Ireland Reddit closing at night as mods try to 'stem the flow' of extreme racism

My name is URL

This story has even made it onto the BBC now https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52992676

coinop

My name is URL wrote: »

'Some irritated users' = dumb racist cun*s that can't handle being told to STFU?

It's like Voat all over again lmao

I googled Voat after you mentioned it and you should probably know that they have your picture and address posted on there. Maybe contact their admin to have it removed?

My name is URL

coinop wrote: »

I googled Voat after you mentioned it and you should probably know that they have your picture and address posted on there. Maybe contact their admin to have it removed?

Thanks. I'm not too worried about it. They've been threatening me and others for years because of stuff we've posted here

Acting on it would require the basement dwelling tards to actually go outside, and that's not happening anytime soon

My name is URL

My name is URL wrote: »

Thanks. I'm not too worried about it. They've been threatening me and others for years because of stuff we've posted here

Acting on it would require the basement dwelling tards to actually go outside, and that's not happening anytime soon

All joking aside....i think one of them.was lifted for burning mattie kennys car that time (so rumour went)


Perhaps for his own safety mind

purifol0

purifol0 wrote: »

Great job by the mods there, it's a thankless task. I genuinely mean that. I like reddit Ireland and I'd hate to be subject to a load of gaslighting, propaganda and astroturfing every time I'm on it. If they have to close it at night then so be it.

What's astroturfing? There was me thinking my weekly 5-a-side was just some harmless fun. Little did I know I was supporting the far right.

gibsmedat

Reddit Ireland seems to consist of simpsons memes father ted jokes and Irish people giving out about other Irish people. Strange forum, definite bugman vibe off it.

Annasopra

Yeah maybe it is all just road testing

https://www.politico.eu/article/us-nationalists-far-right-europe-elections-digital-facebook/

Melanchthon

gibsmedat wrote: »

Reddit Ireland seems to consist of simpsons memes father ted jokes and Irish people giving out about other Irish people. Strange forum, definite bugman vibe off it.

It's not great at all is it, it's worth looking at what happened with the UK related sub-reddits
r/UK is similar to /Ireland with even more of a strident student union vibe, obviously this puts a lot of people of so casualUK was formed which has a very strict no politics rule so everything is nice, UK politics took the political stuff and has some actual discussion outside of "Tories bad" (well outside of election times when it gets flooded) as well as this there is a askUk Reddit.

This has meant that despite being the default UK reddit it's actually got way less user interaction than would be expected, mainly because of toxic moderation and userbase. As far as I can see none of the r/Ireland alternatives took off possibly because the userbase isn't there, boards is genuinely better for any Irish issues and R/Ireland while not worth the time isn't as incredibly bad as r/United Kingdom.

In relation to the other stuff.

Reddit power mods/users of going to the media to get stuff actioned by the admins so this possibly isn't an organic article.

There is definitely racist groups and videos being misattributed and likely fake screenshots.

On the flip side though.

The videos that are real are pretty bad and there was attempts to minimise them, the kicking video has audio that would have outraged articles in the major news sources if the roles were reversed.

Quantum Erasure

r/ireland is offline again...

We are electing to shut down r/Ireland until the admins can make the most basic assurances on the safety, and privacy of moderators on their platform.

The moderators of r/Ireland have been reporting repeat problem-users for over 2 years now, alongside subreddits which exist solely to harass, abuse, threaten, and doxx r/Ireland mods (both past, and present). The admins have paradoxically both recognised that these subreddits, and users exist to endanger the personal privacy, and safety of r/Ireland moderators - while deliberately choosing to not take any action on them.

...

more here: https://pastebin.com/W3ZBM1fc

antimatterx

Quantum Erasure wrote: »

r/ireland is offline again...



more here: https://pastebin.com/W3ZBM1fc

The admins should just remove the mods, and move forward. This "power play :pac:" is getting ridiculous.

The mods don't create the community, the users do. Stop trying to feel like you're important.

Dyr

Sounds strangely like a power play alright, a few weirdos with weirdo political opinions take up a position of influence and suddenly their safety is under threat if Reddit does not aqquiesce to their demands. If Reddit, of all places, isn't buying into your accusations, we would have to wonder about the veracity of the demands.


