Worth pointing out that Reddit voluntarily doxxed at least one of its commenters to this plaintiff — when no court order required it to do so. This Ars writeup neglects to mention this, and leaves the implication that Reddit consistently defended its users' anonymous speech in this dispute: it did not.
- "However, Reddit decided to share information about “ben125125”, while protecting the other users. As shown above, “ben125125” responded to a thread about piracy warnings and specifically mentioned RCN. That wasn’t as obvious in the other comments and Reddit feels that disclosing their identities goes too far."
edit: The linked court order also mentions this (page 3, lines 6–7)
The way I read it, the only reason Reddit didn't hand over the information on the other users was that the comments didn't specifically mention RCN. If all the users had mentioned RCN, it seems like Reddit would have handed them everything they wanted.
You linked to an HN thread which linked to a reddit thread as proof of this. I would like you to know that is absurd since the reddit thread makes an accusation with no proof.
The 'proof' is a screenshot of a post that was called '92 of the top 100 subbreddits controlled by the same 5 people' that got removed. Why did it get removed? Who knows?
Do better. If you want to be better than reddit don't do the same dumb shit that it does and check your sources.
The highest non-bot user moderates 12 subreddits in the top 100. There's quite a few users who moderate more than 5. I believe the situation was much worse a few years ago, and reddit the company put pressure on them to give up some of their subs.
The highest person on there that isn't a bot moderates 13 subreddits. The second 12, and down from there. Doesn't look like anywhere near '92' for any 5 people.
Yes because like I said the fallout from the original post caused a lot of the power moderators to give up their spots. The biggest one "Cyxie" straight up deleted their account.
.. the mods of most subreddits are public. This is a trivial thing to verify. It's as valid as any other information posted that you haven't personally inspected. I have no idea why you're so belligerent about this, but it's odd.
Yeah I have been asking for it and gotten either 'search for it, it is easy to find' or a runaround where people claim to have it and then don't. So, provide it or stop asserting that you have it.
But there is something to be said about having the censor cabal out in the open for everyone to see. Compare that with Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, where there is no record of who is determining what is and isn't ok to say.
Why do I care? That it's 0.0001% more transparent of its top-operators? If anything, I at least can see who works under the VP of Integrity at Facebook via LinkedIn - I have no idea who GallowBoob would be if he didn't make it explicitly known.
Maybe I have nostalgia glasses on but when I grew up on the internet forums only deleted posts that had illegal content.
They did not remove unpopular opinions.
Reddit is were actual discussion goes to die.
Comes with the downvote ability I suppose.
instantly reminds me of two moments in the early 2000s. 17yo me got banned from the then largest synthesizer forum in 2004 just because I called a mod named Angus "Mr. Beef" one too many times. :)
And another particularly niche forum dedicated to a specific range of car chassis with a specific set of engine swaps that would permaban anyone who asked a question that could be answered via forum search. Which was at least mentioned in the forum rules you had to read before joining.
Forum mods were notorious power trippers on any forum I've been on. Sometimes it was worth it just to keep order. Other times it led to flame wars and forum splinters where a few people would start their own in competition to try and pick up the unhappy crowd.
So really nothing has changed because this is exactly how most discord/telegram servers, forums, subreddits, etc still function.
> Forum mods were notorious power trippers on any forum I've been on.
Back about 10-15 years ago I agreed to be a mod on a pretty large and popular forum, naively thinking I could help keep the place decent and useful for the users. What I discovered instantly were hidden mod forums where they made fun of all the users, laughed about arbitrarily banning people, and discussed about how they banned posts about illegal stuff mostly because it gave away their secrets. I gave that up quickly and decided I was all set with modding.
Just reminded me of another mod power trip. Local buy/trade/sell car forum got sold when the owner got approached with a cash offer. The way the forum worked was it took mod approval before your listing would go live. Kept out spam/trash posts and helped keep the forum organized. It was eventually discovered that he was screening the listings for things he could make a first offer on and flip somewhere else for profit. Caused the whole place to implode and everyone moved to a handful of splintered facebook swap shop groups.
