r/pics calls out spez' history as jailbait moderator, a former sub dedicated to actual CP. the post hit the front page with 15k karma in 4h, then got removed earlier today
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đ amazing act of malicious compliance! fuck spez
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It didnât host actual CP. That is hyperbole and the FBI would have shut that shit down in a heartbeat.
It WAS however, a disgusting place to obtain scantly clad pictures of minors and Spez actively encouraged and contributed to the abuse of these minors.
Isnât that basically what softcore porn is? Itâs sick and should have been shut down.
It thankfully was but it survived for a long time, likely because of Spezâs role in it. There is a video on YouTube about it if you want to learn more but I canât recall the title right now.
The top mod there curated the subreddit heavily and made sure to ban users that âcrossed the lineâ. That way they can say âitâs not illegal and we believe in freedom of speech so it staysâ.
When all the other hate subs finally started getting banned is when I recall it going away.
IIRC they fucked themselves by giving violentacrez an award and then everyone paid attention to what that guy actually did
This is also why I say people who want the Fediverse to be fully unmoderated should basically only live on single user servers. When your server federates with another and caches what's on that server, you begin to bear some onus for the stuff that's on that server, including if that other server is acting in a WILDLY illegal and unethical way. If you want to moderate out child porn yourself, be my guest, but also realize that not everyone took up the mantel of being a moderator on any of our older forums for a reason. It's exhausting. It takes a mental toll on you that makes it hard for you to enjoy the community that you're curating (most likely out of love).
I don't think I could ever be a moderator. It sounds stressful. If a mod is reading this thank you for what you do
I read somewhere that most mods who do it out of love only last about a year or two at the most. I modded a small sub of 20k almost on my own for a year and then helped out for another year... and yeah I can't stand Reddit anymore so I'm stepping down as mod. You really are exposed to the WORST excesses present in a community - even if it's like 97% friendly, the tiny minority that are not will do everything possible to suck out your very soul.:-( It's made me so defensive and cagey now even irl and I don't want to be acting that way with my work colleagues.
IMPORTANT CAVEAT: that was Reddit, and the bar was significantly lower there - I hope people will accept mod positions here b/c these communities look just about like 100% different than there.
Totally!! I modded a few different "place" sub-reddits for really small places. We didn't have anywhere near 20K in subs but I had a few death threats in DM's over the years. It was like, "Bro, is it really that bad that your completely unrelated post (to this sub) got removed??!" Some of the users would track me down and basically stalk my account every time I made a post on a different sub just to harass me. It was funny in a really dark, weird, why take the time, way.
It didn't host child porn, but when it was shut down part of the statements Reddit gave was that they had found users of the sub were using the comments sections of /jailbait to meet like-minded people, and then were using Reddit DMs to arrange exchanges off-platform - that likely did involve CP.
It was well-known and indisputable that child porn was posted to that community not infrequently, but was being removed by mods when detected. That's why Admin liked ViolentAcrez - he ran the community specifically to prevent it from being worse. The other allegation from that era was that the community routinely featured submissions of scantily-clothed minors who had also appeared in nude image sets, as unremoved content, and the comments sections would reflect that.
I think it's completely reasonable to frame that community as "dedicated to actual CP" for all that they weren't hosting it directly. The same way that /r/Piracy is dedicated to pirating digital content, but doesn't host links to piracy because that would be against TOS. The only reason Jailbait didn't host CP directly was the fact that as you note, the FBI would have shut that shit down in a heartbeat - if not for the illegality, that's absolutely what their main content would have been.
So much of what that community was up to had been openly known and discussed by the wider reddit community for years prior to the media attention that eventually pushed Reddit to shut them down.
If I recall correctly, one of the things that led to it finally being shut down was that having community of people interested in that content inevitably led to them sharing the real thing via dms
The content may well have been illegal in some jurisdictions.