All of which makes the actions of Reddit’s core community, the volunteers who run most of the site – backed up tacitly by the staff – so bizarre and counterproductive. Reddit’s mods aren’t boycotting a site they dislike: they’re imposing a ban against it on millions of users. They haven’t reluctantly imposed censorship to comply with national law, or even with Reddit’s own policies (the site is vehemently against trying to “out” users’ real identities). Instead, they’ve issued retaliatory bans against a writer, and his outlet, because they don’t like what he is saying.

Reddit’s new stance appears to be that free speech is great – as long it’s speech it agrees with. Which is a position the RIAA (which seeks to close sites linking to pirate content), or even China’s Communist party could happily agree with.

Posted with Blogsy