You don’t have nostalgia glasses on. You have a nostalgia blindfold on.
Mods on the “old forums” routinely deleted posts and banned users because they don’t like their opinion or hell even just as a “fuck why not it’s funny”.
Source: was a mod and active participant of such forums and saw it all the time. Did my fair share too.
Half of my hardworking, law-abiding immigrant community of doctors, engineers, and scientists were on the_donald. These are people who’ve actually faced hate in this country and who likely have way more exposure to people of different races & backgrounds than the average American.
If that does nothing to make you reevaluate your opinion, then you are sadly and ironically a victim of divisive indoctrination.
Edit: For context, the parent advocated banning users from an entire subreddit as a sound moderation strategy.
> For context, the parent advocated banning users from an entire subreddit as a sound moderation strategy.
It is. 100% it is. If a subreddit shows that it's users continuously abuse the rules of the site, then yes, 100%, it's a sound moderation strategy. Banning regular users of the subreddit and just flushing it all out is sound.
> If that does nothing to make you reevaluate your opinion, then you are sadly and ironically a victim of divisive indoctrination.
The problem is you are misrepresenting what happened. Reddit didn't just "ban users from an entire subreddit." They didn't just randomly pick a large subreddit and ban all the users. Suggesting that they did that is disingenuous at best. So you can play the victim card all you want, but if you can't be honest about what happened that does nothing to make you reevaluate your opinion, then you are sadly and ironically a victim of divisive indoctrination.
Trump did very poorly with the highly educated and with minorities so it wouldn't be shocking to find the intersection was even worse. For instance 8% of black college grads in 2020 and 30% of Hispanic college grads.
Far from it being half of America it looks like a small fraction of educated folks and minorities and a large helping of mostly uneducated white folks. If anything the fact that he has any support at all from educated people in America proves that being an expert in one field doesn't necessarily make you wise.
Do you think all 30% of college-educated Hispanics who voted for Trump were wholly misguided? Do you believe none of them had legitimate reasons for supporting him?
How about the 8% of black college grads, or the 26% of doctors?
None of these people were competent enough to make an informed decision?
This seems like a fairly obvious yes since his performance is no longer hypothetical. Donald Trump is a mentally impaired bigot who combines inattention to detail, massive ego, inability to select quality underlings, and failure to manage and performed abominably.
None of them were competent enough to make an informed decision insofar as the leadership of the nation because they relied on faulty analysis, willful ignorance of Donald's many flaws, and self interest in lower taxes.
I'm not sure why this is controversial. The average college educated individual is presumably skilled in their profession but their profession but that is hardly sure to inform their understanding of matters out of scope of that profession.
Do you find it surprising that 30% of any group makes poor decisions?
The most tragic part is you don’t even recognize it. You peddle loaded language with the broadest of strokes without seeing that you yourself are the very thing you believe you’re fighting against.
Genuinely believing every single one of those hispanic grads or doctors were misguided or uninformed, tells me you haven’t had many good faith conversations with people across the aisle. Nowhere do you even acknowledge the legitimacy of or a desire to understand the grievances and concerns that led to their voting behavior. But you’re certainly quick to insults and labeling.
Don’t be an Intellectual Yet Idiot.
“The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited.”
Half of inflation is economic reality having little to do with the president and half of it is corporate greed. If you think the two are equivalent I submit you haven't analyzed the situation accurately
Although your first sentence is probably half true, there were a few stimulus signed by both the previous and standing president which contributed to the issue as well. The amount of money that was printed between 2020 and 2022 did indeed help with inflation, which was signed off by both presidents.
They're not equivalent in reality (that wasn't my point, but you seem to think it is), but your argument lacks sufficient detail and presents an ambiguous enough framing to make it applicable to Biden as well.
Its worst content was no worse than what you saw (and still see) on other subreddits.
You would be disingenuous to not acknowledge the political forces at play. Mods were on high alert because they knew admins were waiting for the most microscopic of reasons to ban the sub. And we know these forces exist. Twitter is proof positive of political bias in content moderation.
