[bfuller]

>This week: Reddit bans Cigar, beer and Alchohol trading subreddits, toy bb gun sales, and gun related coupon clippers

Reddit also banned subs that were used for sourcing marijuana, designer drugs, xanax.. direct deals onsite.

i'm not defending the drug war, but when you only include the subs you wrote the move looks really silly. if people were only doing giveaways and trading toy bb guns, those subs would still be open. the fact is reddit was being used by vendors for direct deals of illegal shit, and in order to put that to a stop reddit had to ban all sourcing.

[thrden]

While I'm not saying they should have banned one, and not the other it would have been entirely possible to say ban an opioids sales subreddit, but not the bb-gun subreddit. It would have been trivial to simply make the rule such that only illicit sales/transactions were banned. They decided to create these rules and if the rules make reddit look foolish than maybe thats because they are.

[secabeen]

Take the challenge from their side. If they leave the bb-gun sub active, how do they ensure that people aren't going to the bb-gun sub, and trading real guns there? They'd have to have humans police each post, or develop ML algorithms that can reliably identify when someone is hiding a real gun sale as a bb-gun sale. The former doesn't scale reliably (sure, the mods of the bb-gun sub could probably do it voluntarily, but I doubt reddit wants to bet the corporation on their continuing to do so), and the latter doesn't yet exist.

Banning both subs definitely stops the illegal transactions at the (relatively minor) cost of not letting people trade bb-guns on their site.

[pavel_lishin]

> Banning both subs definitely stops the illegal transactions

Big ol' [citation needed]. This just moves it to r/beaniebabytrades, where you have to not explicitly say you're trading firearms. The only way this helps is by making those subreddits less discoverable, but anyone with an interest in guns will go to another subreddit, and get clued in by the members there.

[s5fs]

"Limited edition Beary Garcia" is code-word for submachine gun.

[girvo]

But what stops people from trading real guns on ANY subreddit?

[bfuller]

Ok but for instance research chemicals are legal to posses, so they aren't illicit, but vending them from reddit basically amounts to drug dealing.

[gergles]

Reddit also refuses to ban /r/entexchange because the Silicon Valley liberals that run it like weed but hate guns.

So, reddit is moralizing, has a logically inconsistent position, and deserve to be called out for that.