Revamping the Quarantine Function

Quarantined subs are completely inaccessible on the Reddit mobile app.

Guys can we get every sub quarantined? No ads!

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r/againstmensrights is a blatant hate sub and their mods used the platform to dox a guy and file a false police report against him. Should that have any consequences or.... Nah that's cool.

I am seriously livid that I can’t view WPD on mobile.As morbid as it may sound it’s my second most visited sub..

People deal with the problems they face in life different ways. How you might respond to a challenge might be different from mine. How you might deal with depression might be different that mine.

I say that to say this. I lost my daughter on 10/28/2016. I reached out to people on multiple platforms for help. For advice. For a open ear. For arms to wrap around me. For someone to just fucking tell me it’s going to be ok. I’m not saying the WPD community doesn’t have some cunts in it but it also has some of the most passionate, down to earth, realistic human beings I’ve ever met. I’ve had more conversations about death and the reality of it on this sub than any other plat form I’ve tried using. I’ve had conversations last for days and weeks and have had people check in on me.

I had to live through the horror of feeling my daughter get cold in my arms.. that’s why I am here. To see that the life I’m currently living in, is something that we are all going to have to face.

There is a video on here, and most will know which one I am talking about, it’s the video where the brick comes through the truck window and although you can’t see what happened you hear the husband reacting to it for a solid minute or so. That video makes people cringe and some people say it’s harder to watch than the cartel videos. For me when I hear it, I cry every time. I watch it every time but I cry every time as well. I cry because it literally takes me back to the exact moment where my wife and I found out our daughter died. Those cries of pain and sorrow and helplessness are forever burned into my brain, but they are my wife’s cries that I hear when I watch that video.

Watching stuff like that makes me just understand that someone somewhere knows what I am going through and it comforts me ( in a sick way ) to know that someone else knows the exact pain I feel. I’d rather watch that video 50X then have another conversation of someone telling me that they don’t know how I feel but I’ll be ok, I just need to accept that God wanted a Angel.

So now to find out that I can’t come to this site on mobile (99.9%+ mobile redditor here) I am devastated. This sub is literally where I go to escape the fact that my daughter is in a box in a Cairo cabinet in my bedroom.

Y’all are fucking up reddit. You really are.

Cool. Your website is going to shit anyway.

Have fun with a front page full of reeeeeeesist and astroturfing

Also, you're a piece of shit hypocrite, arguing for net neutrality but censoring and quarantining many subreddits that aren't even offensive: YOU JUST WANT TO STOP THEIR MESSAGE

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Quarantined communities generate no revenue

Can users in there buy gold and gild stuff?

Genuine question: What is the purpose of requiring a verified email to view quarantined subreddits?

My 2 cents: There's a nice talk Richard Dawkins gave on the subject of free speech, and during it he rhetorically asks "Who would you nominate to decide what you're allowed to read?"

Try to think of who would be most appropriate to tell you what newspapers you're allowed to read, what movies you can see, what food you can eat. Who do you nominate? To whom do you delegate the task of deciding what is right and wrong for you?

I think the administration is trying really hard to be that person, and I don't like that. We're all grownups; we can decide for ourselves what we do and don't want to see. I can see the value in having a warning, but putting up hurdles and making things deliberately difficult is ridiculous.

Today, we are updating our quarantining policy to reflect those learnings, including adding an appeals process where none existed before.

Not having the old policy memorized, what specifically are the changes from what it was before compared to now, aside from an appeals process? Are there actual additional categories which can merit a quarantine? More defined characteristics of existing categories? Or are other changes also mostly administrative?

On a platform as open and diverse as Reddit, there will sometimes be communities that, while not prohibited by the Content Policy, average redditors may nevertheless find highly offensive or upsetting. In other cases, communities may be dedicated to promoting hoaxes (yes we used that word) that warrant additional scrutiny, as there are some things that are either verifiable or falsifiable and not seriously up for debate (eg, the Holocaust did happen and the number of people who died is well documented). In these circumstances, Reddit administrators may apply a quarantine.

Fair enough.

Quarantined communities display a warning that requires users to explicitly opt-in to viewing the content (similar to how the NSFW community warning works).Quarantined communities generate no revenue, do not appear in non-subscription-based feeds (eg Popular), and are not included in search or recommendations.

So this is a way of making sure that advertisers don't find their products displayed on racist subreddits, "alternative truth" hoax subreddits, or other such 'unsavory' corners of Reddit?

Does the "Won't appear on r/popular" also apply to r/all?

You're not my dad. Give us an uncensored mode that makes Reddit work as if none of this happened please. You can even leave it off by default. I don't like other people thinking for me.

