everybody on ilx complains about reddit

haha who is "gawker" there xp

just the collective gawker, you know

I think a lot of people who visit reddit don't think of themselves as really creepy either, and a fair portion probably don't give a shit about this, just the ones involved in the site politics

gawker is an important satirical commentary and worthy of interest, just ask max's alma mater's facebook page

distinction 2 is problematic to me. first off, plenty of ppl on reddit (ok, ppl on the tech communities that are all i see of it) don't hide behind anonymity. like they don't use full real names, but you can figure them out v. quick from context, and some people do use full real names.

second, plenty of ppl have chosen not to use real names for potentially good reason historically, and perhaps in the current day. i don't think there's something especially noble about going under your real name, and i don't think that it's at all hard-and-fast that if you aren't comfortable with something being tied to your real name then you shouldn't post it. there was a huge, huge flap over g+'s "real names" policy that dealt with lots of this quite well. i mean, ffs, gawker even goes out of its way to provide burner accounts to its commentators.

so yes, this distinguishes, e.g., ac from mb. but i think it is more important that one writes newsish articles for a newsish publication and the other moderated /r/hitler.

2) gawker writers publish this stuff under their irl names

― max, Wednesday, October 17, 2012 11:09 AM (15 minutes ago)

funny thing is that the first time I saw your byline, my initial thought was "that's got to be a pseudonym"

hahaha yeah a lot of people still assume it is ~~who will dox me~~

gawker is an organization with paid contributors who may or may not have editorial direction from the top down

unless Nick Denton tells them to put sharpies in their butts, I don't think the sites are really comparable

at a certain point treating this beef as between the collective entities of "gawker" and "reddit" breaks down for me, but i can't really articulate why.

distinction 2 is problematic to me. first off, plenty of ppl on reddit (ok, ppl on the tech communities that are all i see of it) don't hide behind anonymity. like they don't use full real names, but you can figure them out v. quick from context, and some people do use full real names.

second, plenty of ppl have chosen not to use real names for potentially good reason historically, and perhaps in the current day. i don't think there's something especially noble about going under your real name, and i don't think that it's at all hard-and-fast that if you aren't comfortable with something being tied to your real name then you shouldn't post it. there was a huge, huge flap over g+'s "real names" policy that dealt with lots of this quite well. i mean, ffs, gawker even goes out of its way to provide burner accounts to its commentators.

so yes, this distinguishes, e.g., ac from mb. but i think it is more important that one writes newsish articles for a newsish publication and the other moderated /r/hitler.

― s.clover, Wednesday, October 17, 2012 12:18 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im not distinguishing between *reddit as a whole* and *gawker* just between */r/creepshots* and *hulk hogans sex tape* or maybe better between violentacrez and adrian w/r/t to charges of hypocrisy

sure the house styles and internal culture of both sites play a part in what has occurred, but at it's core this is one guy writing about another one guy

xp i think max is getting at the same thing here

I think gawker's editorial direction is such that revealing who's behind all this weird shit is news, but the weird thing is that this stuff seems out of the mainstream of reddit, but it's obviously not out of the mainstream of reddit moderators. So, reddit basically is run by people, and moderated by people, who find more in common with this dude than the common user

there's a running meme on reddit that gawker is NO DIFFERENT than creepshots b/c gawker publishes celeb sex tapes. and thats not an *entirely* unfair charge! except it kind of totally is

like the thing that his *whole episode* hinges on is the "doxing" or "unmasking." if the dude was doing what he does under the screen name Michael_Brutsch this would be/have been a very different story, or maybe not a story at all

honestly it probably would have been this: http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-04-04/news/revenge-porn-hunter-moore-is-anyone-up/

I don't know, the story could still be "what the hell kind of dude is this Brutsch guy to post and moderate all this shit"

haha, true

I wonder what the content was in the racism-styled forums that guy started. And also there's a difference between celebrity pr0n and calling something 'rapebait'.

