(Photo: Twitter)

College is a time for learning about arcane poetry and gender norms, algorithms and political discourse. But it's also a time to lock lips with a sexy, sweaty stranger in an uptown bar as the DJ plays that 2 Chainz song. Spring break forever.

Twitter account @ColumbiaMakeOut has "become a minor phenomenon up in Morningside Heights," one Columbia tipster told Betabeat. The account solicits photo submissions of Columbia students making out in various bars around campus and then tweets outs the lip-locking evidence. It kicked off a few weeks ago, during “senior night.”

"The prime time to catch some people in the act ;)," tweeted @ColumbiaMakeOut.

It seems light-hearted, if sophomoric, until you're the Columbia kid caught with your tongue out--with someone who may or not be your campus boo. "The account is also eerily reminiscent of Creepshots, subReddit that received national scrutiny for publishing photos of women without their consent.

Columbia students seem to have mixed reactions to the account. The school's paper, The Columbia Spectator, called it "refreshing (but also a tad bit creepy.)" The account certainly doesn't make us long for our college days.

What we really want to know is, when did Columbia get so fratty?

Update:

Apparently Ohio University also has one. One more and we have a (gross) trend!

(Photo: Imgur)

It’s no secret that Reddit, the link-sharing site that members tout as a bastion of free speech and creativity, also serves as a seedy showcase of the sexism, racism and misogyny that’s always existed on the web. Reddit has a long history of publicly grappling with its dueling reputations: on the surface, it's a knowledge-sharing platform that even the President has deemed worthy of his presence.

But the site has also battled to suppress some of its more hateful communities while toeing the free speech party line. Last year's Violentacrez scandal, in which Gawker outed one of the site's most notorious trolls for moderating the controversial subreddits r/Jailbait and r/Creepshots, exposed much of what Reddit admins gloss over in favor of inspiring "free and open Internet" rhetoric. In short: Reddit, much like a lot of the Internet, is still a pretty difficult place to be a woman.

Communities like r/Doppelbangher don't make it any easier. The subreddit, which has over 8,000 subscribers, allows users to submit photos of celebrities and--more typically--users' friends so that others can find their porn star lookalikes. It seems kind of harmless at first: sure, we totally get why it might be funny in a weird way to find your porn doppelganger. But the majority of photos appear to come from male redditors looking to find porn lookalikes for women they know, whose photos they've used without their permission. Creepy.

Of course, like most of Reddit, the subreddit discourages the outing of personal information. "If you are going to post a Facebook pic make sure the girl in the picture can't be traced back," reads the subreddit's sidebar. But just because the women in the photos are anonymous, doesn't mean they appreciate cropping up on a subreddit like r/Doppelbangher.

One female Reddit user found her photo on the site and was so incensed she created a throwaway account, "wtfisthisbull," in order to respond. In response to the post, "[REQUEST] Friend from high school," which asked for users to submit porn lookalikes for her photo, the woman posted a photo of herself holding up the sign, "You're disgusting." The user deleted his original post, but not before being shamed out of the subreddit.

Vengeance is sweet, sure, but the existence of r/Doppelbangher speaks to a deeper pattern of casual misogyny and disrespect that permeates the site, one so obvious that even former Starfleet captains take issue with it. "I am apalled [sic] by some of the immature, horrifically racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnic… etc.. posts that are just ignored [on Reddit]," William Shatner wrote in a post to r/StarTrek this weekend. "Reddit has been the first ‘mainstream’ site that I have been to that actually appears to allow racists and other hate mongers to group, congregate, incite and spread their hatred. There’s entire subreddits that allow it."

(Photo: Styleblaster)

In an effort to catalog the underappreciated diversity of style in gentrified Williamsburg, a team of Brooklyn technologists has set up a camera outside their apartment that records the street stylings of passersby and posts the images online. But if passersbys don’t want to be recorded, they’re kind of out of luck.

The site, called Styleblaster, aims to “become a destination for New York City peacocks to traipse by and show off what makes the neighborhood hop.” Using a camera perched a block from the Bedford Ave. L train, the site captures and immediately uploads images of Brooklynites walking by in real time. Users can then click a tophat to signal whether or not the subject is “stylin’."

Click once through Styleblaster and you land on a picture of a moody girl with dark, blunt bangs trudging down the block in heavy black boots; click again and it's a mom pushing a baby stroller; again, and it's a dude with his hand down his pants.