People of all backgrounds were on the_donald, which should make you question why they were tolerant of much of the content you likely perceived as hateful. If your answer is simply that they’re bigots, then I suggest you have more conversations.
Which political subreddit calls their opponents “fucking cuck” or equivalent with extreme regularity? For the record, this is devolving into a flame war and that wasn’t my intention. I suggest this stops here.
I’m going to assume you’re responding in good faith. “Fucking cuck” is honest-to-god no worse than the numerous insults I’ve seen hurled at conservatives by left-leaning subs. I’m a little surprised that’s the worst you could come up with.
You are right and its actually possible since post history is public and some subs have gone further by making it impossible to participate if you had commented on the_donald. This method can trivially lead to collateral damage insofar as people may comment or even subscribe in order to needle and torment Trump supporters especially around 2020.
A more through approach might to be to analyze the sentiment or at least the score of comments or even go further and analyze the mix of comments and sentiments to decide if someone is an undesirable.
Being very active in the Facebook groups/pages scene, I can tell you that very similar situations happens there. Same thing for Discord. Even back in the 90's, it was common for people who enjoy being a moderator or admin to be all over the place.
current lead on r/relationship_advice here - none of these people actually "control" anything, and gallowboob (for instance) has largely stepped away from modding.
There's value in any information-sharing they do in that they share trends across subreddits that reddit themselves are opaque about, but the subs still operate autonomously.
It definitely is one of the great victories of the commercial internet (in “mobile” 2023 sans web for the most part, mind you).
BBS like systems and forums had been successfully in use since the early 70s. Usenet is more than 40 years old by now IIRC? Very similar function and open by design.
Even without falling into “Endless September” rose tinted glasses I would argue that we really, really could do a whole lot better in 2023 and going forward.
I guess someone must work on Ted Nelson’s ideas at least (Xanadu, etc)?
You may not be old enough to remember the internet before reddit. There were many separate forums dedicated to specific interests, and quite a few of those communities moved to subreddits, and the quality suffered greatly. I'm sure someone is going to chime in and say how it was the same thing with newsgroups before, but to me it feels like that time just before reddit and facebook took over everything was the peak of the internet.
At least subreddits are still searchable. I'm running into a lot of instances now of forums/subreddits turning mostly into Discord servers. It sucks when all of the troubleshooting and repair instructions get moved into a Discord server and become unsearchable unless you join discord.
Video game producers are starting up fan discords that also have the troubleshooting/bug reports channels for the game on them. Video game mod communities are moving to discord.
Its going to really suck when a few years go by and a company closes or moves onto a new game and shuts down their discord. A lot of community sourced info is going to be flushed down the drain if people don't archive it.
There are two different but similar effects occurring.
Dedicated forums for particular topics were generally tiny. A forum with 10k+ people was a sizable forum, and not many where that large. Small communities got very little attention from spammers, and while they had their own trolls giving problems they were much less rarely subjected general trolls unless something like 4chan or whatever came before it picked up on them.
The internet is also huge and has zero degrees of separation in most places. I could post a link to a tiny forum here and 1000 people may see it. I could post it to reddit subthread and a hundred thousand people could see it. Or I could get a front page post on Reddit and a million+ people could see it. And with it tons of trolls, spam, and general idiots will follow and quality goes to trash.
This barely has anything to do with Reddit/Facebook itself. It's the power of network effects congregating people. Facebook was always going to happen, maybe in a slightly different flavor, or slightly different form, but once we got the computing capability to have millions of people at one place at once time, someone was always going to build it.
People have a lot of nostalgia for those old forums and I can understand that to some extent, but most things that people complain about with reddit applied to the forums as well... often to a much greater extent.
Piss off the admin and you might be insta-banned with no recourse. You'd even lose connections to the other users on the forum and would have no way to reach them. You didn't have the option of opening a competing forum where all of the old users already had access like you do with opening a new sub. You'd also lose access to the posts themselves and any content you found useful for the private forums.
You were reliant on the admin to keep the site running. Most had extensive downtime. Things would often break. The admins would have to run charity fund raisers to keep things up and many would threaten to take everything with them if people didn't pay up.
