaking point and it won't matter they'll go back to using google alerts, they'll go back to using 25 different sites instead of 25 different subs. Reddit's 'convenience' just won't justify the hassle/toxicity

                                      [–]Tralan 15ポイント16ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      I appreciate you addressing the issue, but I feel this is a hollow attempt at damage control rather than a sincere attempt to make Reddit a better place. What happened (on Reddit) was unacceptable, but you're still placing some of the blame on the users. It doesn't feel like the mods in question are getting more than a slight slap on the wrist.

                                      And that's not fair to the community. You know, the people who make Reddit a success? I'm sorry if this means I can't mod anymore. It's a small game community for a card game that is all buy dying. They're good people and pretty much mod themselves anyway.

                                      [–]sybau 65ポイント66ポイント  (1子コメント)

                                      No, /u/spez - your site is the main source of news for millions of people. Your "editors" can no longer continue to be sycophantic ego-centric politically motivated children.

                                      Reddit is calling for all of the mods to be removed from /r/news

                                      You need to respond to- or better yet, take responsibility for- the clear lack of oversight and responsibility standard that your main subreddits (your content providers) post.

                                      [–]tcp1 223ポイント224ポイント  (23子コメント)

                                      /u/spez,

                                      Why can't you simply come out and admit that Reddit and a good portion of mods have a certain bias and agenda, that this is NOT an unbiased/uncensored news site, and let the users decide?

                                      We accept that Fox News is conservative, MSNBC is liberal, and CNN is a schizophrenic meth addict. And that's OK, because we know the context. We know what we're getting when we read Daily Kos or Newsmax - on either side.

                                      Let's just call it what it is and say that Reddit and its leadership is attuned to a certain crowd that is hypersensitive to race/gender politics and prefers to reject what they may perceive as overentitled "mainstream" American demographics and be honest with each other?

                                      What happened in /r/news yesterday was not an "accident" and the quicker you guys admit that, the more people will just be OK with what Reddit is and know how large a grain of salt to take with any news events.

                                      You can pretend the "kill yourself" mod was an errant outlier, but those of us who have been on Reddit more than a few months know that just is not true.

                                      [–]youramazing 356ポイント357ポイント  (30子コメント)

                                      This is all nice, but none of it addresses the real issue which is abuse among the mod teams here. I don't have any solutions, but there should be a checks and balance system put into place on some level to protest actions of a specific moderator. For example, if one or more mods are censoring discussion, can we not raise those concerns somewhere higher than that specific sub's modmail? Because as shown over the weekend, they will not treat those concerns in a serious or fair manner.

                                      If you don't do anything to address this issue, then you can't say that you are really doing anything to prevent what happened with Orlando again.

                                      [–]md5getsum 40ポイント41ポイント  (4子コメント)

                                      Their policy includes removing duplicate posts to focus the conversation in one place, and removing speculative posts until facts are established. A few posts were removed incorrectly, which have now been restored.

                                      UPDATE: This thread is being manipulated by MORE deleted comments by mods. http://i.imgur.com/ZGrPLYL.png

                                      Only a few? This is not true. It's more than half the thread. http://i.imgur.com/047aYvR.png I used the Uneddit utility. Google Uneddit. Use it and come to this thread. This is just one fraction of the entire page, as you can see by the scrollbar.

                                      There doesn't seem to be a reason when you compare some comments. A lot of genuine comments were deleted and valid information, is still not there. The deleted comments are in red. These are still gone.

                                      We can go through every comment if you'd like, and compare it to this statement made here for "transparency."

                                      This is great: http://imgur.com/oPfrfPz

                                      [–]MAGABMORE 8ポイント9ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      Whether you agree with r/news’ policies or not, it is never acceptable to harass users or moderators. Expressing your anger is fine. Sending death threats is not. We will be taking action against users, moderators, posts, and communities that encourage such behavior.

                                      Just outright say you support censorship and lies to fit your narrative. I have no doubt that not a single mod or user that is on "your side" will have a single thing done to them.

                                      Your newly instated rules do nothing but empower yourself and other subreddit mods more censorship, such that the truth is even more difficult to be brought to light.

                                      Removing /r/news from default would be the absolute minimum necessary to imply any good will towards "open discussion" on this website. But of course that will not happen, as that is not your intention.

                                      Tell the lawyers and PR reps who crafted this message to go fuck themselves, then find a mirror and tell yourself.

                                      We have seen the accusations of censorship. We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims.

                                      This above all is god damn embarrassing and insulting.

                                      "Kill yourself"

                                      [–]BlueSignRedLight 905ポイント906ポイント  (42子コメント)

                                      This sounds like a very long post to say that other than banning an obvious sockpuppet, nothing is going to be done. So business as usual then?

                                      Edit: Turns out they didn't even ban the account, the user simply deleted the account. So nothing was done.

                                      [–]ABCosmos 114ポイント115ポイント  (8子コメント)

                                      Many people argue that the biggest issue with Reddit is that the moderators of default subreddits like /r/news have too much power.

                                      Is this concern on the radar of the admins at Reddit? Is there any theory on how to handle this better than reactionary, after the fact, and on a case by case basis? This seems like it will happen over and over.. the defaults are too important to be controlled by mods who tell redditors to kill themselves.

                                      [–]Smoothvirus 35ポイント36ポイント  (6子コメント)

                                      Going to be brutally frank here. Reddit dropped the ball on Sunday in a spectacular fashion. I was driving from Georgia to DC, on the road all day so I didn't have access to a television and all I had was my smart phone. All I could see in /r/news was deleted posts.

                                      The whole reason I joined Reddit in the first place was so I could get news faster than the mainstream outlets. Reddit has now failed completely at this purpose. As a result I won't be using this site as a news outlet. I've deleted any news subreddits from my feed and am sticking to my special interests/hobbies only.

                                      I'll reconsider this in the future but for now Reddit is useless to me for relevant news information.

                                      [–]fhayde 6ポイント7ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      Why not invest some time into developing a merged post feature? So many of these situations are the result of content that is either hidden, moved, or deleted which instigates the suspicion that content is being censored. If what you're saying is true, and content was moderated because it violated duplicate content policies, this would be a viable solution.

                                      Moderators could select a target to merge posts into, and the new post could even retain its up/down votes, but would appear as a list of related posts underneath the main text of the post, before the comments. Comments could easily be merged between the subsequent posts. Or it could appear as a separate tab similar to the related discussions tab at the top of the post.

                                      This would fix issues related to moderating duplicate content by keeping the moderation process visible to the user (content isn't just hidden or missing) while still giving moderators tools to keep their sub well organized without losing context or credibility. It would be even better if there was a field (either text or select) that would give a reason for the moderation action. It's hard to claim censorship when the content is still available and the reason it's no longer on the stream of that sub is because it violates duplicate content policies.

                                      On the other hand, some content is so important that policy should take a backseat. What's more important, making people aware of a massive shooting, catastrophic environmental disaster, public health risk, etc... or following a policy about duplicating content? Common sense must always prevail over adherence to policy. Policy is meant to support the process, not strangle and restrict it by giving people control that they will inevitably abuse.

                                      Last but not least,

                                      We are working on a change to the r/all algorithm to promote more diversity in the feed

                                      This is a very roundabout way of saying you're going to make is so that what happened with /r/The_Donald isn't possible which bothers me. If something is important enough for there to be a sizeable and legitimate effort to bring awareness to it ... taking actions to prevent that from happening seems counter intuitive if what you're trying to do is support the users instead of control the content that they see. That kind of baked in behavior is exactly what creates situations like what happened with /r/news.

                                      [–]CowrawlAndFheonex 1167ポイント1168ポイント  (78子コメント)

                                      Something about "One moderator" sounds kind of bullshit. You're telling me one moderator completely censored multiple threads at a very high rate? Sounds like a lot of work for only one person. Or are we talking about the one moderator sending death threats? Because that doesn't solve the problem.

                                      [–]HordeOfDoom 329ポイント330ポイント  (16子コメント)

                                      You're a content aggregator; contributors are the content, not you, not the moderators.

                                      If your policies continue to promote moderators, admins, and advertisers at the cost of the contributors, your business will die. You need to change.

                                      In particular, Reddit's algorithm's as-is are, simply speaking, fucked. News is slow to propagate through the site, suppressed by algorithms, and heavily biased. When I find out something from the mainstream media before it hits the front page on Reddit, you've lost my readership.

                                      [–]HelveticaBOLD 44ポイント45ポイント  (3子コメント)

                                      I've noticed the last several major news stories have taken so long to reach the front page that I have gotten faster updates on Facebook and TMZ, among other sites.

                                      Reddit used to be lightning fast as a source for news, but in recent months it's become, well, kind of pathetic.

                                      Can we expect this to change, or has reddit's usefulness along these lines come to an end?

                                      [–]Skyon1 49ポイント50ポイント  (2子コメント)

                                      This level of moderation did not occur during the Paris shootings, Brussels airport shooting, airline crashes, etc. Something more needs to be done here. During the aftermath of the largest shooting in US history is not the time for heavy moderation and ban attacks from moderators. We come to reddit for the flow of information. I've unsubbed from r/news and will replace it when something more suitable comes along.