why does the story have to be the anonymity element of this? shouldn't this also be about the objectification of women and how creepshots and the other voyeuristic subreddits promote this behavior and take it to the next level?

this is a bit tenuous as an argument, but i think /creepshots and the like were magnets of production for that kind of content. in the 'skin' category (running together the celebrity and intruded-civilian purposefully here) i think the roles of gawker-as-producer and reddit-as-aggregator are actually reversed.

gawker is collating and re-publishing celeb sex/nudity because it's already out there and gawker "has to" have those hits

reddit's creepshots, for example, had dudes going out and doing creepshots so they could upload them to creepshots. the existence of the place drove the practice.

i'm trying to make an argument for the gawker celeb stuff being pre-existing (or always already existing, haha) while the problematic reddit stuff is more causing to exist.

i mean it's a big gross hall of mirrors out there but

well a lot of stories have been written about that! check http://www.gawker.com/reddit or http://www.jezebel.com/reddit

this "story" (the "metastory"?) is about brutsch and the anonymity b/c that was the big deal to reddit

plus the guy had been profiled before under the pseudonym. and appeared on a podcast! the "outing" was the story, that and an understanding of how this horrible guy had become this important part of the reddit moderation structure

xp

Well, you're forgetting the part where that love sponge dude knew Gawker existed so he filmed his buddy banging his wife to give it to the site years later

x-p

goole otm

gawker as one part of the celebrity-industrial content probably partially drives the 'production' or at least the theft and hacking of celeb nudes tho

i had never seen this video before some blog linked to it this week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-avakrRUaU

i've always liked gould too but the video does demonstrate a real - idk - paucity of ethics i guess?

guys we're all horrible

"that's actually a popular misconception about how the stalker map works"

Gawker's new Buttsharpie Watch

i think reddit's entire 'hypocritical' tact is a dead end tho. who cares if gawker is also sleazy? sleazy ppl can expose other sleazy ppl for being sleazy. it's for the public good.

guys we're all horrible

otm

"hahahaha, oh you're visibly intoxicated"
"that may be funny to you..."
"okay, sorry"

it reminds me of when gawker published that long piece about romney's finances in offshore cayman accounts and ppl responded by pointing out that gawker is also invested in similar accounts.

I kind of can't get over the fact that there was an entire buttsharpie subreddit

seems super Usenet-y to me in its weird specificity

lol at jimmy kimmel too: "i don't know why anyone would buy internet advertising"

"there's this shifting definition of privacy with the internet, blogs, myspace"
myspace!

alt.sex.binaries.pictures.butts.sharpies

We also think that if someday, in the far future, we do become a universal platform for human discourse

this is fascinating. what on earth does it mean? that the entire internet will be Reddit? do all these guys (tech/web guys, i guess) think like this?

oh well, this is from 2007

i participated once in gawker stalker and immediately felt bad afterwards. i saw kaavya viswanathan on the subway after the whole plagiarism thing broke and snapped a pic w/ my iphone and sent it in. :/ i censure young mordy's privacy invading decisions.

lol elmo EXACTLY

god I can visualize the RFD for that, urgh

yeah i don't really buy the 'gawker is just as sketchy' argument, call me back when gawker has forums encouraging insecure college-age girls to post naked pics of themselves for internet karma points

http://www.reddit.com/r/gonewildrequests/comments/101khq/rbuttsharpies_needs_new_life_gwers_of_the_world/

I don't know why buttsharpies is as awesome is it is, I just know that it's damn sexy!

Nick Denton actually spends part of his time making sure Max and company don't post child porn and delete the posts where they do

funny i kept thinking there was a usenet joke to be made about this being a fight b/n alt.binaries.nude.celebrities and alt.photography.creepshots

no usenet humor allowed

meow

alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die

usenet was more fruitful than reddit for non-creepy strange forums

gawker too!