You did have the option of opening a competing forum if you had a modicum of tech knowledge, and this was extremely common. It was also independent from the administration of the offending forum, unlike Reddit, where administration biases are applied to 300+ million active users, and a small group of rule obsessed powerusers direct a significant amount of the big boards.
Forum administration was terrible, but there was a far healthier ecosystem full of alternatives that no longer exists. Remember, SomethingAwful's overmoderation was what popularized imageboards for westerners, and Digg's failings were what popularized Reddit. There is no equivalent today.
You could open a competing forum, but users of the previous forum would not automatically have access to it, which was my point. You'd have to somehow reach out to them to let them know it existed and they'd have to create new accounts and all that. That would be hard to do if you no longer had access to the old forum. With reddit you can simply open a new sub and everyone would already have access with their existing accounts.
In the same way that Walmart is one of the great victories of the retail industry.
It snuffed out small independant competitors, dominates an industry, and wields its tremendous power in a negligent, self-serving, and irresponsible manner.
Do you mean in terms of adoption, revenue, growth, etc., or do you mean something else? I can see that the business is successful, but from where I stand it's a bit of a mixed bag in terms of quality of discussion, experience as a user, treatment of its community, and perhaps its overall effect on the culture. Would like to hear more about what you mean, in other words.
There's a reason it's a meme that people always append "site: Reddit" to the end of web searches. It's one of the greatest sources of genuine, peer-to-peer information out there. They also have open APIs that allow everyone from researchers to developers to access it.
I think the main reason people search Reddit from Google is more that Google's search results are bad, not that Reddit is great. When I search Reddit instead of Google, it feels like a hack to work around the fact that Google is overrun with spam.
And, to the extent that Reddit is an essential information source, it's largely because Reddit (and other social sites) destroyed the small websites and blogosphere where this information used to live. Reddit is now kind of the only game in town, which to me is a success for that business, but overall a failure for the web. Compare it to Walmart and Amazon in the retail space: is the fact that we now only shop with those massive companies a victory for the wider retail landscape, or just for those corporations?
Anyway, good point, thank you for the response.I would still like to hear what the original commenter has to say.
>Reddit (and other social sites) destroyed the small websites
I disagree here, Reddit didn't destroy the small websites, the users leaving the small websites destroyed the small websites. Reddit did not put any duress on the users and force them to leave. Instead having everything they wanted in one place without 20 different logins motivated the users to stay on Reddit instead. Convenience motivates individual action.
Also, coming back to your first point on Google, but tying into Reddit. Spammers are destroying the internet. The reason Google is failing is spammers are expending far more energy to spam than Google is willing to spend to detect spam. Reddit is still very willing to expend energy to prevent spam on their site, hence becomes a higher quality source of information than the average search.
The size of Google and Reddit both make them targets for spammers, and I believe eventually their success will be mostly eaten by the costs of preventing spam from ruining their services.
Reddit has some serious flaws to be sure, and some really shitty subs, but the "genuine, peer-to-peer information" is found there in the weird little niche subs. PR organizations don't care about modified IBM Model M keyboards from 1985, but there's probably a subreddit out there dedicated to just that one thing, with a bunch of genuine information from genuine people who like to modify that keyboard. I could probably find another subreddit dedicated to restoring electronics from the 1940s, something else I'm sure no "PR organization" cares about. There's countless other examples just like this. In fact, if Reddit were confined to extremely narrow special-interest hobby groups like this, it wouldn't have the bad reputation it has now.
Thanks to ChatGPT that is about to become a thing of the past. First the APIs, and then the content. There was already quite a lot of paid fluff on Reddit, but it was fairly easy to recognize. Now it's easier to make and more plausible sounding, and it's going to completely drown out the humans. The value of "site:reddit.com" is plummeting.
I think the GP means that soon ChatGPT-generated content will be flooding reddit and drowning out the human-created content. Whether you use ChatGPT yourself or not isn't relevant when all the search results are ChatGPT authored pieces of content.
Please. Are you saying people would not have figured out how to host personal communities if it wasn't for Reddit? Oh wait... They did that long before Reddit even existed.