Styleblaster is a personal project of Jules Laplace, the technology director for OkFocus, the creative agency behind the Kanye West/Donda Media PR stunt. The team created WhoDat.biz, a domain lookup site that purported to be the first startup of rapper Kanye West but was eventually revealed to be a big hoax.

Mr. Laplace has created a host of other online projects and games, like Where's the Pixel? and video-sharing chat site Scanner Jammer. Mr. Laplace's business partner, Ryder Ripps, told Betabeat via email that the project is not affiliated with OkFocus.

The idea for the site came from Mr. Laplace and his roommates, who are all "fairly technically minded." His roommate, new media artist and recent NYU ITP grad Jack Kalish, designed the software that takes the photos. "The camera sits in our apartment and takes a photo whenever someone passes by our window," Mr. Laplace said over email. "We have a webcam hooked up to a Processing sketch, which sends pictures up into the cloud.  To get people walking from right to left--so they'd be seen front on--we do motion detection using an optical flow field.  It's pretty cool, seeing it at work: it looks like the person is pulling a bunch of rubber bands across the frame, which tell it to snap the picture."

Mr. Laplace said the goal is to capture a portrait of Williamsburg fashion live and as it happens. "It's an egalitarian take on streetstyle," he said. "There's more to Williamsburg than hipsters and rich ex-Manhattanites. Everybody has their own style, and our site celebrates that."

But the project resurfaces privacy issues that were thrust into the mainstream by the scandal surrounding Reddit's creepshots forum, where users posted sexualized photos of women without their consent before Reddit administrators shut it down. Still, Mr. Laplace insists that unlike WhoDat.biz, this isn’t one of OkFocus’ attempts at subversiveness. He dismissed privacy concerns by noting that with the amount of foot traffic the block sees, the images are quite ephemeral.

"As far as privacy goes, we count on people to be dressed well when they go out in public--especially on a brisk fall day," he said. "Don't expect the pictures to hang around, though. Fashion gets stale after a couple of days, so we don't see a point in constructing an endless archive. This is really about the moment."

There are surveillance cameras installed all over New York City, inside ATMs and subway stations and convenience stores. The laws in New York regarding video surveillance are very specific. To summarize, video surveillance is only illegal if the subject has a reasonable expectation of privacy, meaning "a place and time when a reasonable person would believe that he or she could fully disrobe in privacy." You're probably not going to begin undressing on Bedford Avenue--unless you're the dude with his hand in his pants.

"I'd like to think that sort of behavior [related to Creepshots] is a relic of a time when people really were awful to each other online," Mr. Laplace added. "The internet's junior high phase, if you will. Our site isn't here to judge people or make fun of them. We're really just in it for the fashion, to be inspired by normal people and our great neighborhood."

(h/t Adrian Chen)

Reddit CEO Yishan Wong. (Photo: Reddit)

As the story of notorious Reddit user Violentacrez and the controversial subreddits he moderated sinks its tentacles into the greater internet, Reddit administrators--known for their laissez-faire attitude toward site moderation--have remained astonishingly mum. In conversations with Betabeat, Reddit general manager Erik Martin gave little indication as to how Reddit intends to handle the Violentacrez and Creepshots fracas, except to admit that two of the subreddits had been banned by admins.

But a thread published by Reddit CEO Yishan Wong, posted to a private subreddit for moderators and obtained by Gawker, sheds some light on Reddit's intentions toward the controversial content on its platform:

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).

As Gawker notes, Mr. Wong did not mention Violentacrez by name in his note, nor did he directly address the myriad issues surrounding controversial subreddits like Creepshots. Instead, he reiterated the policies established following last year's shuttering of the subreddit Jailbait, a forum for users to post sexualized photos of minors:

We will ban illegal content, and in addition sexualized pictures of minors, immediately upon any reports to us. We gave our rationale for that back when that issue was resolved, and we will maintain that policy for the same reasons.

This is where Reddit continues to draw the line: it will not ban sexist, misogynistic or racist content, but it will ban anything illegal, as well as images of minors that could be considered "sexualized." That means Creepshots--however offensive it may be--is here to stay. This is because the vast majority of photos posted in Creepshots and its ilk are taken legally and--when moderated properly--do not break any of Reddit's rules.