                                      [–]bonked_or_maybe_not 65ポイント66ポイント  (3子コメント)

                                      A few posts were removed incorrectly, which have now been restored. One moderator did cross the line with their behavior, and is no longer a part of the team. We have seen the accusations of censorship. We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims.

                                      In other words, outright lies are completely acceptable if they fall in line with the political agenda of those on staff at reddit.

                                      70 seconds after the first reputable news source stated that the shooter was possibly of middle eastern descent - the entire mainstream sections of this web site were in full on Orwellian memory hole mode.

                                      [–]celerym 6ポイント7ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      This is going to get totally buried, but a few points:

                                      • Sort this thread by "top" not "q&a", which doesn't give an accurate image of the community response to this post.

                                      • /r/news has about 20 moderators. Is it fair to scapegoat this whole debacle onto one 'rogue' moderator? It is clear either they were in agreement with the mass comment deletions, or were simply not there, in which case /r/news clearly needs a better (bigger?) moderating team.

                                      • Having a sockpuppet moderating account should be against the rules as it prevents moderator action accountability to be investigated by admins. It is also disingenuous to users to have default sub moderators hiding behind such an account.

                                      • The response of both /u/spez and the /r/news moderators has been clearly inadequate.

                                      • There seems to be this general attitude among some mods that they are doing us a favour by moderating the subs for free. This along with disdain for the users they deal with in their subs. You know what? Moderating a default is a privilege. If it is too much unpleasant work for you, give it up. Someone else will step up to the job. Heck, I'd wager I could do a better job moderating /r/news on my own than the whole moderating team. And you know why? because I'd take a hands off approach and focus on spam, which brings me to my next point...

                                      • Reddit is clearly at war with its userbase and with its own architecture. The whole point of voting on content and comments is to automatically moderate content. having a heavy-handed approach to moderating goes against this idea. And this is what is happening more and more. As Reddit Inc is frantically searching for ways to monetise their golden egg, it needs to 'clean up' itself in order to be attractive to sensitive investors. It is the same problem 4chan had. And guess what? Unless Reddit cashes in soon, it will be over, because the userbase is getting sick of being at odd ends with the admins and mods.

                                      [–]MultiPackInk 1000ポイント1001ポイント  (53子コメント)

                                      /u/spez - the mod that was banned has created another account, as you can see here: http://i.imgur.com/0Hb7UKI.png.
                                      So that's a site wide ban, right?

                                      [–]BigIrishBalls 93ポイント94ポイント  (20子コメント)

                                      I'm not on any side politically. But when you have to hear about this from the Donald Trump subreddit, one who's fairly controversial on here, I think it points out just how bad this censoring is.

                                      Every post was removed. Vast amounts of comments were removed. There's an agenda on a lot of subreddits here that doesn't suit the very nature of reddit. We want to discuss real things, without having a fear of being banned. To have our voices silenced or be called racist for mentioning facts is idiotic. The mods fucked up. There's literally no other way of looking at that. News should not be a default sub. It's censoring news and this isn't the first time. Censoring goes against the very purpose of news.

                                      I'm sure this might get buried, but I want my voice heard. This is disappointing to say the least and your dismissal of it is ridiculous.

                                      [–]Rocksbury 180ポイント181ポイント  (3子コメント)

                                      This is disgraceful...Blame everyone but yourselves.

                                      The mods who have been called out for months if not years had been confronted with a huge story and they do what we all expected.

                                      If News is not purged you lost any respect some users may have had.

                                      [–]lngwaytogo 6ポイント7ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      Reddit as a primary news source is a thing of the past. I think this incident is affirmation of that, but it has been true for some time now. Honestly, the mod and admin response to the /r/news train wreck is making it worse. You all can keep saying you've punished the guy who crossed the line and are looking into the deleted comments issue but it all wasn't as bad as we're making it out to be, and I say bullshit. I saw he wall of deleted comments when I went looking for news. I saw this front page with absolutely no posts about the deadliest shooting in US history. I saw the goddamn /r/AskReddit thread that had to be created so people could talk about it. That is a huge failure. This site failed. Admit it and come up with some actual solutions to get back to a place where news can break here before you talk about being my primary news source. Admit that maybe you should have been looking at /r/news for months into the accusations that their mods had been selectively removing content to push an agenda. Just don't patronize us wits excuses and claims that it was just a few comments removed. If it weren't for my local subreddit I honestly don't know if I'd be spending anymore time on this site.

                                      [–]1TrueScotsman 9ポイント10ポイント  (2子コメント)

                                      Your /r/News mods are accused of censoring comments and news stories and trying to control the narrative. The evidence is in fact overwhelming that this is what they were doing.

                                      A little reminder about reddiquette:

                                      Please don't...Take moderation positions in a community where your profession, employment, or biases could pose a direct conflict of interest to the neutral and user driven nature of reddit.

                                      The mods of /r/News clearly broke reddiqutte.

                                      You need to stop blowing smoke up our ass.

                                      ***/r/News_Mods_must_Resign. Censorship has no place on a default news sub. Boycott Reddit gold.***

                                      [–]Emberwake 7ポイント8ポイント  (1子コメント)

                                      Reddit seems to have gradually taken a heavier hand in censoring content as it has grown older. For a platform that once espoused an absolute belief in free speech, Reddit has taken an almost paradoxical turn towards carefully cultivating a political and social message by removing content that doesn't suit its vision.

                                      To be clear: I am not talking about constitutionally protected freedom of speech. Obviously, Reddit is a private institution, and can censor content on its site as they see fit. Instead, I am referring to the philosophy of free speech which the founders of this website once considered to be a core value.

                                      Certainly, illegal content must be removed. Reddit cannot avoid doing so. But we've gone way beyond removing illegal content. Today rude, distasteful, or even simply unpopular comments are regularly purged. Popular opinions never needed protection. Free speech doesn't mean the freedom to agree or be silenced.

                                      Moreover, at Reddit's core is a mechanism which already manages undesirable content: the voting system. The entire idea behind the voting system is that users can democratically choose what comments and submissions they find value in, and consequently bury those they feel have no worth. Taking an active hand in removing distasteful content is tantamount to an admission that Reddit's moderators do not have any faith in democracy. And while the voting system is certainly vulnerable to manipulation, it seems that if Reddit had any faith in the values of free speech and democracy that it espoused, it would focus its efforts on combating manipulation rather than censorship.

                                      How do you reconcile these acts of censorship with the company's stated goals of democratization and free speech? Why has the site drifted towards dictatorial control rather than user driven curation over time? Do you not see this event as a direct consequence of the shift towards a more hands-on approach to managing content?

                                      [–]MisterTruth 539ポイント540ポイント  (114子コメント)

                                      Very simple rules: If you are a default sub and you participate in censorship, you lose your default sub status. Mods of default subs who harass users, threaten users, or tell users to kill themselves are demodded and possibly banned depending on severity.

                                      Edit: Apparently there are a lot of users on here who consider removing thoughts and ideas they don't agree with for political purposes not only acceptable, but proper practice. There is a difference with removing individual hate speech posts and blanketly setting up an automod to remove all instances of references to a group of people. For example, a comment "it's being reported that the shooter is Muslim and may have committed this in the name of isis" should never be removed unless a sub has an explicit policy that there can be no mention of these words.

                                      [–]0l01o1ol0 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      In such situations, their community is flooded with all manners of posts. Their policy includes removing duplicate posts to focus the conversation in one place

                                      Look, dupe posts on breaking stories is an issue that's been around on web news aggregators since the days of Slashdot, and it's not going away. If you allow separate posts for every news link, it's inevitable that you'll get lots of submissions for breaking major news, and if the only tools mods have is post removal, you're going to end up with a lot of censorship.

                                      Sites like Google News have shown that the good way to deal with that is to allow the "clustering" of stories, so that you see multiple posts of the same topic clustered together and the less popular ones hidden so that if you want to see more on the same topic, you expand the topic. This allows you to keep diversity of topics on the main page, and have multiple sources for in-depth coverage.

                                      The other way is the Wikipedia current events way, where each breaking topic gets one big page with links to different sources embedded within the post. This will probably not work as well for Reddit, because one of the problems is that the discussions stop being easily navigable after reaching 1,000+, and the recent shooting news had posts with 40,000+ posts.

                                      If reddit wants to remain useful as a news source, they're going to have to learn to hide stories on the same topic, with one main story per topic and a "show more stories on this topic" button, or maybe a "would you like to know more?" link.

                                      [–]FPHdidnothingwrong 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      I have an honest question: this is clearly about the Donald. I don't care about him, political blah blah, the nonsense people push every 4 years because they act like their problems go away/become real when someone new becomes president.

                                      What the fuck is wrong with you s4p and thedonald subscribers? You are all literally ruining the site with your spam. What's your end game? Ending a liberal site by invasion? Likewise for Bernie fans, you think you can win an election on Reddit? It's the political bullshit that is fucking with r/news, r/all, and it has been happening for a while.

