Social news site Reddit has downgraded the status of its "technology" section after a censorship row.The category is no longer a "default subreddit", meaning it stops being one of two dozen communities promoted to new account holders.It follows a report by the Daily Dot that revealed headlines posted to the area had been secretly deleted if they featured certain words.The subreddit's own moderators now acknowledge that this was a "disaster".Reddit describes itself as "the front page of the internet".It had about 115 million unique visitors last month, according to its own data, and more than 6,500 active subreddit communities, all moderated by independent volunteers.Members can submit links to articles to each community, for which they provide their own headlines.Other members then up-vote or down-vote the links, which determines how prominently they feature both in each individual section and on a core list of the most popular posts.Users can also submit comments, leading to lively discussions.The site is majority-owned by media group Conde Nast's parent Advance Publications, and has proven particularly popular with 18-30 year-old males.This audience-profile closely matches that of many of the major tech blogs and, as such, articles that have attracted interest on the technology subreddit have helped drive traffic to these third-party sites.However, the section will now be much less visible to people who have either not edited their "subscriptions" to include it or have visited Reddit without logging in.

After a similar action was taken against Reddit's "politics" community last year it experienced a steep decline in activity.Reddit said that it had acted because the technology community's moderators had become distracted by "petty squabbles"."Wedecided to remove /r/technology from the default list because the moderation team lost focus of what they were there to do: moderate effectively," the site's director of communications Victoria Taylor told the BBC."We'regiving them time to see if we feel they can work together to resolve the issue."We might consider adding them back in the future if they can show us and the community that they can overcome these issues."Theissue was brought to light by a Reddit user nicknamed Creq who posted a message to the site a week ago suggesting that 20 terms had been banned.He said the list of censored words included: "National Security Agency", "GCHQ", "Anonymous", "anti-piracy", "Bitcoin", "Snowden" and "net neutrality".It later became clear that other terms, including "EU Court", "startup" and "Assange" had also been blocked.

When the Daily Dot questioned one of the section's volunteer moderators about this, he confirmed that software was being used to automatically delete posts that featured "politicised" words in order to avoid the links making it to the core list of most popular topics.The Daily Dot subsequently reflected that: "Many would argue those terms have an essential value to readers interested in technology, but the ban was never put up for discussion among the subreddit's millions of subscribers."Thenews caused controversy with those users, prompting a U-turn."Asmany of you are aware the moderators of this subreddit have failed you," the volunteers wrote in a message to Reddit visitors over the weekend."Whilethe intent of this system was, to the extent of my knowledge, not malicious it ended up being a disaster.We messed up, and we are sorry."Themods directly responsible for this system are no longer a part of the team and the new team is committed to maintaining a transparent style of moderation."One

of the changes taken, they added, was to allow the general population to view a configuration page that listed banned materials.While links to pornography and petitions remain blocked, it reveals that most of the censored headline words can now be used again.However, the move has failed to placate several of the subreddit's visitors who are now calling for a further two of the section's surviving moderators to resign."Pleasebitstamp bitcoinnote that it's not the censorship the [Reddit] admins worry about," added the moderator of a censorship-themed subreddit."They'vesteven lord bitcoinnever spoken out against it."Thebitcoin triviaproblem is that there's zero transparency, zero accountability.bitcoin news coindesk

That's the real story here."Recently, a Reddit post titled What White Nationalists Don’t Get has been making rounds on the internet, and it appears to have rustled more than a few jimmies.The post, written by an arrogant lefty under the moniker YouAreAll_Absurd, insists that white nationalism and white pride are irrelevant concepts, because allegedly, “white” is not a valid identity.Here’s the full post: The author argues that the progeny of white Europeans have every right to celebrate their specific cultures — English, German, French, etc. — but not their race, as race is not a cultural determiner.bitcoin hash difficulty“I don’t have white culture, I have Irish culture,” he states smugly.bitcoin bieteA number of people have taken a swing or two at this faulty logic, but it seems many are missing the big picture, and are unable to place why exactly this self-flagellating nu-male is wrong.bitcoin miner kickstarter

To that end, here’s a fairly exhaustive debunking of his flawed points.For a moment, let us ignore the exception of black pride, which this Redditor seems okay with.If one can only take pride in his culture, but not his heritage, then to what do I owe my culture?Is culture not a product of heritage?This argument only makes sense if one believes, as this Redditor appears to, that culture is just an arbitrary amalgamation of language, customs, and traditions, that is in no way a product of race.bitcoin iowa cityYet this idea completely ignores the fact that culture and race evolve simultaneously, and are both determined by the environment in which a group of people reside.bitcoin con nvidiaJust as the harsh conditions in Northern Europe gave the Scandinavians of old their strong work ethic and resilient spirit, so too,did the lack of sunlight result in the lightening of their skin and eyes.

Aside from the fact that race and culture are inextricably linked, the post completely ignores the fact that there are numerous other forms of racial pride in America that are treated as valid in the mainstream: Latino pride, for example, is available to anyone whose ancestors came from anywhere within the landmass spanning the northern tip of Mexico to the southern tip of South America.Asian pride is celebrated by people from a number of different eastern Asian countries, such as Japan, China, Korea, Mongolia, et cetera.Native American pride is a common one, yet many Americans fail to realize that when the first settlers arrived in the new world, the American Indian tribes were completely fractured.There were larger conglomerates such as the Cherokee nation, but there were a myriad other smaller tribes, all of whom frequently warred with each other.In many ways, this particular example is analogous to Europe’s own history.Don’t the dozens of countries inhabited by each of these different racial groups have their own cultures?

If so, it would appear that by this poster’s own logic, anyone claiming Latino pride is as much in the wrong as someone claiming white pride.Our author goes on to explain that while whites cannot be unified by race, blacks ought to be, as no black descendant of slaves can trace his ancestry back to a specific country in Africa.“Their culture,” he insists, “was taken from them.It was beaten out of them.” True, many American blacks can’t point to a specific country of origin.But how many African countries really were there when the first future-dindus arrived in America?Africa was a wild and largely uncivilized continent prior to the age of Imperialism; before then, it didn’t have much in the way of countries, in the modern sense.These slaves did not have their national identity taken from them and beaten out of them — rather, they had their first-ever national identity bestowed upon them when they arrived in America.Furthermore, there are numerous blacks from the Caribbean Islands who claim black pride as well.

If their ancestors were never slaves, aren’t they no longer allowed to take pride in their own heritage, and instead sequestered to merely “Haitian Pride” (celebrating the time-honored traditions of rape, earthquakes, and dismemberment) and “Jamaican Pride” (dude, weed)?This entire argument stems from a foregone conclusion and works its way backwards.That conclusion is that pride in one’s ethnicity is stupid, because my professor told me ethnicity has nothing to do with culture.I suspect this Redditor believes that modern Western culture just sprung up out of nowhere by chance for white Europe, and that it was equally likely to occur in any other part of the world.If shitlibs are going to fall in line behind this line of thinking, then by their own logic, they must either oppose all the other forms of racial pride — Latino, Asian, Amerindian, etc. — or else permit us our own.Given the primal, gripping fear that lefties have of offending minorities, I’m going to assume the latter case is more likely.