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

The redpill was quarantined and the message 'For information on positive masculinity, please see the resources available at Stony Brook University's Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities' was attached.

That paper was authored by this woman who stated 'The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race.' so that is now Reddit's official position.

Good thing is post history in those subs is hidden so automatic bans from left subs won't work and neither will tagging posters from other subs.

Wouldn't this make these communities echo chambers, where outsiders aren't even aware of what is being said. Wouldn't this also make it less likely that reportable offences get reported?

Great new censorship. My fav is the throttling. Great that it only allows one side of the story to get out. And then being able to harass the commenter because they can't respond. Awesome. Keep up the good work. With the admins help we will be able to drive actual discussion off this site. That way only one opinion will be had by all and we can celebrate this utopia that we work towards. And nobody will be able to argue because they'll be banned or throttled or removed. Great times.

"Platform as open and diverse as Reddit"....Which is why we are quarantining subreddits we choose to not agree with. We are doing this for YOUR benefit and safety. All subreddits are equal, except these that we are quarantining. This is about diversity, and inclusionary principles. We are keeping these ones mostly out of view so that we may be better together (without some, though, cuz we quarantined them). We must stay united in the defense of what we determine to be acceptable free speech and violating these principles will lead to a ban. Thank you for participating in the "open and diverse" platform that is Reddit.

This "quarantine" is fucking stupid and just anther way to enact censorship for the already shilled reddit.

Your goal is to reduce traffic to something by obfuscating it. The Streisand effect and the Cobra effect suggest that this may not work. Either you fully ban something, or you treat it the same. Trying to pull off a clever middle-ground may bring more attention to the content you thought you were hiding. As a wise man once said, do or do not, there is no try.

You can't stop people from curating repositories of quarantined content. For example -- you want people to use upvotes/downvotes as a way to hide uninteresting or unimportant content, but they don't. Just look at the votes on this thread. The post has 62% upvotes indicating that people use the votes as an agree/disagree button. Oof. People will do what they do, with complete disregard for developer intentions. Our colleagues at Facebook know this all too well.

Another example -- DRM. Many studios are ditching DRM because it suffers from the Cobra effect. The stronger the DRM, the more people want to hack it. This could be no different. By treating controversial topics specially, you may inadvertently bring more attention to them, thereby defeating the purpose.

I predict that this is the precursor to mass censorship on Reddit. There are only two stable states, and quarantining is not one of them. Either you full ban, or don't -- That's the decision you are choosing to defer until later. You'll eventually have to decide, you will not be able to avoid this decision. We could see it in months, maybe in years. It depends on your colleagues at Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Whatever rabbit hole they go into, other social media platforms will eventually follow.

why unsubscribe me from the quarantined subs tho? if im subscribed i obviously dont need it to be hidden from me

Is there a way to view all quarantined subreddits? At least, is there a way to know whether a sub is quarantined or not?

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Since r/FULLCOMMUNISM has been banned, the following message appears one goes to the sub:

This community is quarantined.

It is dedicated to shocking or highly offensive content. For historical information on communism, please see the resources available at the Project on the Reconciliation of European Histories (https://eureconciliation.eu/institutions-promoting-awareness-and-remembrance-of-communist-crimes/).

Why add this blatantly biased "historical information on communism"? Are any subs that advocate communism grounds for a ban, or was there a specific infraction? If it was a specific infraction, I don't think the link is necessary.

Is it just the posts from a quarantined subreddit that are excluded from search or will the subreddit itself be excluded from search?

I'd like to be able to find all subreddits when searching. The opt-in warning upon visiting should be enough warning that the subreddit may be unsavory..

As part of an ongoing project involving Reddit, I've been cataloging some information about popular subreddits. I've compiled a list of around ~7,000 of the most popular, active and public subreddits, and collected some general API-related information about them.

As luck would have it, I tested the collection of this data this morning, and so I have a table of around ~7,000 rows of subreddit info. Prior to this post, I filtered that data by quarantine-status, just out of curiosity, and it turns out that none of the subreddits I collected information for are quarantined.

I wondered to myself what the point of the quarantine feature was, if literally no subreddits of the top 7,000 had been quarantined, since, to my knowledge, communities still just get banned/removed, as with before its existence.

I didn't have anyone to ask about that until.. 48 minutes ago. So uh.. I guess you guys are going to use this feature more, going forward?

(And will it have any impact on the ability of the Reddit API to interact with those communities?)

Edit: Occasionally, the quarantine attribute in queries to info.json comes back as null, rather than true or false, to public communities that show in the front-end as quarantined, such as with r/Ice_Poseidon (https://www.reddit.com/api/info.json?id=t5_3aelr) - is that how the API is going to respond when a community is quarantined?