                                      Put your tiny dicks away and quit trying to ruin the site for everyone. All of you politically charged neckbeards are actively trying to ruin this place for no reason besides you can't get laid so you have to jerk each other off. Just stop, you're so fucking annoying and have been for the last year that the mods are taking you down. Good riddance, go back to your left wing or right wing safe spaces and leave us the fuck alone.

                                      [–]elquesogrande 18ポイント19ポイント  (1子コメント)

                                      Loooong time user here - even before this account. I used to use reddit for breaking news and tried my best to find something of value during the Orlando situation.

                                      r/all was a hot mess of r/The_Donald taking a...special view of the situation. Then r/news came up a censored mess. Live thread was not much help - mostly dated info. I had to go to Twitter to sort out the real news.

                                      Quit apologizing and fix it. Seriously - reddit's inability to lead has left this place a hot mess of political trolling and censuring.

                                      [–]KoNP 8ポイント9ポイント  (1子コメント)

                                      By "working closely" you mean you're removing their default status and canning the entire moderator team, right? Because as I'm sure you know, they basically worked together to warp the narrative of a fucking NEWS STORY, the biggest mass shooting in your nation's history by an agent of a current terrorist group, removed posts that were telling people how and where to donate blood to help claiming it was "hate speech".

                                      Oh yeah, and that one mod was telling people to kill themselves.

                                      If you don't perform the previously mentioned actions then you're basically saying you're OK with all of what they did - and remember, the story of what they did has already reached several news outlets itself, so people ARE watching.

                                      [–]my_lucid_nightmare 13ポイント14ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      A few posts were removed incorrectly

                                      That is Bagdad Bob level of misstating fact. Dozens of posts were being deleted in real time, and the reasoning for doing so was pretty ridiculous given reddit's attempt to brand itself as an impartial and open news source.

                                      [–]druglawyer 143ポイント144ポイント  (13子コメント)

                                      A few posts were removed incorrectly, which have now been restored.

                                      Understatement of the year award, right there.

                                      We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims.

                                      And I'm sure we all believe you. /s

                                      Edit: The initial excuse for the "kill it with fire" approach to the event that the mods took was brigading. There's even an admin in the thread confirming that brigading was happening. Please provide some actual evidence to that effect, or post a retraction of that excuse. And also please explain how brigading, in your view, differs from large numbers of people climbing into an /r/news thread regarding a major event.

                                      [–]JustAnotherPer 23ポイント24ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims.

                                      "We investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong".

                                      [–]Ragnarok222 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      Here's the "Mega Thread" and all of it's inconvenient posts. 90% of the ones that were deleted not being delete worthy at all. https://r.go1dfish.me/r/news/comments/4nql8f/_

                                      And here's the news on the moderator who told users to kill themselves. He wasn't even gone a day. https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/4nsiw1/state_of_the_subreddit_and_the_orlando_shooting/d46nram

                                      Spez, I understand. You as a part of reddit must wield a sword against all the evil doers of the world. Open discussion was fine in the early days, but now reddit has become too large, too influential, and you must protect the lesser classes from others forming the wrong opinions, or worse, scaring off investors! You, with your singularly just ideology must protect humanity from itself, and if it just happens to make the site more profitable so be it! Surely you haven't just taken the ideology as a way to be popular! YOU ARE JUSTICE, YOU ARE THE LAW!

                                      Frankly Spez, get over yourself. Get over your ideology, re-think you world view. Whatever justification you have to yourself that people need guidance, that people can't be trusted to speak freely, whatever the fuck you think of us that you're too "polite" to say. It applies to you too. You'll fuck up just as much as the next person, and if you and the people behind the curtain at Reddit make it so no one else has a say, whatever little fuck ups you have just get dialed to 11. This right here is a perfect example. Reddit naturally deals with distasteful posts, they get vote bombed to oblivion and disappear, and if the system had been left to work people would have known what was happening, and how to help, hours before they did.

                                      I understand someone would probably dig up the "bad" comments to make an example of how homo/islamophobic the site is, and it really would have hurt your feelings (and maybe driven away some money), but would you rather have that as well as people helping the victims of this tragedy sooner, or what happened here?

                                      The ideology failed Spez. Turns out looking like good people isn't as important as BEING good people. And it amazes me how many people can't fucking understand that.

                                      [–]darty11 32ポイント33ポイント  (2子コメント)

                                      Call me skeptical, but points #2 and #3 sound a lot like an attempt to punish r/The_Donald for blowing the whistle, and to prevent them or another sub from doing so again.

                                      The current sticky system is what allowed r/The_Donald to get the word out so fast, and is heavily used by the sub for their day to day business. The changes in #2 would prevent r/The_Donald from stickying this type of thing in the future, unless the mods made their own post for it, and would throw a wrench in r/The_Donald's current routine.

                                      Point #3 sounds like an attempt to censor certain types of posts from r/all, namely ones from sub-reddits that like r/The_Donald.

                                      Also, how is giving the mods of a default sub-reddit feedback on their policies brigading, but the stuff SRS does isn't?

                                      [–]2dilatedpupils 698ポイント699ポイント  (192子コメント)

                                      You are seriously telling us you found no instances of censorship in the whole /r/news fiasco? I call bullshit.

                                      We are working on a change to the r/all algorithm to promote more diversity in the feed, which will help provide more variety of viewpoints and prevent vote manipulation.

                                      Just so /r/the_donald doesnt keep reaching /r/all all the time?

                                      [–]matesc 70ポイント71ポイント  (8子コメント)

                                      How are you going to prevent the mod from just making a new account, it doesn't seem that unlikely that that had already happened since their account was only 4 months old and they are clearly friends with the rest of the mods at /r/news since they weren't instantly unmodded.

                                      Edit: As someone pointed out to me they already made a new account which has been modded.

                                      [–]gilbes 5ポイント6ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims.

                                      That is some great double speak. This whole post is.

                                      Reddit as a company has a good thing going. Users create, submit, freeboot and manage content for reddit for free. In lieu of financial compensation, the mods for almost every subreddit just want the ability to exercise their brand of petty tyranny because they are sad people with no perspective.

                                      However, reddit staff regularly communicates with the mods of large subreddits like r/news about the practices and policies and sometimes suggests an editorial viewpoint. While some mods might not have been acting directly with reddit staff in these actions, reddit staff has made themselves culpable with any actions by any of those mods because of that interaction.

                                      So reddit needs to grow a fucking pair and own up to shit when shit hits the fan instead of trying to trick users in to believing another line of bullshit. Sure, a lot of people are going to buy it, again. But some won't. Because you are only appealing to the lowest common denominator, and that worked out so well for gawker. Or maybe it is reddit's goal to achieve BuzzFeed levels of credibility and respect.

                                      [–]opk 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      /u/spez, I know I'm late to the party here, but I think what happened in /r/news is that the moderators do not represent the community. Instead, they impose their own rules (whether listed or not) on a community that doesn't want those rules. I'm not trying to call those rules good or bad, I'm just stating this is what seems to be the case.

                                      Further, it feels like the community really has no input on how a subreddit should be run. On a subreddit as big as r/news, or any of the defaults, there is no good mechanism to ensure the voice of the community is heard. I think the best remedy should be allow the community to vote for moderators, at least on the default subreddits. I think that is the only "good" option that would both keep the community in check, but also give the community a very big voice in how the subreddit should be run.

                                      [–]overwatschen 5ポイント6ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      If you really think there was no censorship you need to understand one thing. There were tons of reddit users (I was one of them) who had no clue that the event even happened, while actively browsing reddit, while it happened. There was censorship, even if it wasn't permanent. It simply didn't get covered and you were completely left in the dark. I always thought I could rely on reddit to be up to date on any major news because I will undoubtly see it pop up on the front page of /r/all within minutes of it happening. But this time it was the polar opposite. It's not acceptable for a site like this.

                                      Apart from that, 90% of the posts in the thread that was allowed to exist were removed. You can't tell me that that isn't active censorship. Because there was absolutely no reason or legitimacy to remove the vast majority of those posts.

                                      [–]supaskulled 6ポイント7ポイント  (5子コメント)

                                      No censorship? Oh okay then lets just check the undeletion logs...

                                      Nope. There was censorship. Most posts didn't violate the subreddit's rules OR the global rules of reddit.

                                      Can we get /r/news off the default subs?

                                      EDIT: Went searching through unreddit for some great examples. From /u/Roushfan5 :

                                      "Who decides what is 'hate speech', how is 'hate' in speech measured. Censorship even for well meaning reasons is wholly unethical."

                                      Spoke out against the censorship happening in the thread, and was censored.

                                      From /u/GodOfEnnui :

                                      "Reddit keeps trying to change things and make things better, yet they ignore the obvious flaw in the system- the moderators and moderation tools."

                                      Once again, spoke out against the moderators and the moderation system, and was censored.

                                      And finally, from /u/ewbf :

                                      "Mods need to step down or Reddit administration needs to clean house and drop these fools."