I think Reddit can claim credit for making an easy framework for creating new communities, unifying the UI experience, and making discovery somewhat easier.
I still think it has devolved into one of the biggest tire fires on the Internet, but it was a cute idea. Maybe the next attempt will suck less.
Slashdot's system works better than Reddit's or HNs, but unfortunately Slashdot fell for other reasons (gross mismanagement, nonexistent editing, etc) Slashdot's moderation was great though.
Specifically, I really like the way Slashdot provides more categories for rating comments. '+5 Funny' vs '+5 Insightful' is a very useful distinction. '-1 Off Topic' vs '-1 Flamebait/Troll' is a useful distinction. I don't want to read off topic spam, but I often do want to read unpopular dissenting opinions. Slashdot let me read the "trolls" (dissenters) without having to wade through the literal spam. Great system, HN and reddit would be better if they had something similar.
I was seemingly randomly selected to be a moderator a couple of times on Slashdot. I don't remember how long each term lasted, maybe a couple of weeks? It seemed like a good system to keep anyone from being in the role for long enough to be the target of corruption and to prevent much damage if the selected person was simply a shitty moderator.
The way I remember it working was it would randomly select users, and you were given the ability to give +1/-1 to posts for a certain period of time (day? week?) and you could only use that in threads that you were not posting in.
And once in awhile you'd get picked to meta moderate where you'd be asked if the moderation choice of another user was reasonable.
Yes, this is exactly how it worked. It sounded good in theory, but in practice wasn't that great IMO. By only giving a few random users the ability to mod up/down posts, for a limited time, and ONLY in threads they didn't post in, there just wasn't much incentive to moderate. Personally, I frequently got mod points, used them, and then wanted to respond to something somewhere else in that thread, and so making my post would undo all my moderations. It was a choice between my speech being stifled, or being able to do my civic duty of moderating, and I chose to exercise my speech most times, so I probably was not a very effective moderator. Perhaps if they had made it more fine-grained it could have worked better (so you can't mod in a subthread you post in).
I'm not sure that having a horde of posts trying for '+5 Funny' really helps their discussions. On HN, you tend to get downvoted for posting lame jokes, and even some good ones.
That's not the way conversations tended to go on Slashdot, from what I recall. It wasn't like reddit. Furthermore, because Slashdot's system differentiated funny from other kinds of ratings, you could specifically suppress posts rated funny, or raise posts rated Troll, etc. This functionality was built into the interface.
I wish we’d have less of these “victories” that go from a half decent forum software to an ad-ridden hellhole full of childish gay jokes and regurgitated memes in place of actual discussion.
With their blatantly sexist and racist policies, and their Free Speech bait & switch I vehemently disagree:
From reddit a employee:
"Our rule1 protects groups that are attacked based on a vulnerability, which doesn't pertain to white people or men as a group." Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/NgOxEg0.png
What is rule 1?
"Remember the human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned." (https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy)
So in practice, according to one of their employees it's actually:
"Remember the non-white male human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking non-white people or women. Everyone except white people and men have a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate against non-white people or women will be banned."
And this is absolutely born out in their repeated banning of male-centric subs, while the most toxic community I've ever seen remains, because it's wildly sexist against the correct gender. And there are multiple "fragile white redditor" type subs also, but all other "fragile <race> redditor" subs were instantly banned.
And the bait & switch:
"We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it."
— Reddit FAQ 2005
"We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content"
— u/kn0thing 2008
"A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets."
— u/kn0thing 2012
"We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal."
— u/reddit 2012
"We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse)."
— u/yishan 2012
"Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech"
> And this is absolutely born out in their repeated banning of male-centric subs, while the most toxic community I've ever seen remains, because it's wildly sexist against the correct gender.
They banned a load of female-centred subreddits too, a couple of years back. The moderators of these subs then set up their own Reddit-like forum at https://ovarit.com, with a mission to uplift women's voices, especially on topics where they had been censored on Reddit.
