On March 22nd 2018 Reddit moved to ban all questionable market places and subreddits. This includes the usual places that you would expect like /r/deepfakes and places where potential adult interactions could occur. But they also banned the pipe market place, cigar market place, scotch and whiskey. Basically Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Oh and airsoft.. yes that’s right, a kids toy gun subreddit.

Any market places that remotely facilitated sales or trades of pipes, pipe tobacco, cigars, beers, whiskey, guns, all were banned.

Furthermore, vendors were not permitted to post ads, unless they used the reddit advertising tool… which of course won’t let you post about the vices anyway.

Reddits new content policy includes the following and is how they decided to ban all these subreddits:

So why did this happen?

Reddit is getting ahead of the potential laws and deeming regulations that recently went through trying to distance themselves. It appears they are worried about SESTA/FOSTA. Read more here. But the jist of it is, a badly written law was jammed through during budgeting in another bill that, yet again, no one was allowed to read through. It was signed into law by congress and the president because the need to keep government open.

Clearly Reddit users are upset, even the people who don’t see the same way can see the impact to free speech.

You know what? I’m actually pro-gun control, and even I can see how this is ridiculous. You’ve gone through and banned subs without any warning, not giving them a chance to change their policy or set up another place to meet or anything. You’re also clearly overreaching, rather than just doing the minimum this new policy would require. A lot of gun-related stuff simply links to existing sites, and no actual sales take place on the site. By this specific policy, those should be fine. But you are banning them, proving once again that you are just lying.

So what we have is a poorly implemented update to the policy and regulations based on a poorly written law that has sold more of our freedoms down the river under the guise of saving the children.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains, “The platform liability created by new Section 230 carve outs applies retroactively — meaning the increased liability applies to trafficking that took place before the law passed. The Department of Justice has raised concerns [.pdf] about this violating the Constitution’s Ex Post Facto Clause, at least for the criminal provisions.”

The bill is worded so broadly that it could even be used against platform owners that don’t know that their sites are being used for trafficking. When the Department of Justice is the group urging Congress not to expand criminal law and Congress does it anyway, something is very wrong.

As far as pipe smokers are concerned with the subreddit of /r/pipetobacco mentioning sales or deals of other companies is questionable as a marketplace even so the admins decided, along with r/cigars etc , to move the vices off reddit to a new more open community. They’ve opened up a new forum called https://speak-easy.club/ and there you will find pipes, beer, whiskey, and cigar vices all getting along and building the new community where markets are not shunned.

With privacy rights, freedom of speech, over-reaching freemium services like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit having user back lash like the #deletefacebook movement, it’s clear that users are finally waking up to how their data is being mined and used against them or their freedoms stifled. Many, like myself are looking to embrace the newer decentralized or federated server structure that open source software offers where there is no centralized company that owns the data, less fear about governmental shutdowns. I look forward to soon seeing some great new blockchain powered social media platform.

pipes.social

Until that new solution comes available though, I too have spun up a microblogging community for pipe smokers that could be considered a twitter replacement, but is a niche type of community that runs a federated server service called mastodon. I encourage you fellow pipe smokers to join me at https://pipes.social and good luck out there.