                                      Once again, talking about the mod team and reddit administration and was, again, censored.

                                      You're trying to pull the wool over our heads, except, instead of wool, you're pulling the very evidence of your censorship out of your pockets, waving it in front of our faces, and saying "I didn't do that thing you just saw".

                                      [–]prattle 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      I would agree and start with anyone who is threatening mods over this is an absurd and idiotic human. What is wrong with you?

                                      More on topic, your statement that only a "few comments" were removed is not credible to people who were watching as this was going on. There were many, many comments that were removed that were similar in both tone and content to information available from main stream national news sites. So when it is obvious that part of what you are saying is more damage control than truth, why should your further assurance that there was no political motivation be trusted in any way?

                                      Also, as others have noted. The steps you took to get rid of this one guy who is acting as a scapegoat in this are unlikely to prevent him from returning and probably just retaining his job as mod under another account. Again, the problem isn't just that this is ineffective, it is that it is incredible to believe that the admins aren't aware that this is ineffective. So we are left in a situation where what you are saying doesn't appear to be particularly honest.

                                      Edit: also it would go a long way if for every comment that was deleted, you provided the community with the mod who was responsible for the deletion. That way it is easier to determine for ourselves what their motivations may have been. end edit

                                      Going beyond that. It is easy to at least help the situation. r/new should no longer be a default subreddit. It should probably be renamed to something appropriate like r/manipulatednews or similar. You give legitimacy to a subreddit by making it default. At the very least it should be honest about affiliation when it has one.

                                      The mods in default subreddits should probably not be eternal either. They have huge communities so there has to be a way to draw from that to give mods limits and prevent supermods from occurring. Also possibly no person should mod more than a single default subreddit. If admins catch them in this, the accounts involved should be banned.

                                      [–]a_shootin_star 50ポイント51ポイント  (1子コメント)

                                      This post was more about /r/news and reddit than Orlando. Hijacking the Orlando massacre to justify the incompetence of a moderation team is highly despicable.

                                      Title should be "let's talk about /r/news"

                                      [–]TheCheesy 15ポイント16ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      I think we understand the rules of /r/news. I believe the issue was the mass panic and thirst for information with lack of any patience or restraint on behalf of the mods. People wanted to discuss the issue. Obviously there was a lot of strong opinions and hate but there was also a lot of good. Posts in the mega thread didn't need to be completely deleted. If Reddit is good at anything it's getting the important news and information to the top and burying the hate.

                                      I know a lot needed to be done, but I've seen lots of bans and mutes happen with no responses and with little regard anyones intentions.

                                      I watched TV the day of and I'm in Canada. It was a stream of a US station showing Obama giving his speech and their reporters saying it was tragic and hiding a lot of facts on the event. The Reporters on my local station explained it fully with no hidden details after.

                                      If the news in the US is hiding important details and Reddit is too where can we go for reliable trustworthy news on recent events?

                                      I want Reddit to be a platform for free and open discussion.

                                      [–]honestbleeps 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      given what happened in /r/news, is reddit finally considering some sort of code of conduct or litmus test for rightful ownership of "prime real estate" subreddit names besides "I was there first"?

                                      I understand reddit's policy on "first come first serve" made sense in the past, and I also understand it allows you to stay out of the very sticky business of "deeming someone unworthy" of a sub or whatever... but the whole "just create another sub and build that community" thing doesn't really hold water when it comes to subreddit discovery.

                                      People check if [common name] exists, they don't just stumble across /r/alternate_news_sub_that_is_better_managed on their own unless people are spamming it / promoting it elsewhere, etc.

                                      The current system probably should be reviewed, no?

                                      [–]clintonthegeek 72ポイント73ポイント  (25子コメント)

                                      We are working on a change to the r/all algorithm to promote more diversity in the feed, which will help provide more variety of viewpoints and prevent vote manipulation.

                                      So what you are saying is you don't want /r/The_Donald scooping the discussions on any more events which default subs are all set to moderate for civility, etc.

                                      You see, I don't think that is how it's going to work. The community of Reddit, the multitude of users, come here to have discussions and encounter the opinions of others. When moderators and administrators try to fiddle with the mixture of ideas, priviliging some and trying to obscure or minimize others, it interferes with the free exchange of ideas.

                                      The world is changing. We all know it, we've all felt it. The world has gone digital. With AMAs and outreach programs by political campaigns, the MSM and establishment has descended massive sites like Twitter down to Reddit to have deeper discussion here. Also, anonymous imageboard culture, from sites like 4chan, has risen from its depths to occupy some sub-reddits and spread their memes and ideas. There are cold winds from the north, and hot winds from the south converging on this very website.

                                      A storm is brewing on Reddit that nobody can predict.

                                      I understand moderators and admin must feel like it's an impossible situation to please everyone as culture goes crazy and opposing ideas crash together in thousands of controversial upvotes and flamewars. Just realize that it's the users who choose to keep coming here that keep Reddit a thriving community. And they like keeping the strong arguments on the internet, in cyberspace, apart from physical reality where punches are thrown and people get shot. When they collectively say that "censorship" (not 1st Amendment violations, but merely overzealous moderating) bothers them, you should listen.

                                      Reddit is the safe space for the societies most contentious issues to be battled out in containment. It's not a safe space for people's ideas to go unchallenged. I think that is how Reddit should act more like a neutral carrier, and not try to use admin/mod powers to shape how conversations go. To borrow a phrase from America's Declaration of Independence, Reddit has become the place for facts to be "submitted to a candid world."

                                      Let us remain candid.

                                      [–]thematabot 6ポイント7ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      What are your thoughts /u/spez, on the actions of a particular mod (/u/SuspiciousSpecialist), of /r/News, where he was actively telling users to essentially end their own lives.

                                      And secondly was the deletion of his account undertaken by reddit or himself?

                                      Thirdly it was unclear how to report this activity to reddit themselves yesterday, as if I am not wrong the report button on comments goes to subreddit mods. Could reddit make this clearer?

                                      Edit: One more thing... This particular disgraced mod keeps making new accounts. Can you guys IP ban him or something?

                                      [–]Hibria 23ポイント24ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      People were getting banned and comments deleted for saying muslim..... it is clearly heavy with censorship. Many people unsubbed including myself for this very reason, and for the leaders of reddit to have "not found this to be the case" makes yall as bad as them.

                                      [–]dltbgyd 45ポイント46ポイント  (1子コメント)

                                      We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims.

                                      What? Aside from the post that were censored, which you have now uncensored , there was no censorship? It doesn't matter that you uncensored them, the fact remains that they were censored at the time, which is the problem.

                                      That's like saying "aside from the 50 people who died, no one died"

                                      [–]SixBiscuit 182ポイント183ポイント  (38子コメント)

                                      Stop using amateur, inexperienced, volunteers to moderate and curate your main subreddits with 8 million users and actually pay someone that knows something about journalism to moderate your news subreddit, someone that knows something about politics to moderate your political subreddit, etc.

                                      You get what you pay for and you mostly get drama loving power trippers.

                                      [–]Tomes2789 45ポイント46ポイント  (13子コメント)

                                      We have seen the accusations of censorship. We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims.

                                      What about the NUMEROUS (too numerous to even count) people who were both banned AND muted by the mods of /r/news for posting stories and/or comments that were IN NO WAY hateful/bigoted/etc.., but were instead just the facts?

                                      Just because these facts seemed to be against the political ideologies of the mods of /r/news, they were removed, and the posters were immediately banned AND muted.

                                      How is this not censorship?

                                      This goes beyond the one mod who told a user to kill himself.

                                      [–]RootUser 20ポイント21ポイント  (1子コメント)

                                      The problem with restoring posts which were incorrectly removed is that there was a critical time during the US East coast a.m. where users were left with no resources in r/news and instead had to turn to other subreddits for information. The damage was already done.

                                      I don't have a solution for what happened, but if r/news is going to be a default subreddit, it should be held to a different standard than other subreddits. That means when critical information is being shared in a default subreddit that has been represented to the users as a center for receiving critical information, there's an objective treatment of that information.

                                      Simply restoring posts is not a fix for the mistreatment of critical, time-sensitive information. There is no fixing that kind of mistreatment after-the-fact. The only thing that can restore the trust of users in that case is ensuring that it does not occur again, and what I have read here does not satisfy that, in my opinion.

                                      [–]Shooterman56 29ポイント30ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      What a sadly obvious attempt to just kick one mod account out and hope that all of this will go away. The behavior of the entire news mod team has shaken the faith that people have in your website and these politically scripted half answers talking no real responsibility for your actions is only making it worse for you. No instances of censorship? The deleted post logs make it clearly obvious that there was clear political motivation behind the scrubbing of some of the comments the started the shit-storm.

                                      How patronizing.

                                      [–]Alpha-as-fuck 23ポイント24ポイント  (7子コメント)

                                      We are working on a change to the r/all algorithm to promote more diversity in the feed,

                                      Please explain what you mean by this. It sounds like you are going to force things to the frontpage over things users have actually upvoted.

