r/pics is wide open to all kinds of fuck spez posts, or well written calls to resign, whatever you want with the current rules right now.
all it takes is John Oliver be featured in the image and title and you're free to post anything (but no porn or gore). go nuts!
edit: because, the mods don't act anymore, unless an admin tells them to, and by the time the admin sees a post on the frontpage, the damage is already done. it's malicious compliance from the users and mods! if your title doesn't trigger any blocked words, the admins have no idea what's in your post until it's too late.
pics has 30 million subscribers and 8k are online. it's massive
but the mods can't post the critical content themselves! they need others to do it, so they can turn a blind eye. the fluff is such a wasted opportunity. we def need a well written call for resignation trending imo, I mean wtf it's what everyone wants and it's what spez is trying so hard to suppress on reddit. I know people would upvote it if it's good.
This is some revisionist history he was certainly involved and chose to remain part of it and support that type of community because he thought it was funny and he is gross
He awarded a unique "pimp daddy" trophy to the creator of the sub and was suspected to be active on there under an Alt account. He also publicly defended the sub as a demonstration of free speech as the ceo of reddit and it didn't actually get removed until it became a big deal in the news and they got really bad PR. You can find out a little more from this post a couple of weeks ago.
It's not just that he allowed them to exist, he created a special one-of-a-kind "Pimp Daddy" trophy to award to the moderator of r/jailbait and r/creepshots.
There is some whitewash in the comments there: "[violentacrez] received the trophy because all the work he did to moderate the site..." as if he got the award for keeping things clean, but consider that he contributed the vast majority of those subreddits' content himself by cruising social media for salacious pictures of minors to share while he was in his 40's, and the award is named "Pimp Daddy."
IIRC Violentacerz modded like 50 different porn subreddits, and he did a goob job by moderation standards so he was appreciated by the admins for being the overseer of the porny side of reddit.
When they sent him the award and made a huge fuss over him, they were pretty open that it was largely due to him that the site had been able to keep NSFW content and not have it be a legal impossibility.
Exactly. And manufacturing fake grievances only serves to discredit the legitimate ones.
It would be fair to say that he and Reddit leadership not only provided a platform for deplorable communities like r/jailbait to flourish, but benefitted from them financially, while claiming that they can't do anything about it because freeze peach.
I don't want to be the one making those decisions for anyone but myself, and it's not the business reddit is in. We're a free speech site with very few exceptions (mostly personal info) and having to stomach occasional troll reddit like picsofdeadkids or morally quesitonable reddits like jailbait are part of the price of free speech on a site like this.
This doesn't exactly answer your question, but Reddit did send the creator of /r/jailbait a golden trophy for his contributions to the website. Here is an interview about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks8xuYRPnWM&t=458s
Do we know he did nothing for years, though? Like, I'm not checking /jailbait is still up on Internet Archive to see how long he was on their mod roster, I don't want to end up on that list, but I've never seen anything that indicates he remained on their list for any particular amount of time.
Didn't do shit about the community as an Admin, for sure. That took way too long from all of Reddit. But that's also separate from the recent narrative that he stayed as a mod for rather a while or was a willing and active mod there.
I don't know if a timeline was made public but i imagine back then that either a) you might not even get the notification when made a mod somewhere or b) filterng wasn't good so that particular one was lost and drowned in a ton of notifications.
So it becomes somewhat plausible that spez was actually unaware of this fact for a bit.
That said, my gut feeling is that he knew about it but tried to justify it publicly and to other reddit employees as some kind of "for free speech!" sort of thing. I dare not go any deeper and speculate about his private thoughts on the matter...
Apparently in the early days of reddit, you could add anyone as mod and you didn't need to accept, it just automatically added you. IDK when that changed, but I was told by a user on modcoord that spez was added to that sub without his knowledge. I mean it's bad enough that admin allowed subs like this to proliferate and continue their activity.
The guy is a major DB, and has, for sure, done a lot of questionable to unethical stuff, but apparently modding that sub knowingly isn't accurate. I like to be right when I'm criticizing the dude and there's plenty to choose from.
This doesn't answer the questions. (How long was his account listed as a moderator for that sub? And did he even know about it? Finally, if he knew about it, why didn't he remove himself right away?)
I wasn't really trying to answer the question of if he knew or not. idk if he did or not. I was just agreeing, based on what someone informed me, that yes what you said is probably correct, that he didn't initially realize it. I guess my point is, it doesn't really matter when he realized. He was added without permission, and removed himself. The fact that he was or wasn't mod doesn't negate the fact the reddit tolerated these subs and he has done plenty of shit that's easily proven that it's not like anyone really needs this issue to be the defining moment.