Another ISF in the making

ShineOn7

I'm a fan of it. But there's no way I'm arsed to read all this

We are electing to shut down r/Ireland until the admins can make the most basic assurances on the safety, and privacy of moderators on their platform.

The moderators of r/Ireland have been reporting repeat problem-users for over 2 years now, alongside subreddits which exist solely to harass, abuse, threaten, and doxx r/Ireland mods (both past, and present). The admins have paradoxically both recognised that these subreddits, and users exist to endanger the personal privacy, and safety of r/Ireland moderators - while deliberately choosing to not take any action on them.

Reddit turned over close to $120 Million in ad revenue last year, and are now valued at $3 billion following raising an additional $300 Million in funding during 2019. Moderators are completely unpaid staff which police their platform and allow it to remain advertiser-friendly, in order to allow Reddit to continue reaping these profits. Absolutely no Moderators are asking for a salary, or so much as a hollow thank you for it.

However, it's not unreasonable to expect that a company which has what's essentially unlimited resources to run a souped up message board can ensure that adequate staffing is available to deal with legitimate threats to the safety of their unpaid volunteers.

When the mods on r/Ireland were faced with an onslaught of Racially-motivated Brigading coupled with personal targeting/threats towards mods, we reached out to the admins and tried to tackle this proactively by recruiting more moderators to stem the flow.

We've now found that while we managed to curtail the racially-motivated content through sheer power in numbers, we also caused more volunteer mods to face constant abuse, and legitimate threats to their safety - to which Reddit's Administration has acknowledged, yet actively allowed to continue.

The admins ceased maintaining dialogue with us after we managed to curtail this content; and it's now become very clear that like every other multi-million dollar corporation, their ability to care starts and stops with something that could affect their bottom line. Advertisers don't want to see racist brigadiers - and we gladly met the expectations of stopping it. However, advertisers don't care if the same mods cleaning up the mess then have their safety threatened - and with that, admin responses went from "immediate action needed", to "the wheel turns slowly".

We pre-empted this in advance to the point where we warned our new mods 3 months ago (link redacted: provided to admins) that if admin inaction continues, outside of being open game for abuse from areas of reddit which are actively granted protection by the admins, they will likely face legitimate threats to their privacy, and safety. This has now come to fruition on multiple occasions during that time.

Over the past month (the below does not include the 2~ years prior of reports - only the past month), we have reported the following posts, subreddits, and user accounts which all break reddit's site-wide rules. All reports, inclusive of doxxing threads being manually approved by moderators on other subs have been ignored.

We're not including the full 2~ years of reports we've sent on prior, as honestly, it would take weeks to compile - and you already have these reports in your admin inbox, granted they've been left largely ignored.

----
Redacted (provided to admins): 42 individual links to User Accounts, Threads, and Subreddits dedicated to site-wide rule breaking actions (spam, extreme levels of harassment, and doxxing)
----

We're unwilling to re-engage on recruiting more active moderators when the Reddit Admins have actively supported these mods being targeted for harassment, abuse, and doxxing. This would be forgivable if we hadn't spent years sending on these exact users, and areas of reddit which are set up specifically to house them.

Moderators are unpaid volunteer janitors - disposable as this makes us to Reddit, this does not mean you can freely allow, and encourage other users on your platform to threaten our safety. We will be happy to re-open the sub once the admins engage with making the bare minimum expected efforts in preventing this.

Harry Palmr

St@rmfr@nt's Ireland board must be quiet these days

RasTa

Fair play to them

MadYaker

Why anyone would want to be a mod on reddit is beyond me.

SchrodingersCat

If the mods are getting doxxed, and the admins won't do anything about it, then the safest thing to do is to shut it down.
These folks are volunteers and aren't getting paid like the higher-ups. The least the admins could do is help to protect them from that.

I say fair play to the mods for shutting it down too.

Thelonious Monk

They should keep it shut down. It's just a forum for teenagers to post anti British memes and glorify the IRA etc. Bunch of saddos.

macpaccrack

antimatterx wrote: »

The admins should just remove the mods, and move forward. This "power play :pac:" is getting ridiculous.