                                      Does not sound good at all. Also sounds like regular PC rhetoric and just another way of saying you are going to implement some more censorship and fudge the votes.

                                      [–]designer_of_drugs 65ポイント66ポイント  (4子コメント)

                                      Hey look, it's spez minimizing bias and coming to show what a good job the mods do and how neutral and good (and worth investment) reddit is. Sticky posts are now called announcements! This will obviously address the problems reddit doesn't have! But remember, what happened in Orlando is horrible, so in comparison this was just a little hiccup. Err, or hypothetically would have been a hiccup if reddit had bias problems. Which it doesn't.

                                      It sounds like spez has a PR lackey permanently installed in his ass.

                                      [–]uiucrower 8ポイント9ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      If you think r/news is the only sub censoring content, you're dead wrong. Remember how r/worldnews censored what was going on in Cologne during New Year's? Certain subreddits (defaults especially) have an obligation to try and be neutral or at the very least, avoid censorship. Let's be honest, you can't have a fair political discussion on r/politics.

                                      [–]betona 7ポイント8ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      Steve, I was working online professionally before you were born, and at one point I ran a major news portal so I've seen my share of bad things. I know these past 48 hours have been tough on you and your staff and I don't envy you.

                                      But with over 500 million uniques on your site, a few subs have to become very professional with News being front & center. I'm talking true professional journalism and it has to be staffed 24/7 (made easier with a global staff). This hit on a Sunday where the sub had a skeleton crew that should've immediately ramped up to full war room with maximum staff. I'm not saying something I've not done before.

                                      I also believe that News should be one place where the Mods can't hide behind usernames: It sounds so un-reddit-like, but I believe they should all go by their real name. While you don't report the news in a traditional fashion, important things do appear here from experts in the field. And when something hits, you're right up there with CNN on importance and there's no such thing as "this is skoobydoo45 reporting" in the news business. News is dead serious.

                                      And as others have said, this thread should be, "Let's talk about /r/news" because that's your problem you need to fix, not Orlando.

                                      [–]thelettergii 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      For me, /u/spez, the main issue with what happened in /r/news this weekend wasn't the censorship. I mean, it was an issue for sure. But the main issue was the fact that the worst mass shooting in U.S. history was not even on the front page for several hours, because the mods chose to remove all posts about it WAY after the incident happened and replace it with a megathread. The missing news story from the front page shouldn't have happened. All discussion was already happening on the initial posts, there was no need to remove posts that were already on the front page.

                                      I know that you can't necessarily find proof of censorship, but what doesn't need proof is the fact that this hate crime was removed from the front page for a megathread that would never make it to the front page. The shooting was not visible to Redditors and it should have been. So, my suggestion for a policy: I think megathreads shouldn't be created hours after the initial front-page posts as an excuse to remove them. Like, if megathreads are being created, I don't think front page posts about the same subject should be removed. It takes away valuable discussion that's already happening.

                                      This won't handle censorship, but censorship can be subjective and (as you see) very controversial. I feel like this policy is more objective and thus more easily followed without any complaints.

                                      [–]G30therm 24ポイント25ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      We all know that the "one moderator who crossed the line" is just a scapegoat for all of the problems, there's no way this level of censorship (which it was) occurred due to a single moderator. However, the 'rogue' mod was so far out of line that they made themselves an easy scapegoat for the rest of the problems too.

                                      It's over now and /r/news will be scrutinised for a long time to come. Hopefully that is enough to prevent it ever happening again.

                                      Lets move on.

                                      [–]karmalizing 11ポイント12ポイント  (1子コメント)

                                      What a poor response.

                                      • You didn't "find censorship" when entire threads were obvious comment graveyards? When there are dozens of screenshots floating around documenting it?

                                      • You're using this event and /r/news censorship to change the /r/all algorhithm? How is that even relevant to this?

                                      • You're changing sticky posts? Why? What does this have to do with Orlando or /r/news mods deleting hundreds of comments and threads?

                                      This is obviously a hamfisted attempt to use a tragedy as an excuse to change the rules surrounding what appears on /r/all, nothing else.

                                      You should be ashamed for even posting this in this manner.

                                      [–]FranklinAbernathy 15ポイント16ポイント  (1子コメント)

                                      Are you people(admins and /r/news moderators) completely unaware that all the posts and comments you deleted were archived?

                                      We know that your excuse is complete bullshit. You purposely deleted threads and banned users the moment it was released that the shooter was a Muslim. It wasn't because of duplications or racist comments, we can see the posts and comments that were removed; they broke no rules. You even deleted posts about places to donate blood, that is absolutely disgusting.

                                      You are all completely full of shit, and rather than just own up to it and punish /r/news for their obvious biases, you choose to lie in the face of readily available proof that you are completely full of shit.

                                      You admins and every single one of the mods at /r/news have lost all credibility, and it seems you've surrounded yourself in an echo chamber full of idiots telling you everything is fine.

                                      I live in a small town in the Midwest and my local radio station was even talking about the bullshit you pulled. You should apologize to every person on Reddit, the people that keep this website going. Instead you chose to lie, while anyone with a keyboard can see you're completely full of shit. Very sad.

                                      [–]allthefoxes 17ポイント18ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      I can't speak for every default moderator but at this point I don't see why default subreddits can't belong to reddit at the end of the day, ala eminent domain

                                      /u/Doctor_McKay explains it better than I could, but simply slap /u/reddit on top of the modlist of any default, and give yourself the authority to handle situations like this.

                                      I'm very surprised this is such a lax slap on the wrist. Every mod makes mistakes, I do all the time...but this was a fuck up through and through.

                                      If a default doesn't want to give ownership, they cant be a default

                                      I'm not suggesting reddit admins actually moderate the subreddit - I'm just saying you should really be giving yourself the power to handle these issues.

                                      I am very surprised /r/news is "getting away" with this - Though I am happy with the changes you guys are making at least.

                                      [–]xGARP 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      "Confidence over caution", that you say is preached at Reddit sounds like arrogance masquerading as purpose. Proverbs suggest The wise are cautious and avoid danger; fools plunge ahead with reckless confidence.

                                      In your interview here you claim that users can find information and connections here that cannot be found anywhere else online. This episode surely does not support that opinion. Nor does your response.

                                      You claim that you are the brains of the operation, versus the charismatic leader. Your post supports that you are not charisma, the brains part we will have to see, depending on your actions. Something I have noticed consistent with many in leadership roles, mocking their customers or in your case user base is summed up when you share that circlejerk provides you best insight into what is happening online at this time. If that is true, and you also think people take things too seriously, as you state, perhaps you are not the correct person to really comment or recommend action in this case.

                                      I do find it interesting that you devote so much satisfaction to the demise of Digg, selling out their users with sponsored content. I find the actions you are taking to be similar to the accusations. Mods are the weak link in the Reddit chain, and allowing things to go, as you seem to be doing here, with mods of default subs having an agenda is really no different to selling out your users to those with an unknown end. Isn't advertising communication with an agenda, a form of manipulation? So how is stifling free exchange of ideas and communication any different? You go on to say you realize that Digg's demise was a lesson on how fast things in social media can die, but you seem to be in denial as you careen this site off a cliff. Maybe not now, but the actions or lack of action seem to indicate the end will be sudden and obvious in retrospect.

                                      If i were to offer anything as to what has been said about your qualities and strengths, and what is seen in the interview, it is obvious to me, you are the wrong person to be leading the charge on this. You are too convinced people are making too much of what was experienced Sunday. But it is a fundamental shift from what I have seen in the past. It is contrary to what I prefer. Most, including myself our more than capable of filtering out the noise, hate, off topic and so on and find the meat that is worth eating. You say your self at the end of the interview, "Reddit has the best users, and the best content on the internet." Prove it.

                                      [–]jhra 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      /u/spez

                                      I've been here a while, moderated a few crisis situations, seen reddit at its best and worst. Watched as admins actually working with mods that had bad raps (VA anyone?) to align them with a more inclusive way of moderating. Saw admins right in the thick of commenting and moderating in some big events (Norway shooting comes to mind). Now, you know when I see admin anywhere on Reddit? In times like this days after the userbase is calling foul. This isn't a public school board, situations happen in real time, why the delay to hear from head office?

                                      You and the rest of the admins are the mods of mods, letting a situation get way out of hand, splintering subs and alienating users while your team watches the cards fall isn't necessary. You can't say that nobody on the admin team saw the censorship spree in Orlando threads, any one of them could have directed /r/news mods or calmed down the herd asking for heads to roll. Every time power mods piss off a large subreddit and we get the eventual admin hand cleaning post im in one part surprised admin still has accounts but also not surprised that you (or whomever is doing an admin post) will at best reply like a politician to a dozen comments then bail.

                                      [–]Iamabioticgod 32ポイント33ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      We have seen the accusations of censorship. We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims.

                                      they deleted comments about blood donations. They nuked entire threads. They banned people for literally nothing. I was banned for asking where an alternative thread was to discuss it because literally the only place to talk about it for a good 2-3 hour was /r/the_donald.