He allegedly didn't realize it, but his frequent comments in various related AMAs (and the custom Reddit trophy sent to one CP-focused user) do not paint the picture that he minded being nominated one bit. Coupled with the fact that said removal of his status was not immediate? Yeah, not innocent in the slightest, but he's BDE now and makes up the rules as he goes. What could go wrong?
It's hard to say exactly what actually happened because all we have are account from users who were active back then, but I can't seem to find any archives of the moderator list. Some old Reddit users say that it was indeed possible to add people as moderators without their consent (something I noticed recently that you can also do on Lemmy, hope it gets fixed soon 🙊) , and apparently this was commonplace. Beyond user accounts it's unclear when and how he was added as moderator, for how long he was a mod or how active he was on the sub.
I tried looking for some archives of the subreddit and spez's account, however I didn't find anything that helpful. I only found two archives on archive.is from 2010 and 2011 (which I'm not gonna link here for obvious reasons), and the moderator lists didn't include spez. I also tried looking at archives of his userpage to see if he was listed as a moderator of the subreddit, but it looks like Reddit only added the list of moderated subreddits to the userpage after r/jailbait had already been banned.
Some old Reddit users say that it was indeed possible to add people as moderators without their consent
Can confirm, that's how I got put on the modlist at /DoesAnyoneElse for a spell. Someone figured I'd be a good hand on deck, hit the "add" button, and suddenly my mod queue was filled with a lot more bullshit than it was the day prior. I had to go hunting through their modmail to figure out if I'd been added deliberately or in error.
Just ...
I tried looking for some archives of the subreddit and spez's account, however I didn't find anything that helpful. I only found two archives on archive.is from 2010 and 2011 (which I'm not gonna link here for obvious reasons), and the moderator lists didn't include spez.
That also checks out with my recollections. I was pretty involved in some of the calls to get /jailbait taken down when it first came to site community attention, so while I'm open to being wrong - I feel pretty confident that it would have been something we'd talked about at the time if he'd been there particularly long or was particularly active.
As a somewhat separate point, I think VA - head mod there, among other places - would absolutely have burned Spez on the way out if Spez had that sort of clearly voluntary connection to the sub. Reddit had encouraged him to be there, then hurled him under the bus the moment national press caught wind of the sub's existence.
I'm a Reddit user of 16yrs and can safely say: He didn't just "doi nothing". Reddit and Steve himself actively promoted and supported the sub AND the main moderator (violentacrez). The mod had a "Pimp" badge added to his profile specially for him. He also had a golden Reddit Snoo trophy sent to him personally.
The original and main mod had a couple of AMAs that were often commented in by admins like Spez and Ohanian.
I'm at fifteen - same username - and my signup predates the subreddit system, I was definitely there at the time.
That's why I'm expressing doubt - this telling isn't really adding anything I wasn't aware of, I just think you're missing a few details and filling in the gaps with a more lurid narrative than would be strictly accurate.
Reddit and Steve himself actively promoted and supported the sub AND the main moderator (violentacrez). The mod had a "Pimp" badge added to his profile specially for him. He also had a golden Reddit Snoo trophy sent to him personally.
I never saw site Admin or Steve promote /r/jailbait, and I was one of the voices yelling at them to take it down, so I feel confident that I was genuinely paying attention to the issue while it was live and present. That a huge part why I'm asking for some more concrete confirmation that they did promote /r/jailbait, if it happened. I did see them honour VA and give him the custom award - for the sake of being specific, it was actually titled "Pimp Daddy" and it was related to his running some hundreds of different porn subreddits.
The original and main mod had a couple of AMAs that were often commented in by admins like Spez and Ohanian.
Reddit Admin made a huge deal about fussing over him because he personally oversaw that some 95% of NSFW subreddits were compliant with the law and with Reddit rules. The fact that "jailbait" and similar distasteful subs were included in that sure is shitty, but leaving out the context that VA collected NSFW subs, in large part because he didn't trust who might otherwise want to run them, does leave this version as something that seems like it's sacrificing strict accuracy for the sake of feeding the current anti-Spez sentiments.
Hello fellow OG. 🤘🏼 I'm sorry for your loss/long live the queen!
