r/pics calls out spez' history as jailbait moderator, a former sub dedicated to actual CP. the post hit the front page with 15k karma in 4h, then got removed earlier today
John Oliver is in the post & also in the title
😂 amazing act of malicious compliance! fuck spez
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.
I hope it doesn't become like r/aww where they're just posting normal content but including a picture of John Oliver. It's undermining the protest.
Isn’t that basically what softcore porn is? It’s sick and should have been shut 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).
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.
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
The content may well have been illegal in some jurisdictions.
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.
it's worse because they don't benefit from trying
Lmao what a weasely little rat dude
Ew, I remember that trend!
Disappointing from Spez but not very surprised.
Because it's bullshit.
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.
So, it's bullshit.
I think making a custom award for the sub's creator qualifies as knowing about it.
Don't think he actually was a mod for it, you used to be able to just add people as mods without them having to accept.
Fuck spez anyways of course.
Eh... If I logged on to my Workplace account (Facebook for corporations) and saw that I was made moderator of a Jailbait community would I:
A) Do nothing for years
Or
B) Immediately remove myself and investigate that community to see if additional action needs to be taken
🤔
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.
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
Source? I am happy to shit on spez, but my sphincter’s aim must be true.
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.
Here's the direct quote from the General Manager of Reddit:
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.
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
The Aimee Challoner thing wasn't great either.
He gave awards.