                                      Don't feed us this bullshit

                                      [–]inhuman44 12ポイント13ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      This is a travesty of a response. On the morning after the attack I had to scroll through 5 pages to find a subreddit other than /r/The_Donald that was talking about it. How is this not censorship? If, as you claim, /r/news broke the story then where did the story go? How is the complete nuking of all the comments in a megathread not censorship? And are we just going to ignore the reports from multiple users that they were banned with zero justification? What about the posts talking about blood donations? Furthermore how does a 4 month old reddit account become a moderator of a default sub? This isn't one little mixup, it's a train wreak poor decisions.

                                      Yet, the only response you're going to offer is a change to the /r/all algorithm for 'diversity'. Lets be frank, what you really mean is you want to get /r/The_Donald off the front page. Despite /r/The_Donald and /r/AskReddit being the two subs that stepped up and did the job /r/news failed to do.

                                      You would have been better off ignoring the fiasco completely than offering a response so tone deaf as this.

                                      [–]rnflhastheworstmods 21ポイント22ポイント  (12子コメント)

                                      We are working on a change to the r/all algorithm to promote more diversity in the feed, which will help provide more variety of viewpoints and prevent vote manipulation.

                                      AKA "We're sick of the_donald being at the top. "

                                      [–]bugalou 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      This was an example of a serious subject that brought attention to this issue, but as a frequent Reddit user and a mod of my own small sub (shameless plug for /r/radarloops), I will say some subs have gone out of control with rules and over zealous moderators. More and more I submit things to any handful of subs I subscribe to and usually feel about 50/50 on whether or not my post will be deleted for any number of reasons.

                                      I do my best to read and follow posting rules but some subs have a far too long list of rules, thread tagging procedures, required title info, etc. Sure a few subs like /r/IAmA need concrete and detailed rules, but these are the exception and not the rule. Far too many subs have gone off the wire with rules and moderation to the point it affects my experience with Reddit.

                                      I know mods are volunteers (as I mentioned I mod) but they still should be some checks and balances on their power and repercussions when they do poor work. I also think Reddit as a company needs to structure subs in a way that don't require as much human judgement to help and shorten some of these crazy rule lists we have. For example, a sub template for a TV show with spoiler tags prebuilt in, title templates built in a programmatic fashion, time controls similar to reddit live threads for premiere episode threads, etc. This is just a single example for any number of sub reddit templates that could exist.

                                      You guys should also work with moderators on moderating techniques and perhaps make a guide book to moderating. Sure the sub I run has some rules but if someone screws up and its something I can fix, I do it, let them know what I did and why, and educate them on how to do whatever properly in the future. If it comes to me deleting a post, I PM them and let them know why, and perhaps suggest what could be done to correct the situation. I don't blindly delete things, or delete them and send the OP a short childish response or my favorite response the copy and paste of page 4, rule 15, subsection C, amendment II. Some mods take themselves way to seriously and have more of a confrontational mentatlity with the users than a guide like one.

                                      Finally any large subreddits that absolutely require long lists rules should have a community staff member involved with them and not simply run by volunteers, or pay and (when required) fire the mods on subs XX in size.

                                      [–]BrownBoognish 14ポイント15ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      Ah yes, the fall guy... classic Reddit. That dick nuts that told someone to go kill themselves was not the only person from /r/news to cross the line. They didn't single handedly pull that ridiculous stunt yesterday morning. All of the /r/news team is culpable.

                                      The idea that they were understaffed is ridiculous as well. If you're a mod for /r/news and a news story of that magnitude shows up on your day off, and you know the sub is understaffed-- get your ass in there and moderate. You shouldn't be making excuses for yesterday's cluster fuck.

                                      I agree that the tragedy is what is most important here, but /r/news and their petty personal world views and politics kept people from actually assisting the victims... but no, you're right, it was totally just that one mod... get real.

                                      Quick shout out and thanks to /r/askreddit

                                      [–]needconfirmation 12ポイント13ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      We have investigated ourselves and found ourselves not guilty.

                                      Way to go Spez, but honestly nobody could have expected more from you.

                                      [–]norx123 33ポイント34ポイント  (13子コメント)

                                      Live threads are the best place for news to break and for the community to stay updated on the events. We are working to make this more timely, evident, and organized. We’re introducing a change to Sticky Posts: They’ll now be called Announcement Posts, which better captures their intended purpose; they will only be able to be created by moderators; and they must be text posts. Votes will continue to count. We are making this change to prevent the use of Sticky Posts to organize bad behavior. We are working on a change to the r/all algorithm to promote more diversity in the feed, which will help provide more variety of viewpoints and prevent vote manipulation. We are nearly fully staffed on our Community team, and will continue increasing support for moderator teams of major communities.

                                      Translation: We are hamstringing /r/The_Donald because they are doing exactly what s4p did for 9 months and we don't like Trump.

                                      [–]crikey- 5ポイント6ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      "We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims."

                                      So besides the censorship, there was no censorship.

                                      You disciplined someone for telling people to kill themselves, but no one else for censoring facts.

                                      Just another reminder that agendas are everywhere.

                                      [–]mafaldo 106ポイント107ポイント  (8子コメント)

                                      We have seen the accusations of censorship. We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims.

                                      https://i.sli.mg/mbleSK.png

                                      https://i.sli.mg/Oxshsf.png

                                      http://imgur.com/qRWIlGM

                                      Deleted comments in red

                                      So this doesn't count as censorship?

                                      [–]txmstr 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      Honestly dude - you need to get your head out of your ass. Even as the CEO of Reddit, you don't have time to be posting here about constant shit like this.

                                      Over the past 6-12 months too many shitty "causes" have been taken on by mods on this website (FPH, Cologne, Orlando, uselessness of /r/politics, /r/news, etc.). It's great that they do this shit for free but these basement dwelling losers are still costing you money if you can't focus on whatever it is you're actually being paid to do (I assume you don't get a pat on the back in your monthly board meetings for actually posting on Reddit, do you?).

                                      Get these losers out. Save yourself the headache. It will happen again and it will waste your time again if you don't nip it in the bud. Going forward, I would suggest Reddit stick to "moderating" things that we can all agree do not belong here (ie. /r/coontown and /r/jailbait). Whenever the admins get themselves involved in some stupid cause or let moderators do the same, it always leads to shit hitting the fan.

                                      [–]IUsedToBeGoodAtThis 11ポイント12ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      This is a responsibility we take seriously.

                                      Your site didnt have the most important news event of the decade. Your mods actively suppressed it. That ANY of that moderation team is still in place makes it seem like might not take it seriously enough.

                                      Those mods so effectively suppressed the story that they became the story.

                                      I dont mean to be so inflammatory, and thank you for this post, but Reddit honestly cant be trusted to bring NEWS, now. Reddit worked a long time to become the place to get information. Yahoo might rip off content for fluff, but it was better than Reddit for actual news yesterday. How you let that sub's mods continue moderating on your site shows the direction the site is taking.

                                      [–]BenignEvil 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      On mobile, sorry for any grammatical mistakes or formatting issues.

                                      u/Spez -

                                      I've been with reddit for almost four years now. I have seen a lot of things change, but the largest change I've seen is lack of accountability for anything that happens. Anymore, it's just "well, these posts were banned because of brigading." EVEN though SRS's infrastructure is literally built around brigading. Which, by the way, you never, seem to comment on. But if any other subreddit that doesn't agree with the admin's views "brigades" (which a lot of the time it just happens to be that users will vote on content from other subreddits without an ulterior motive), they're banned or given warnings. It's fucking ridiculous.

                                      I promise you, if you continue to do what you're doing: change algorithms to censor content you don't like, continue to quarantine/ban subreddits that don't fit your agenda, and overall turn this site into a hug box (and as long as the people being harassed are white males), you're going to end up like Digg. People will find an alternative site, or a new one will be created.

                                      That being said, default subreddits and their moderators should be also controlled by the admins. It's sad that default moderators continue to ban people who aren't even ban-worthy, most of the time just because they post in other subreddits they dont like. This needs to stop if they're going to be a default. Non-defaults should still be allowed to do whatever they like. But it's sad the r/news was banning people for posting articles saying that the shooter was a Radical Islamic Extremist, which is news. It doesn't matter what they do and don't like posted. They're a default, and they bring a lot of traffic to this site.

                                      I'm starting to see that Reddit is becoming a lot more compact with content. I don't really know how else to explain it. But any sub that doesn't seem to fit your agenda ends up with a lot of stern warnings or bans. That shouldn't be how it is. If you're going to enforce a set of rules, they need to be enforced equally, regardless of what your position is on it.

                                      [–]nate1212 3004ポイント3005ポイント  (49子コメント)

                                      Let's talk about Orlando r/news

                                      FTFY

                                      [–]iReign_x 17ポイント18ポイント  (1子コメント)

                                      Clarity/transparency is something reddit promised, this would be a good opportunity to get moderators of the default subs to employ as well.

