Good on ya, Drew. To celebrate I wanted to share one of my favorite Fark Headlines from the other year: Shots fired after George Clinton concert. Four people funked up
Pretty much every thread about someone going to prison is going to be devoid of comments now…
*shrug*
I kinda liked the format of Fark, where nearly everything went because everyone “knew” it was all big times jokez and everyone was blowing off steam, but I understand that not everyone that posted hateful stuff “got it” and that’s a problem.
Now, maybe they’ll crack down on the casual racism and the anti-AGW bozos.
Your move Reddit.
- Rape jokes
- Calling women as a group “whores” or “sluts” or similar demeaning terminology
- Jokes suggesting that a woman who suffered a crime was somehow asking for it
Drew’s original post doesn’t make it clear, but the moderators point out that rape jokes where a man is the victim are also not allowed. Come to think of it, I think the overwhelming majority of rape jokes I’ve seen on Fark have been of the prison rape variety. Keep in mind that Fark adopted a highway and named it this:
UFIA stands for unsolicited finger in ass.
It’s “unsolicited finger in anus”, and IIRC it was literally quoting the words of a judge.
Shit, my impression back in the days of SomethingAwful and Fark was the latter being filled with a stream of bitter divorced sysadmins who hated women because of their “bitch ex”.
I am sure that will help the revolution in Columbia
Here’s the actual text added to the FArQ:
Sexism, Racism and LGBT bashing: Fark is a humor site, and we’ve done more than our fair share at poking fun of others, often for what they’ve done, sometimes for what they’ve said, occasionally because they look funny. Fark has long prided itself on being irreverent and sarcastic.
That said, there are still some things that cross the line, and misogyny, racism and LGBT bashing are some of them. So just to be clear: these things will not be tolerated.
We know that on the internet, it’s impossible to know the difference between a person with hateful views and a person lampooning hateful views to make a point. The mods try to be reasonable, and context often matters. We will try and determine what you meant, but that’s not always a pass. If your post can be taken one of two ways, and one of those ways can be interpreted as misogynistic, racist, or LGBT bashing, the mods may delete it and could even give you a timeout–even if that wasn’t your intent.
Well, there was that, too…
I can understand FARC’s stance. Sites that pride themselves on being able to joke about anything draw in people who use jokes to further their agendas. Not all agendas are hateful, but some cross the line. Humor become a means of demeaning and libeling people. Discussing hateful things becomes acceptable when done under the cover of irony. Hard to fight that when you get labelled as humorless and “serious”. Sometimes it even leads to online harassment, i.e. “trolling”, and in the classic bully’s defense they claim they were just joking. Such humor also serve to exclude certain groups of people from forums and boards, because who is going to feel welcome under an unending barrage of vile jokes aimed at them?
That took a few beats to figure out.
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Over a minutes, actually.
Ohhhhhh! Why do they hate freedom? Doesn’t the US Constitution give me the absolute right to use any media I want to express any idea I want? And you have to publish it, or I’m a big damn victim!
At this point Reddit’s more likely to go the way of 4chan than spend resources on functional moderation.
I stopped visiting Fark when they allowed a conversation making fun of a young girl with a major facial deformity (“strawberry” birthmark to extreme degree with lots of swelling and issues) go on for hours.
That was my first thought as well, but I’m actually not sure about how I feel about that.
In the same way that the Craigslist sex section helped sex workers do their jobs more safely (and therefore it was a loss when the section was removed), Reddit’s subreddits protect the rest of us from a lot of insane bigotry. The nature of subreddits is actually very important: assholes are encouraged to go be assholes over here and stop shitting up the joint for the rest of us.
Terms of service don’t make misogyny go away. Fark’s just making it harder for you to poison an entire comment thread–and, by extension, the entire site–with your ugliness. And, to be clear, Fark needed this move very much, because Fark doesn’t have the same kind of organization Reddit does.
So I think it might be a mistake for Reddit to stop allowing hateful speech to take place, to ban TheRedPill and other subs like it, because that would just encourage the shitting to resume in the mainstream areas of the site.
The way I remember it is that Fark used to be pretty fun long ago, but it really took a nosedive after 9/11 when it turned all nasty, dumb and bitter. It got a bit better, but it never recovered fully.
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