I'll second your comment as one who watched that shit from the noobish sidelines, unsure of it was actually the sort of place I wanted to be a part of. There was so much potential, but r/jailbait was one of the handful of despicably (and inexplicably) lauded by too many at the time. The spectacle was indefensible, though I learned very quickly how important it is to curate your personal media input stream in this day & age.
Do not let this chode live this down. He was an active participant, not some innocent victim of a prank. Fuck spez.
Except for his alt accts in the sub, the golden trophy they sent to the lead CP trog, and the simple fact he took his sweet ass time to remove himself as mod from the sub. "Wasn't aware" my ass. It was a CYA move, plain & simple.
I'm not defending spezs behavior but there is a solid argument for not taking immediate action to remove yourself if you thought it would spark a wave of backlash from others doing the same thing.
One of the worst things you can do on the internet is react to trolls.
Did he leave it up until that functionality was removed? That would make sense. Don't poke the bear until they can't add you to all subs as mod.
Yeah, I wish people would stop spreading this lie, especially when the truth is no better: As reddit's admins, spez and the others explicitly oversaw, tolerated and defended r/jailbait and every subreddit like it on the site, for a period of multiple years.
that comment section is incredible, the reddit shills have nothing to defend this and they're still trying. "it was years ago, it was an accident, it was just a prank bro (literally! they're saying oh well, it was a joke. unironically!!!). what the fuck, and it took them this long to notice the post? reddit is in over their heads, and without mods cleaning up for them their community is fucked.
it was years ago, it was an accident, it was just a prank bro
The single-digit-IQ masses who spout that sorta stuff also magically seem to gloss over how A) the admins allowed the sub to exist for a long period of time in the first place and didn't get rid of it until public backlash, and B) the same admins created a custom award for them/one of their users/mods/creator/whoever.
Spez is an ass on his own merits, no lies needed. He was (briefly) named as an r/Jailbait moderator without his knowledge at a time when anyone could name anyone as moderator of any subReddit.
If I recall correctly, one of the things that led to it finally being shut down was that having community of people interested in that content inevitably led to them sharing the real thing via dms
It didn't host child porn, but when it was shut down part of the statements Reddit gave was that they had found users of the sub were using the comments sections of /jailbait to meet like-minded people, and then were using Reddit DMs to arrange exchanges off-platform - that likely did involve CP.
It was well-known and indisputable that child porn was posted to that community not infrequently, but was being removed by mods when detected. That's why Admin liked ViolentAcrez - he ran the community specifically to prevent it from being worse. The other allegation from that era was that the community routinely featured submissions of scantily-clothed minors who had also appeared in nude image sets, as unremoved content, and the comments sections would reflect that.
I think it's completely reasonable to frame that community as "dedicated to actual CP" for all that they weren't hosting it directly. The same way that /r/Piracy is dedicated to pirating digital content, but doesn't host links to piracy because that would be against TOS. The only reason Jailbait didn't host CP directly was the fact that as you note, the FBI would have shut that shit down in a heartbeat - if not for the illegality, that's absolutely what their main content would have been.
So much of what that community was up to had been openly known and discussed by the wider reddit community for years prior to the media attention that eventually pushed Reddit to shut them down.
This is also why I say people who want the Fediverse to be fully unmoderated should basically only live on single user servers. When your server federates with another and caches what's on that server, you begin to bear some onus for the stuff that's on that server, including if that other server is acting in a WILDLY illegal and unethical way. If you want to moderate out child porn yourself, be my guest, but also realize that not everyone took up the mantel of being a moderator on any of our older forums for a reason. It's exhausting. It takes a mental toll on you that makes it hard for you to enjoy the community that you're curating (most likely out of love).
I read somewhere that most mods who do it out of love only last about a year or two at the most. I modded a small sub of 20k almost on my own for a year and then helped out for another year... and yeah I can't stand Reddit anymore so I'm stepping down as mod. You really are exposed to the WORST excesses present in a community - even if it's like 97% friendly, the tiny minority that are not will do everything possible to suck out your very soul.:-( It's made me so defensive and cagey now even irl and I don't want to be acting that way with my work colleagues.
IMPORTANT CAVEAT: that was Reddit, and the bar was significantly lower there - I hope people will accept mod positions here b/c these communities look just about like 100% different than there.
Totally!! I modded a few different "place" sub-reddits for really small places. We didn't have anywhere near 20K in subs but I had a few death threats in DM's over the years. It was like, "Bro, is it really that bad that your completely unrelated post (to this sub) got removed??!" Some of the users would track me down and basically stalk my account every time I made a post on a different sub just to harass me. It was funny in a really dark, weird, why take the time, way.
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