Not all of us that left reddit were part of FPH, I've been an active redditor for the past 2 years, taking care of my local town sub and contributing in a lot of smaller subs, it was all good until the blatant censorship started a few months back, I got over it by adding reddit to my adblock and blocking everything else with NoScript... and then today came and saw what happen, reddit cherry picking a few subs so they would justify the deletion of FPH, because FPH dared to make their own imagehost and insult imgur staff the previous day, right after that I spent a few hours deleting all my history and deleting my account, I'm done with reddit. I hope to make hubski my new home once I get used to it.
Agreed. I think you will see a lot of the FPH crowd remain at reddit because they are now out for blood and simply leaving won't satisfy their already established desire to rage (or at least accost). I'm not one of them, but I also think it would have been best not to poke the sleeping badger. A large portion of the exodus is just people tired of arbitrary censorship. On the internet, the phrase "Vote with your wallet" translates to "Vote with your views", so I am taking my views elsewhere from reddit.
The censorship isn't arbitrary though. People don't understand the underlying pattern because they think of Reddit as a free speech free-for-all, when really it is fundamentally based in libertarian principles of property rights. The idea is that the mods and subscribers of a subreddit have absolute control over their subreddit and the absolute right to the integrity of their subreddit community, in the same way that people in the real world have an absolute right to their property. The admins only oppose censorship as a policy insofar as it interferes with this right (so banning a sub just because they have offensive content would be against the principles of Reddit). However, if certain communities are interfering with the culture and functioning of other communities (violating the non-aggression principle, so to speak) or posing a threat to the site as a whole, then they can and do get banned.A large portion of the exodus is just people tired of arbitrary censorship.
The censorship isn't arbitrary though
That one was interesting. The people who started the sub abandoned it 2 years ago and the people who ran FPH took it over a year ago. So it's not as arbitrary as it seems.
I understand that the new theory of censorship is what you have described, but a large portion of the reddit community does not see it as actually being applied in that manner (the easiest example being the continued existence of SRS, which exists solely to violate the non-aggression principle). My point above regarding arbitrary censorship really was that people decide what to view/consume based on how they perceive the product. Any site/entity that claims to do one thing, but is perceived as doing something else (even wrongly) is going to lose viewers/consumers. Rather than trying to clarify things or reevaluate the manner in which it is applying its own rules, reddit seems to be doubling down on the "you guys just don't understand" position. From a purely consumer standpoint, I don't care for the current business practice, so I'm not going to support the site. That said, I look forward to engaging the Hubski community!
Well as I remember, they justified their lack of interest in persecuting SRS by the fact that SRS simply doesn't brigade that much anymore, and that's completely right. If they were intent on being consistent, they might target AgainstMensRights or something, but I'm not sure. I totally agree, despite supporting them on the whole, that Reddit admins are being stupid by refusing to properly clarify their rules. I think it's just the fact that they are completely, abysmally incompetent at PR that is the problem.
The continued existence of /r/ShitRedditSays and /r/SubredditDrama stands as a debunking of this being the operant principle. There is a double standard no matter how you slice it.However, if certain communities are interfering with the culture and functioning of other communities (violating the non-aggression principle, so to speak) or posing a threat to the site as a whole, then they can and do get banned.