Oh, and Mr. Wong even provided a handy little TL;DR for moderators with a case of ADD:

TL;DR: We stand for freedom of speech. We will uphold existing rules against posting dox on reddit. But the reality is those rules end at our platform, and we will respect journalism as a form of speech that we don't ban. We believe further change can come only from example-setting.

Mr. Wong was tapped as Reddit's unconventional CEO back in March, after the "front page of the internet" was spun out from its corporate handlers, Advance Publications. Just after publishing the post, he said he was going to "nip off for a spot of tea," because he apparently moonlights as Mrs. Doubtfire.

(Photo: Reddit)

The creeps just can't be held down. Jezebel reports that the subreddit Creepshots--which has been at the forefront of controversy recently and helped spur a war between Gawker Media and Reddit--is back in action.

The original Creepshots subreddit was banned by Reddit administrators last week, along with "Creepsquad," a new subreddit which had popped up to collect Creepshots refugees. In an attempt to retaliate against Jezebel for posting the original feature about Creepshots, Creepsquad posted a photo of Jezebel writer Katie J.M. Baker to its front page.

Reddit general manager Erik Martin confirmed to Betabeat that Creepsquad was banned by Reddit administrators, but did not elaborate as to why. Typically, subreddits are only banned if they break one of Reddit's five rules.

Having been ousted from Creepshots and Creepsquad, Redditors are now collecting in r/Cshots and r/CandidFashionPolice, invoking the term "candid" to justify the photos posted in these forums without the consent of the women featured in them.

r/Cshots is moderated by the same cast of characters who haunted the other creepshots subreddits, including Potato_in_my_anus, who was banned after Reddit's community manager found that he had created a subreddit "that disregarded the rules of reddit regarding sexualizing teens/minors."

r/Cshots takes swing at what it perceives as Reddit's hypocrisy for allowing sites like r/ladyboners--where users post photos of (primarily famous and consenting) men--to exist while shutting down Creepshots. It also purports to be a site for lesbians to look at photos of women, most likely as a way to stifle cries of "sexism" that have been lobbed at Creepshots in the past. Its moderators have adopted titles such as "Women's Shelter Employee," in a brazen attempt to keep it classy.

The Cshots sidebar reads:

You may be wondering what constitutes candid. If a person is posing for and/or aware that a picture is being taken, then it ceases to be candid. A candid photograph captures the natural, raw beauty of the subject without their vain attempts at putting on a show for the camera. That is the essence of candid, that is what makes it worth the effort of taking the photograph and that is why this subreddit exists. This is a place for lesbians to appreciate attractive, beautiful and gorgeous women.

The adoption of a lesbian slant is new to r/cshots. When Betabeat first stumbled upon the subreddit in the wake of the Creepshots fiasco, it did not to purport to be for lesbians.

r/CandidFashionPolice is in the same vein. "In this subreddit people post candid photos of women and then we judge their fashion choices similar to TLC's what not to wear," reads its sidebar. "That's it, we don't judge women's bodies, JUST THEIR FASHION CHOICES." Photos taken of women without their consent are coupled with headlines that follow the subreddit's number one rule: "Please speak like a sassy Diva when commenting or posting."

As Jezebel points out, many of the photos posted to r/CandidFashionPolice also appear in Cshots.

We've reached out to Reddit general manager Erik Martin to ask whether, like Creepshots and Creepsquad, Reddit plans to ban CandidFashionPolice and Cshots. We'll update when we hear back.

Update:

Reddit has now banned r/Cshots, but r/CandidFashionPolice is still up.

(Screengrab: Predditors)

Predditors, the Tumblr that posts the personal information of Reddit users who publish photos to the controversial subreddit Creepshots, is back up and running after a tumultuous few days. The blog was initially removed by Tumblr after administrators there mistakenly believed that the information being published was personal information. In fact, the author of Predditors is simply stringing together information available on public profiles posted by the users.

But once Tumblr put Predditors back up, its author panicked--perhaps because of the scale of the story the blog had ignited, coupled with lingering fears that she could be outed. First it was password protected, then it was taken down. Now, predditors.tumblr.com is back up, but the URL Predditors.com redirects to the original Jezebel coverage. The author appears to have individually re-uploaded each post to the Tumblr this morning.

Predditors came to prominence when Jezebel published a feature about the blog and its author, a 25-year-old female Redditor who goes by the name "Samantha." It has been at the focal point of a war between Gawker Media and Reddit, stoked by Adrian Chen's piece outing notorious Redditor Violentacrez, who was a moderator for Creepshots.