The mods don't create the community, the users do. Stop trying to feel like you're important.

The mods are dead right. There's an online element of right wing trolls who are desperate to infiltrate Ireland reddit.

They are trying to prevent it from becoming like Boards (which is a ghost town since it became full of racial threads). The race threads and the posters they bring tends to summon such toxicity and unpleasantness.

Quantum Erasure

Harry Palmr wrote: »

St@rmfr@nt's Ireland board must be quiet these days

voat /boards is aswell

RandomName2

macpaccrack wrote: »

The mods are dead right. There's an online element of right wing trolls who are desperate to infiltrate Ireland reddit.

They are trying to prevent it from becoming like Boards (which is a ghost town since it became full of racial threads). The race threads and the posters they bring tends to summon such toxicity and unpleasantness.

Translates to: how dare anyone disagree with me

Errashareesh

RandomName2 wrote: »

Translates to: how dare anyone disagree with me

Ah now. I don't like man haters - do I dislike them simply because they disagree with me or is there a good bit more depth to it than that?

Eric Cartman

macpaccrack wrote: »

The mods are dead right. There's an online element of right wing trolls who are desperate to infiltrate Ireland reddit.

They are trying to prevent it from becoming like Boards (which is a ghost town since it became full of racial threads). The race threads and the posters they bring tends to summon such toxicity and unpleasantness.

If you wanted to see a ghost town you should have seen when it was politics cafe 2.0 , almost no right wing views or controversy allowed, was a complete echo chamber and died a very quick death due to lack of posts. Allowing conservative viewpoints in CA is what keeps it alive and its busier than ever

Dyr

Eric Cartman wrote: »

If you wanted to see a ghost town you should have seen when it was politics cafe 2.0 , almost no right wing views or controversy allowed, was a complete echo chamber and died a very quick death due to lack of posts. Allowing conservative viewpoints in CA is what keeps it alive and its busier than ever

You want a ghost town try the politics forum (it still exists ) over the years there was always a problem with the various mods and their orbiters in there and once there was an alternative on boards everyone bailed be the new time.

Eric Cartman

Bambi wrote: »

You want a ghost town try the politics forum (it still exists ) over the years there was always a problem with the various mods and their orbiters in there and once there was an alternative on boards everyone bailed be the new time.

I like the politics forum but I always found its very much a ‘you better come correct son’ forum, want to say you like or support something controversial - better have a college thesis worth of references, stats and graphs to back up why you like that thing

Here its just a more sedate pace where you can shout at the other team ‘boo urns my viewpoints the right one youre wrong’ and its fine

Harry Palmr

Inflamatory trash talk is fine here then... right. Not much of a standard

ExMachina1000

That long post reads as in the reddit mods are sick of being doxxed and threatened. Nothing about racist posts.

I wouldn't blame them either. They get nothing for it while reddit is worth a fortune. Not worth it

Hodors Appletart

one or two of them are mods here too

davo2001

The idea of someone else getting rich because of countless hours of free work you (mods) put in sound ridiculous to me.

It's not a job, the admins / people making money are just using you, stop being an idiot and working for free you fools.

ExMachina1000

Mr.S wrote: »

It's community driven, the same as Boards. It's not a job. You do it because you want to do it. Likewise with Reddit, anyone can make a subreddit - once you follow the main site rules, it's over to that community to self-run.

Reddit is a company valued at 3,000,000,000 dollars isnt it?

ExMachina1000

Mr.S wrote: »

Which doesn't turn a profit and "only" brings in a fraction of that in revenue every year.

I see your point, without the moderators, the site would lose subreddits and then traffic would drop etc. A bit like here, I suppose.

I had a bit of a look and people have moved to an alternative reddit Ireland page. Post after post discussing what happened.

General consensus is mods have been only allowing one particular political opinion and banning people under any excuse. Someone must have gotten sick of it and decided to bite back in the form of doxxing. They are saying mods told someone to kill themselves repeatedly in one case and other times have banned people and followed them around other pages posting such infantile responses to their posts like "why so mad" etc

If you have "skin in the game " over there then say so as I don't know the full story and only wrote about what I saw.

Ps both journal media and reddit should be paying their mods and admins