Dealing with suppression of Bitcoin content

[rogerver]

Originally posted here:

A mod from /r/Bitcoin was nice enough to contact me via twitter and explain to me what they think happened.
Supposedly it went something like this:

1. Someone submitted the link to this article on /r/Bitcoin
2. Almost instantly, someone else, who is not a reddit moderator, reported the submission as spam.
3. Once it was reported as spam, no other users of /r/Bitcoin can even see the post at all. My friend verified for me that the post was not visible on reddit during this time when viewed from his IP address and reddit account. This has the effect of a shadow ban even if it wasn't initiated by a moderator.
4. Several hours later, after the article was no longer on the front page of the "new" section, the post was approved by a moderator. By that time, no one will see the post, so it no longer has a chance to make it to the front page.
5. During the interim, I submitted a link to this article, not hosted on Bitcoin.com. It was immediately viewable across /r/Bitcoin and immediately was voted to the top.

6. Over the last few months, nearly ever time I have submitted a link to something on Bitcoin.com, something like this has happened. I don't know if there is an orchestrated effort to suppress links to Bitcoin.com material on /r/reddit, but it sure seems that way. As someone who is spending my own time and money promoting bitcoin, it is very frustrating to deal with things like this. Short of making Bitcoin.com the premier portal for Bitcoin related content, I'm not sure what can be done to stop this type of suppression. I would love to hear additional ideas, and have started another thread here to discuss it.

[helloworld]

Many thanks for your contributions, keep up the good work.

Even as a lowly user, the recent developments on /r/bitcoin and involving blockstream are highly stressful and concerning, so do not let the toxic characters and their actions discourage you from being pro-active.

[kerneldump]

r/bitcoin is not the only problem with suppression.

Valid posts getting deleted from bitcoin-dev mailing list (including Gavin's).
Developers getting kicked out from bitcoin irc.
Bitcointalk.org censored.

[Detriment]

Hello guys,

I have heard a lot about this censorship discussion, but not really gotten deeply into it as at one point it seemed to get so heated that it seemed difficult to get any good answers. This seems like a good place to start asking questions about it.

As far as I understand, talking about (or promoting) XT was pretty much banned on /r/bitcoin and bitcointalk.org. The rationale as far as I have gathered was that XT was a "contentious fork", or a hard fork that would try to go through without ~99-100% consensus.

My first question is if this is correct?

If it is, I understand the reasoning behind that, and I do believe that consensus is important for the Bitcoin community, but I'm not fully convinced that blocking those XT discussions furthered that consensus - I'm also not convinced that it was more divisive than letting them happen as a lot of talk I saw was basically almost screaming.

My second question, is if there are any other types of censorship that has been going on?

[rogerver]

On /r/Bitcoin and Bitcointalk.org, you are not allowed to talk about BitcoinXT, and you are not allowed to talk about the fact that you can't talk about BitcoinXT. The fact that you can't talk about BitcoinXT seems much more contentious than XT itself, so claiming that you can't talk about BitcoinXT because it's contentious seems like a really stupid reason.

[LiteCoinGuy]

Originally posted here:

Short of making Bitcoin.com the premier portal for Bitcoin related content, I'm not sure what can be done to stop this type of suppression. I would love to hear additional ideas, and have started another thread here to discuss it.

not much. when someone owns the 2 main news sources with these strong network effects you can only establish an alternative and grow over time. not many people have the power/money to build something like bitcoin.com plus alot of other things that you need to have to compete with strong network effects.
but i believe this place has a good chance to establish an alternative

[h1d]

So far you have the forum (and wiki but seems non editable for outside admins) for user contributed content but are you going to set up something that would replace reddit style contribution?

[Acidyo]

Originally posted here:
5. During the interim, I submitted a link to this article, not hosted on Bitcoin.com. It was immediately viewable across /r/Bitcoin and immediately was voted to the top.

6. Over the last few months, nearly ever time I have submitted a link to something on Bitcoin.com, something like this has happened. I don't know if there is an orchestrated effort to suppress links to Bitcoin.com material on /r/reddit, but it sure seems that way. As someone who is spending my own time and money promoting bitcoin, it is very frustrating to deal with things like this. Short of making Bitcoin.com the premier portal for Bitcoin related content, I'm not sure what can be done to stop this type of suppression. I would love to hear additional ideas, and have started another thread here to discuss it.

Here is some info I found that may help you: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShadowBan/comm ... oid_being/

Don't post links to your own blog, unless you post a lot of content from other places.
Don't post links to anyone elses blog, or to a single news source. Ensure that you post from a wide range of sources.

What I think has happened here, as I've heard from atleast r/videos having it, is that you can't post more than 10% of a certain link in your submissions, else it may count as selfpromoting. Which in r/videos case is people promoting yt videos obviously for adsense. But you may have been unlucky and gotten caught on it (I am not 100% if it's 10% on r/bitcoin (could probably be changed) or if it's 10% of your total submissions on that sub or in a timeframe). So contacting the mods should help, if they are willing to do anything about it is another question.