(Photo: Reddit)

For the last few hours, the controversial subreddit Creepshots--which is at the center of an "inter-website war" over photos users published of non-consenting women--has been inaccessible.

The message "This subreddit has been banned" is affixed front and center. The banned page notes that the subreddit may have been caught in the site's spam filter, but Reddit general manager Erik Martin confirmed to Betabeat that a moderator from Creepshots asked an admin to ban the subreddit.

Previously: Reddit Readies for Brewing 'Inter-Website War'; Major Subreddits Ban Link to Gawker Media

Creepshots' former members immediately flocked to r/Creepsquad, set up for refugees of the shuttered subreddit. Now, Mr. Martin has also confirmed to Betabeat that Reddit administrators have decided--without moderator request--to ban Creepsquad as well. It went dark around 8 p.m. this evening.

Mr. Martin, who is still on the Reddit Open Internet bus tour, declined to elaborate why the subreddit had been banned.

Earlier this evening, the moderators of Creepsquad published a photo of Jezebel journalist Katie J.M. Baker to the front page of the subreddit, perhaps in an effort to intimidate her. Ms. Baker has been the target of Reddit backlash following a story she published yesterday featuring an interview with the anonymous woman behind Predditors, a Tumblr that publishes the personal information of Creepshots members who have been publishing photos of women without their consent. Predditors was removed by Tumblr, but has since been reinstated after a Tumblr spokesman said it was mistakenly believed to be revealing private information. Tumblr users have been passing around a master list of the "Predditors" after the author password-protected the original Tumblr.

Previously: Tumblr Reinstates Predditors, the Controversial Blog Publishing Personal Info About Redditors Behind Creepshots

Ms. Baker appears to be taking it all in stride. "Flattered that moderators of r/Creepsquad respect me enough to put a photo of me on the main page of their subreddit!" she coyly tweeted.

The removal of Creepsquad by Reddit admins comes as somewhat of a surprise. In an interview with Buzzfeed earlier today, Mr. Martin emphasized that Reddit does not remove content unless it violates one of Reddit's five rules. That implies that Creepsquad was removed because it violated one of those tenets, though he did not offer any details other than to admit it was removed by administrators.

There is precedent for banning subreddits. Last year, Reddit found itself embroiled in a controversy over r/jailbait, a subreddit where users posted sexualized photos of minors. Reddit subsequently updated its policy to include a new rule.

UPDATE: 

Reddit community manager and site admin David Croach has banned Potato_in_my_anus, the maturely-named user who created the now-banned subreddit Creepsquad. In a thread on Subreddit Drama, Mr. Croach wrote:

Regarding PIMA's ban...

There are actually a lot of rules that we (the admins) recently found out when we investigated his (PIMA's) account that he had broken. The most recent one was creating a subreddit that disregarded the rules of reddit regarding sexualizing teens/minors, and not being active in moderating posts that broke that rule. He's had multiple offenses in that category.

Here is a screenshot of the photo that Creepsquad posted of Ms. Baker, without comment, to the front page of the subreddit:

(Photo: Reddit)

(Photo: Predditors)

The coming Internet war may be heating up with the news that Tumblr has decided to reinstate Predditors, a blog run by a 25-year-old female Redditor that publishes the publicly-available personal information of users who post photos of women without their consent on the subreddit page, creepshots.

Yesterday, Jezebel published an in-depth interview with "Samantha," the woman behind Predditors. Reddit users immediately balked at the post, as well as the news that Gawker writer Adrian Chen may be preparing to publish a story revealing the personal details of one of creepshots' moderators. Pitchforks were readied; dramatic diatribes were penned. As of this morning, Tumblr had taken down Predditors.

We reached out to Tumblr inquiring why they decided to shut down Predditors, since its author was only linking together publicly-available information and publishing it to the blog. A spokesman for Tumblr told Betabeat:

This blog was mistakenly suspended under the impression that it was revealing private, rather than publicly-available, information. We are restoring the blog.

The blog is currently back up, but has not been updated since yesterday at 2pm.

Update: Predditors is now password protected. The Daily Dot conjectures that the anonymous author may be attempting to "avoid legal issues."

Update 2: Predditors.com now redirects to the original Jezebel article.

EARLIER: Reddit Readies for Brewing 'Inter-Website War'; Major Subreddits Ban Links to Gawker Media

Additional reporting contributed by Kelly Faircloth.