Edit 2: As I've noted elsewhere, I've since discovered that the quarantine property appears to return null if the subreddit is quarantined, but you the user has not explicitly accepted the quarantine warning. It returns true if you have accepted that warning.

What level of transparency can we expect from the appeal process?

Whelp no more reddit for me. What a joke. Anyone who can read between the lines knows that this is obvious censorship. This site used to be a good representation of all that the internet had to offer. So much for that. The thought police are at it again. You are not the ministry of speech. Stop pretending to be. If your political ideology wasn't obvious before it is now. Are people really stupid enough to support something like this? To think that only a few decades ago this would have generated unanimous outrage. Oh how far the world has fallen.

It sounds to me that reddit is more interested in controlling a narritive that they agree with rather than allowing open discussion of controversial topics. People have a right to be offended. Just because they are offended, doesn't make them right. It is not your duty reddit to "protect" individuals from from wrong think points of view. It is your duty to produce a platform that allows multiple points of view no matter how false, incorrect or controversial, so people can decide for themselves. I feel that this "update" is the first step of many steps that will be taken to justify censorship of controversial subs that are unaligned with the value of the rulemakers. Filtering out and de legitimizing opinions in the name of protecting the public in a slippery slope to tread. In the end leads to radical censorship that does not support the foundation of the first amendment, but instead creates a one sided narrative that will be misinformed and toxic to anyone who disagrees with our corporate fathers.

Will you be quarantining /r/EmpireDidNothingWrong?

That sub is a disgraceful fraud of galactic history.

Linking an outside source that the admins deem related to the content of the quarantined sub is beyond idiotic.

Linking to a source about communist atrocities on the quarantine page of fullcommunism? Seriously? Im not even remotely communist but thats not a disagreement with the hateful content on the reddit(which there was plenty of) but rather seemingly a disagreement with ideology. You cant ban a reddit simply because its communist, and reddit didnt, but that link definitely makes it look like any type of communist thought is not allowed. Which is ironically a bit communist....

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Same with the redpill. Yes, they had offensive content, but ban them for that. Dont ban them for their ideology and then link to an alternative source on how people should view masculinity. Neither that source, or the redpill are correct. Its simply opinions. Reddit inserting their own opinions and ideology is actually kind of disgusting.

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Even with 9/11 truth im kind of uncomfortable with them linking to a government source on "what really happened". Just ban them if you dont want them spreading something you deem misinformation on your website. Going the extra step from "theyre wrong" to "Also, heres what is right" just doesnt seem like something a faceless website should be doing.

Can I be an admin and selectively quarantine subreddits we disagree with too??

u/landoflobsters: You are aware that the link posted on the quarantine page of r/braincels is misleading? The founder of Men and Masculinities studies at Stony Brook University, Michael Kimmel, was accused of sexual harassment multiple times, yet the Reddit link redirects to multiple studies and articles by him. Maybe do your research next time and provide a link to studies of masculinity that weren't researched by a known sexual harasser?

I think the admins have a difficult task and I appreciate the work you do to keep Reddit safe and sane while not becoming as censorious and arbitrary as other large websites.

I want to register that I think it's wrong that you linked to an anti-communism website from /r/FULLCOMMUNISM. I'm not a communist and I think it's a fact that communists have done some horrible things (as have capitalists, etc), but it's blatantly biased that you chose to do that instead of linking to a neutral or non-violent, pro-communist website.

That's diminishing my faith that this is a non-biased and fair process based on the content of the subs.

Any reason why these quarantines look ideologically motivated? The custom message behind some of today's quarantines brings into question the motivation behind limiting some of these subreddits abilities.

Is there a way for users to opt out of this? i.e. I don't need to be shielded from what you deem offensive, and would like quarantined subreddits to be visible on popular and all.

Also, is there a list of quarantined subs? I would like to see a list of them, so that I can specifically subscribe to any that may be of interest to me in order to make sure I see their content.

I appreciate that you want to protect your more sensitive users, but many people, myself included, view this as censorship and do not wish to engage in it. Of course, reddit is a private platform and you can do whatever you want, but as a user, I would like the ability to decide for myself what subs I deem offensive rather than having reddit babysit me.

u/reddit once promised:

We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal.

Why is reddit steadily moving away from this?

Why are quarantines necessary?

Why do I have to give up my email address to view content reddit finds objectionable?

So... addressing the elephant in the room, is this going to affect t_d?

I guess this follows the new movement away from freedom of speech and toward the prohibition of any groups that diverge from what is socially acceptable. Good in most cases, but limits social change, and categorically opposed to what the united states were founded on. I guess because it’s a private company that runs the platform they can do what they want, but when everyone relies on companies for news/ media that are able to choose what people get to see, we have censorship.