Reddit also discriminates specifically against homosexual women, in similar ways: /r/lesbians is a pornography forum dedicated to the male gaze, while /r/actuallesbians is filled with men pretending to be women. Any lesbian subreddit that is created exclusively for actual female women to use gets swiftly banned, and similarly for comments that support being exclusively same-sex attracted. This sort of 'progressive' misogyny and homophobia is increasingly common in other forums too, not just on Reddit.
The common theme of all this banning and censorship is users not toeing the line towards a particular set of US-centric political viewpoints that are currently popular amongst those who call themselves 'progressive'. Though in reality their views and actions are regressive and authoritarian.
They've also banned pretty much anything remotely controversial since maybe 2015. It started out with shock videos and gore, but gradually progressed into pretty much anything deemed offensive by the demographic they're catering to.
The connecting thread in all these bans is that if you're not in the niche of American 'polite society' that they market to, you can expect to be tolerated only to give an illusion of plurality to the site.
Reddit is one part of the web. It's a privately controlled company. It should never have accumulated as much importance as it has. We need to design the next Reddits so they're credibly neutral parts of the internet with their own, distributed controls.
I hadn't heard of this guy, so I just looked him up. He ran a subreddit for sharing photographs of children for the express purpose of jerking off to, and the CEO of Reddit at the time (Yishan Wong) defended that? That's bad indeed.
On the flip side, the knee jerk reaction "think of the children" has resulted in many awful policies which do more aggregate harm than good. It is useful to have someone defend things which are distasteful but not illegal. When we snuff out a particular bit of speech we should have to think about it, however briefly.
I don't think so. The legal and moral principle of free speech is meant to protect different political, scientific, philosophical, etc. views. It's not meant to protect a pedophile's right to sexualize children. What do we lose by censoring those people?
The aftermath of r/jailbait getting shutdown was also the shutdown of any adults only subreddit focused on "smaller" women. I helped mod xxsmall and other small breasted / lithe / petite focused adult subreddits at the time. Reddit didn't care that we explicitly stated everyone must be of legal age, and had age verification in place for the gone wild style subreddits. I put in a lot of my spare time trying to make sure illegal shit didn't end up on our pages and banning people trying to maliciously post images to get us taken down.
It didn't help that this was around the same time Australia started talks of banning A-Cup adult actresses as part of a conservative "protect the kids" push.
In the end they blanket banned all of the small breast subreddits because of the shitheads over at r/jailbait. Some of which had stories from the girls posting about how they never felt attractive or realized they'd actually get attention from men/women online because of their smaller shapes. Not just younger women either, we had women in their 40/50's saying the same thing.
I still think killing off r/jailbait was needed. I just wish they hadn't kneejerk banned every legit sub because they were being blasted in the main stream media. Eventually most of these subreddits came back with new moderation/names and I gave up on subreddit modding because it was stressful trying to fend off illegal posts.
You misread my point. I did not say we could not decide to censor such people, only that it is useful to have people willing to offer up a basic defense that pushes us to justify the actions we take. "Think of the children" is a way to instantly shut down opposition and win a moral argument without having to justify that your policy is well considered.
Everybody has a group they consider 'those people'. It is at least best we have a discussion before banning any of 'those people' before we realize that the people in charge consider 'those people' whatever group you are in.
I'm looking at the sign-up process for Reddit now, and it seems to have a "Continue with Apple", "Continue with Google" and "Continue with e-mail" options. Even with Apple's e-mail obfuscation, there's still an e-mail associated with newer accounts, I think.
I requested my GDPR data and they didn't have much data on me - not even stuff such as links that I've viewed in the past. The most private information is a history of IP addresses that I've logged in with recently and the IP address I registered the account with.
It makes me wonder what hn/dang is going to do if a law enforcement agency (a country’s Govt representative) asks info on an hn user? What all HN collects and keep (email is optional, yes)?
https://torrentfreak.com/filmmakers-request-identities-of-re...
- "However, Reddit decided to share information about “ben125125”, while protecting the other users. As shown above, “ben125125” responded to a thread about piracy warnings and specifically mentioned RCN. That wasn’t as obvious in the other comments and Reddit feels that disclosing their identities goes too far."
edit: The linked court order also mentions this (page 3, lines 6–7)