r/technology • u/Well_Socialized • 24d ago

Social Media Reddit Is Restricting Luigi Mangione Discourse—but It’s Even Weirder Than That: The website is attacking the users that made it the front page of the internet.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250313203719/https://slate.com/technology/2025/03/reddit-elon-musk-luigi-mangione-censorship.html
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u/eleven_eighteen 24d ago

Anyone who thinks it is weird hasn't been paying attention to reddit for a good while. Fuck /u/spez.

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u/ThomasStankEngine 24d ago

Someone say fuck /u/spez?

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u/dust_buster17 24d ago edited 24d ago

He used to be a mod of the subreddit that sounds like you’re fishing for prisons. (I’m scared to type out the actual word)

Edit: Apparently this was done as a prank but no one posted proof so idk if it’s true or not.

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u/Hellknightx 24d ago

Eh, that point gets made frequently but it's meaningless. You could appoint anyone a mod of any sub and they didn't even have to accept it. He was made a mod on the jailbait sub dozens of times, and every time he removed himself, someone would just add him again.

Spez has done a lot of shady shit, but the jailbait mod thing isn't really a valid argument. The really fucked up thing is the fact that he was aware that sub existed and allowed it to exist. Jailbait was on the front page of reddit every day for years, and it was the primary reason that the site eventually added a "safe for work" filter toggle for the front page.

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u/B_U_F_U 24d ago

What is the jailbait sub? This must’ve been before my time here

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u/Spiky_Hedgehog 24d ago

It was a sub for men to post sexualized pictures of underage girls or girls that looked underage. It was one of the top subs on Reddit and it was creepy af. It took Reddit forever to ban it too. The guy who created it got outed by Gawker and instead of taking down the sub, Reddit tried to prevent people from posting links to Gawker's site. So many Redditors defended that guy and it wasn't until Anderson Cooper did a segment on the sub that Reddit actually took it down. Reddit has quite the sordid past. https://www.jalopnik.com/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-the-biggest-troll-on-th-5951394/

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u/kickingpplisfun 23d ago

This site was still the wild west for ages, so it was probably still around in 2016.

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u/snkn179 23d ago

That particular sub was banned in 2011. Reddit was still the wild west until 2015, when a bunch of controversial subs were banned, and redditors threw an enormous collective hissy fit, defs something you had to be there for to understand. That was the turning point for reddit, it was around the time I was just starting out on reddit, absolutely insane how different reddit is now.

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u/kickingpplisfun 23d ago edited 23d ago

I remember the screeching about Ellen Pao, like as if she wasn't just brought in to do stuff that the admins were too afraid to be the face of doing.

I've had this particular account for 12 years but the timeline does get a bit fuzzy including when I was lurking without an account at all before.