                                      In a high profile situation like this with emotions running high, people want to know what happened and /r/news while may have been acting within its rules and boundaries, failed. It failed to settle things. Reddit knows the internet very well; once something gets out, it will be twisted and changed by people who are ignorant , didn't check sources, or didn't read the information properly; they were more worried about multiple posts about people breaking some minor rules (the major rules being broken is understandable) over clarity of their actions, which if they had explained in a proper way (subreddit announcement, near the beginning of this mess) would have quickly diminished the situation. Comment graveyards and deleted threads do not calm tens of thousands of people who are flustered looking for information on a tragedy.

                                      I believe the admins should set better standards for moderators of default subreddits, including clarity.

                                      [–]mecromace 4ポイント5ポイント  (1子コメント)

                                      I'm going to be absolutely frank on this matter.

                                      I am a software engineer living in Orlando and am regularly downtown where the clubs are and I have friends regularly visit Pulse. The fact that I could not find any information because of some zealous mods on the most commonly used sections for breaking news decided to censor literally everything for whatever reason shows either apathy by the controlling interests to maintain openness as has repeatedly been promised (ie. by the admins and reddit inc) or complete ignorance for running the business. You not only dropped the ball while the moderators screwed the pooch, you drop-kicked the pooch wide right with them clinging for hope of a homerun.

                                      For many years, I have not had an interest in developing a competing platform because there is no money in the market to be made. I have a software background, so I naturally came from newsgroups to /. to digg to reddit (during the first weeks where you spammed your own site for traffic no less). I've seen how one grows something people like, then refuse to maintain the essence of what they made and let it become overrun by zealots of many colors.

                                      The system you have built for reddit is broken and I don't mean a minor scratch, but a gaping flaw that exposes the problems to everyone that has some sense of eyesight. This gaping flaw could not be anymore apparent than by the cluster that was revealed today by the weekend's events.

                                      I am livid at not just the apathy you have exhibited towards your own platform, but the blatant ignorance too. I have the means and I now have the motive. I don't want to bother with the mess that is social networking, but if you don't change how you handle the platform as a whole, then I will be forced to start working on the next iteration of what has become a perpetual social news evolution.

                                      I've done it in the travel industry already, so this is not someone just blowing smoke for the sake of gaining attention. This is a shot across the bow, and I'm genuinely pissed at what I'm witnessing.

                                      [–]harps86 188ポイント189ポイント  (20子コメント)

                                      Moderators can make or break this website. Certain ones overstep their boundary and yesterday was a prime example.

                                      [–]newacct123456789 5ポイント6ポイント  (2子コメント)

                                      DAMAGE CONTROL

                                      You guys have been censoring, shadowbanning, and giving users the run around for 2 years now. Within the past year it has gotten to be ridiculously bad. This isn't just one subreddit - it's across the entire site.

                                      Everyone reading this, please just stop visiting reddit and let it die like Digg. Everything that once made reddit a cool place to visit is no longer present.

                                      [–]haraambae 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      I posted this on the /r/news mod spin control thread yesterday, will repost below:

                                      I used to come to Reddit as soon as there was any breaking news -- people from all over the world would link relevant articles, or upload photos and videos in real time, or provide different opinions in a way the mainstream media would not. This was once the website on which I saw the Egyptian square protests unfold, the protests in the Syrian maidan streamed live, and many other global events unfold through the eyes of other users -- the common man, instead of through the eyes of spin doctor approved media narratives.

                                      The more reddit has grown, the more it has tended to cater to pre-established narratives in line with the mainstream media. In order to attract popular users, celebrities, and clicks from the "normal majority" of people, the entire site has sacrificed what made it a great website in the first place and whored out its soul. It is not just /r/news, but nearly every other big subreddit as well.

                                      Nothing you people can say is going to smooth over the fact that you suppressed discussion about one of the biggest terrorist attacks in the US to push your narrative. There might have been an influx of users, as with any other controversial news (what you call "brigading"), but there was no doxxing or misconduct in any thread. You people shut down discussion as soon as the news dropped that the terrorist was muslim.

                                      The damage is done. Moderators leaving isn't going to fix the systematic rot in this website. Perhaps making /r/news non default may improve things, but the site as a whole is beyond redemption. The admins have learned nothing from Digg.

                                      Since there is a lack of competition, your user-base is going to hang out here, but be warned that there will be an exodus to the first viable alternative at the earliest possible opportunity.

                                      [–]caribou16 472ポイント473ポイント  (29子コメント)

                                      Lesson learned. No longer count on reddit for news.

                                      [–]Tjconfidential 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      Yeah, great PR attempt. There is no excuse for the extremely unprofessional behavior of the mods over at r/news. It doesn't matter if it was only one mod, a few of them, or all of them. They represent the sub as a whole and should respect it as such. Reddit altogether has gone down a never-ending rabbit hole and will only continue to get worse. Such a disgrace. Do not tell us users what we need to keep in perspective, I believe that most of us are aware of what matters most here. That doesn't give you an excuse to apologize for the lack of effort given by the /r/news mods. The time when we needed information the most, our voices and opinions were stripped away from us. I am very sad about the events that happened in Orlando yesterday, and it makes me sick to see mods pulling out their non-existent internet cocks to prohibit people from getting the information they want to see.

                                      [–]Raquefel 13ポイント14ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      What happened on /r/news was a catastrophe of insane proportions and an absolute embarrassment to Reddit as a whole. The moderators' behavior (you know who's in particular) was absolutely unacceptable and it's very clear that /r/news needs to be removed from the default subreddits and an entirely new sub needs to be created, because what happened yesterday was unprecedented and asinine. I can honestly say that I have on very few occasions been as disgusted and as outraged as I was about what happened yesterday.

                                      [–]frog_avenger 20ポイント21ポイント  (1子コメント)

                                      a few posts were removed incorrectly??? If you were serious that means that you think we're all a bunch of morons. I woke up at 5:00 AM to head to work on Sunday. I saw the initial thread on r/news before i went to work. When I took my lunch break, I went to reddit on my phone to see if there was any new info available. To my surprise, The top post on r/all about the tragedy with 15k+ upvotes was from r/askreddit. R/ASKREDDIT. I went to look at r/news to find that at least the top 5 posts were locked and every comment on them was deleted.

                                      If you don't think that every thread with 5k+ up votes and hundreds of comments each from a default subreddit being locked/removed is censorship, Than you're a fascist.

                                      This response is absolutely pathetic and shallow. Basically you're blaming all the censorship on the ONE mod who told someone to kill themselfs?

                                      This response does not sufficiently address any of the points of outrage that happened on reddit this weekend. You should be ashamed that you're trying to cover up censorship on this scale and covering for mods deleting comments from people who were trying to HELP PEOPLE AND SAVE LIFES by posting info about how to donate blood to the victims who were lucky enough to survive.

                                      I am beyond angry that this is the only sorry response we get from the admins.

                                      Oh and by the way, I can only assume that you're going to alter the r/all algorithm so that r/the_donald isn't going to be seen on r/all ever again? because of diversity in the feed? you don't agree with that subs politics so you're going to continue to censor them? you don't think any of us can see through your facade?

                                      [–]johntempleton 6ポイント7ポイント  (3子コメント)

                                      I'm sorry, but the decision to delete/remove posts related to where to provide emergency blood donations is simply unacceptable.

                                      Death threats are unacceptable.

                                      So is deliberately going out of your way to delete information as to how you can save a life. Nothing here indicates you have made any effort to address this.

                                      [–]TechN9cian01 14ポイント15ポイント  (1子コメント)

                                      Let's talk about Orlando

                                      All but introductory paragraph about /r/news.

                                      Edit: I wouldn't know where to begin talking about either issue (so good luck /u/spez!) except to separate the issues entirely. I doubt the victims' families and friends give a shit about whatever the hell a "subreddit" is right now. No doubt we all care, but we're not focused on them right now either.

                                      [–]frustratinbubble 5ポイント6ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      Since this is a gigantic clusterfuck and no one will accept any responsibility for the default news subreddit having no threads about the one of the biggest news stories of the year, I would like to take this moment to applaud the mods of /r/askreddit for really stepping up to the plate on this one. good on ya boys.

                                      [–]KytoCSGO 83ポイント84ポイント  (7子コメント)

                                      It's absolutely unacceptable that the mods were deleting every single post about donating blood in Orlando. What they did could have caused someone to die because they didn't have enough blood for the person. When there's an emergency like that, they should make one of the threads about a blood drive a sticky, not fucking delete it. Admin intervention needs to happen in that sub.

                                      [–]VibrantDisc 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      We have seen the accusations of censorship. We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims.

                                      So translation, if you ignore the evidence of censorship, you'll see that there is no censorship? Restoring the posts after the fact does not remedy that they were removed in the first place. The issue was also valid comments being removed in droves, not just posts, duplicate or otherwise.

                                      [–]susquehanna_weed 7ポイント8ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      "We have seen the accusations of censorship. We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are NOW RESTORED, have not found evidence to support these claims."

                                      Fucking what?? This is like saying, "we heard the vase was broken, but after gluing it back together we determined it wasn't broken."

