"now the masses (and/or governments) dictate the content you are allowed to post"
Isn't this an exaggeration? There is a lot of room between "everything goes" and North Korea. Stopping exploitation of kids is one notch up from "everything goes".
I can't help but feel this policy only serves lip service to "Stopping exploitation of kids". Personally, I think Reddit has the right to have whatever policies it wishes -- but this 'think of the children' argument is the same one that will be used to pass SOPA like regulation.
I don't think a sane person would suggest that exploiting children is acceptable, but the answer then becomes -- to what degree to we sacrifice our autonomy to satisfy the regulator's thirst for a censored communications.
If you don't like reddit's policy, it's pretty easy to take their open source code and set up your own clone. You'll likely run into the same issues at some point, though. There are always people out there that will want to do things that are incredibly detrimental to your business. Now that reddit is mainstream and one of the largest communities on the web, they're set up to be a huge target. You don't get popularity or legitimate money without policies regarding unsavory content.
In reddit's case, "think of the children" is a perfectly legitimate cry when the policy specifically is designed to stop exploitation of children.
It think reddit acted entirely reasonably. I just wanted to point out that this argument holds huge emotional weight which will likely be the justification for SOPA-like regulation.
"but this 'think of the children' argument is the same one that will be used to pass SOPA like regulation."
I have no idea what your point here is. You seem to be implying that because someone may dishonestly use a "protect the kids" argument, that others then shouldn't really try to "protect the kids".
If that isn't what you are saying then I have no idea what you intended to convey.
"to what degree to we sacrifice our autonomy to satisfy the regulator's thirst for a censored communications."
WTF are you talking about? reddit had bad shit on their site, and they took it down. There is no boogeyman here.
The only point I was making is, the 'think of the children' will be used to censor the internet by the gov't. Reddit is not censoring the internet. It's their own site.
Isn't this an exaggeration? There is a lot of room between "everything goes" and North Korea. Stopping exploitation of kids is one notch up from "everything goes".