                                      Get real.

                                      [–]AlexFaceHead 18ポイント19ポイント  (3子コメント)

                                      Reddit has become such a massive joke.

                                      I used to enjoy this site, and, as /u/spez mentioned, used it as a source of news. It's sad, because I legitimately believe it used to host quality content with, for the most part, genuine people providing said content.

                                      I can't say the same anymore. And completely honestly, it's pathetic. The staff is pathetic, the moderators of some of the largest communities are pathetic, and I am pathetic for even visiting this terrible excuse for a "front page of the internet" and supporting its nonsense.

                                      Uncensored and unbiased information is hard to come across this day an age anyway, but reddit seems to actively and deliberately destroy any efforts put into preserving freedom of speech, information, and thought.

                                      Furthermore, why was this even an issue? What power can a moderator really have? My layman's guess is not very much when compared to the group of people which runs the site. So really, the issue is with people like /u/spez, and the rest of the flock of administration that run this sad excuse for an informative website. Leave it up to these jerk offs to perpetuate bullshit.

                                      I can't rely on this site for news anymore than I can rely on it for original content.

                                      It's spiraled into a piece of garbage with a profit and an agenda in mind.

                                      [–]Cyberslasher 7ポイント8ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      One moderator did cross the line with their behavior, and is no longer a part of the team.

                                      We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims.

                                      Well which is it? Either someone was abusing power, or someone wasn't. You can't say "nobody did anything wrong, except someone got fired for doing something wrong, and also there was no censorship, except we just undid some censorship."

                                      [–]Sour_Badger 7ポイント8ポイント  (1子コメント)

                                      This has to be the worst Mea Culpa I've ever witnessed.

                                      we investigated

                                      The entire user base can see it with our own eyes. This wasn't a question of if censorship occurred. This is was a question of to what extent.

                                      This is the second non apology for blatant censorship. Are the admins really going to do nothing? You got foreign press accusing you of blatant censorship, this is isn't faux Internet rage. This was tangible, blatant, and frankly disgusting.

                                      Edit: This feels a lot like a Friday afternoon whitehouse dump on controversial topics. You wanted for a Monday evening to address it? I'd imagine this is your slowest hour of waking EST time.

                                      [–]lifelongfreshman 24ポイント25ポイント  (2子コメント)

                                      There is no excuse for the raw number of removed comments, period. I don't care how many duplicates there were, entire sections were graveyards because of direct moderator behavior.

                                      There's a difference between enforcing your rules and stifling your userbase, and the moderation team crossed that line in a bad way yesterday. There needs to be some protection for the users from moderator abuse on this scale.

                                      [–]FlippedFlop 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      Spin this however you want /u/spez, the rest of the internet saw what happened: Washington Post. rt. breitbart. daily mail. vocativ. daily beast. vice. you had a chance to give a human response but instead came in here with less of an informed post than that shitpost sticky on r/news. Pao2.0. *Edit: added periods, mobile site is shit

                                      [–]LightsSoundAction 5ポイント6ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      I'll continue to use Reddit for sports news and discussion but after this escapade, Reddit has completely lost my trust on anything news related. The UnReddit (third party site that shows a thread with every comment that has been deleted) links for the megathread on /r/news and even the thread on /r/askreddit are downright embarrassing. I sifted through quite a bit of the 17k comments deleted and while it's true some of them should have been removed, there was a lot of straight up censorship as well. Even comments suggesting a move to Voat.co, which is always the plan when Reddit does stupid shit, were removed. Sorry /u/spez , been on this site for 6+ years, I can spot yall's BS from a mile away.

                                      [–]onetimecomplaint 7ポイント8ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      Look--Reddit and this sub in particular has really gone south.
                                      You find no evidence to support these claims? Really? You investigated yourselves and decided you were right?
                                      My 4 year old has the same approach when I catch them eating cookies before dinner. Reddit used to be a great place. It used to be special. Now it is a pit of whitewash that immediately deletes ideas that interfere with the prescribed narrative. Comments are deleted. Users are Shadowbanned. It is a black pit of censorship that is quickly becoming the perfect example of a worst case scenario. This is why you are seeing more folks move over to places like Voat.co . It makes me sad to see what Reddit has become.

                                      [–]mcduck0 105ポイント106ポイント  (4子コメント)

                                      BAN shared moderator accounts!

                                      /u/RNews_Mod NEEDS TO GO.

                                      [–]iammanlyman 5ポイント6ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      ".... to promote more diversity....." Just come out and say it. You mean to undermine the popularity of posts - the very system this site was founded on, and it's very appeal because it doesn't align with your agenda.

                                      My one wish... my sole wish.... my wish upon a star.... is that someone with an original idea comes along before reddit is able to recapitalize.

                                      This place has become an utter disappointment.

                                      I don't want reddit to fail. I want a competitor to win - it was reddit's spirit that made it great.... most of the time I didn't agree with it. But this is ridiculous.... Hell, I subscribed to the_donald, and I'm not even voting for the dood.

                                      [–]PM_ME_YOUR_LUKEWARM 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      The story broke on r/news, as is common. In such situations, their community is flooded with all manners of posts. Their policy includes removing duplicate posts to focus the conversation in one place, and removing speculative posts until facts are established. A few posts were removed incorrectly, which have now been restored.

                                      They were removed to the point that the sub had no mention of the shootings , and as such led to many not finding about the shootings until late.

                                      I rely on Reddit for major news. I don't go to CNN , I go to Reddit. After yesterday I am left wondering how many other stories I received too late.

                                      [–]sammie287 20ポイント21ポイント  (7子コメント)

                                      No evidence to support that there was censorship? The moment news broke out that the shooter was Muslim the only thing on r/news was a megathread with no information. It contained about 5000 deleted comments, some about blood donation information, and one comment by a mod telling everybody to stop acting like "crybabies." This event wasn't on the front page until the end of the day, many hours after it should have been. Now they're trying to save their reputation and you're buying it because they restored threads a day after the news was relevant? What a disgrace.

                                      [–]damnit_darrell 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      The sentiment put out by thisnpost is that the users are to blame for the absolute shit show in /r/news yesterday when that could not be farther from the truth.

                                      Comments pointing out that the assailant was affiliated with ISIS were deleted.

                                      Comments detailing where to donate blood were deleted.

                                      Comments pointing out information in regards to casualties were deleted.

                                      All in the guise of preventing "islamophobia". How in the fuck is telling people where to donate blood creating Islamophobia? How in the hell is that a violation of policy in even the subreddit? Yet y'all seem to be perfectly fine with mods telling users to "kill yourself". At least that's the sentiment Im getting.

                                      The userbase, by and large, are not gonna be appeased by anything less than the removal of all moderators in that subreddit and you have to know that. If there is a better solution, I'm sure you will find one but you need to understand that there is no reason for members of the Reddit community to find out about the worst terrorist attack in the US since 9/11 as much as 12 hours later.

                                      Im posting a link to a screencap of a guy who tried 3 times to post about the need for blood donations but was deleted. How is THAT bigoted? http://i.imgur.com/OGaPNij.png

                                      [–]UltravioletClearance 5ポイント6ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      In my opinion, /r/news needs to go as a subreddit. This is one of many scummy things the /r/news mods have done over the years. They STILL refuse to even so much as acknowledge the existence of a secret automoderator "blacklist" shared between /r/news, /r/reactiongifs and /r/games that thousands of people found themselves on for no reason going as far back as 2012.

                                      Thousands of people's posts are automatically deleted and they are not even told about it, and when they try to confront the /r/news mods about it they're either told it is an issue on their end, or insulted and cursed out. That is the very definition of censorship, so I'm wondering if your so-called "investigation" even looked at this.

                                      Secret blacklists is not something that should be allowed on a default subreddit.

                                      /u/spez I'd really like to hear your thoughts on this fucked up policy the /r/news mods have, especially seeing as the reddit admins have publicly stated they are moving away from shadowbans because it's unfair to not even tell people that they're banned, yet you allow default subreddits to do that exact thing using automoderator.

                                      And that's not even touching the non-apology in your post. Anything short of undefautling /r/news is unacceptable. In addition to the above concerns about /r/news, as a gay man, I am absolutely insulted that a subreddit that you approved to be a default cares more about protecting Islam than defending the LGBT community.

                                      The LGBT community has had to live with people in power suppressing them for decades in the real world, now we're not even safe online? Give me a fucking break. And you by extension condone that.

                                      [–]Actual_Dragon_IRL 26ポイント27ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      We have seen the accusations of censorship. We have investigated, and beyond the posts that are now restored, have not found evidence to support these claims.

                                      You investigated yourselves and found no evidence of doing something wrong, I'm so fucking shocked.

                                      People should be able to express hatred of terrorists no matter what religion they subscribe to.

                                      [–]beetlebeas 6ポイント7ポイント  (0子コメント)

                                      You guys are a bunch of weasels. This post made me angrier than the actual censorship. You're like a bunch of politicans: you say some flashy things but implement no real change - like getting rid of the shit lords that put you in this position.

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