(Photo: Says-it.com)

If websites are one big dysfunctional family, Reddit and Gawker Media are the two drunken uncles who can't stop fighting over who has to pick grandpa up at the airport. Now, the two sites are preparing for a grueling "inter-website war" that threatens to rob netizens of wifi packet rations and provide hours of popcorn-eating fodder.

After news broke on Reddit that Gawker writer Adrian Chen was preparing to publish a post revealing the personal information of Reddit user Violentacrez, a moderator of the controversial subreddit r/creepshots, Reddit began to batten down the hatches. The politics subreddit, which boasts almost 2 million subscribers, announced that it will ban all links to Gawker Media properties--including Gawker, Jezebel and Lifehacker--in response to the news that Mr. Chen may be preparing to publish personal details about Violentacruz.

According to the post:

As some of you may know, a prominent member of Reddit's community, Violentacrez, deleted his account recently. This was as a result of a 'journalist' seeking out his personal information and threatening to publish it, which would have a significant impact on his life. You can read more about it here

As moderators, we feel that this type of behavior is completely intolerable. We volunteer our time on Reddit to make it a better place for the users, and should not be harassed and threatened for that. We should all be afraid of the threat of having our personal information investigated and spread around the internet if someone disagrees with you. Reddit prides itself on having a subreddit for everything, and no matter how much anyone may disapprove of what another user subscribes to, that is never a reason to threaten them.

As a result, the moderators of /r/politics have chosen to disallow links from the Gawker network until action is taken to correct this serious lack of ethics and integrity.

It's worth noting that--despite what was incorrectly reported in Politico--this is not a statement from Reddit administrators or officials, but instead from a Reddit moderator. Reddit moderators are volunteers and do not formally represent or speak for the website.

"Moderators are free to moderate their subreddits as they see fit," Reddit's general manager Erik Martin told Betabeat by email. "They can ban all usernames that start with the letter g if they want."

"The statement is from moderators, who are volunteers," he added, while declining to elaborate on Reddit's official stance on the move.

Other subreddits are following in r/politics's stead, including r/gaming and r/SubredditDrama. r/mensrights has also joined the fight, to the surprise of absolutely no one.

Screenshots between Violentacrez and other Reddit users show that Violentacrez believed Mr. Chen was trying to publish an article about him because of his associations with creepshots, which was set to private before being banned, and r/jailbait, which Reddit admins shut down last year.

Creepshots was just banned, but new subreddits created to fill "the hole in reddit's seedy underbelly" have already begun to pop up. [Updated: Reddit has banned Creepsquad, a related subreddit.]

The feud etween Gawker and Reddit has been brewing for a while. Mr. Chen is vocal about his distaste for Reddit both on Gawker and on his own Twitter page. Last year, he was embroiled in yet more internet drama when he trolled Reddit into thinking he was behind LucidEnding, a user who faked having cancer for karma.

Recently, r/creepshots has been at the nexus of much contention between the two websites. Just yesterday, Jezebel ran a feature about the Tumblr "Predditors," run by a 25-year-old female Redditor, which publishes the personal information of those who post to the controversial subreddit.

"I think it's cute how Reddit's CreepShots apologists/Men's Right's activists/etc. think we care if they stop linking to us. And also indicative of their hypocritical obsession with privacy and control," Katie J.M. Baker, the Jezebel author behind the r/creepshots post, told Betabeat by Gchat. "It's okay for anonymous Redditors to post upskirt photo after upskirt photo, but a huge violation of privacy for a journalist to report on the men who post them? How does that make any sense? Plus, the information on Predditors (which is temporarily down) wasn't illegal--or difficult--for my source to track down."

Tumblr has since shut down Predditors. [UPDATE: Tumblr has reinstated Predditors.] A new thread on Reddit alleges that someone whose information was published on Predditors was violently attacked last night, but there is so far no substantial proof corroborating that claim.

Redditors themselves seem to be barely able to control their glee over the ensuing drama:

Now, I see before me the beginnings of an inter-website war, sparked by mass doxing, blackmail, the fall of one of reddit's legendary figures, potentially ruined lives, admins silently working in the background, and repercussions that will have devastating IRL consequences for those involved ...

I now stand before you on the precipice of the greatest shitstorm of our time. We have come far from our origins as a humble kernel, and if this escalates to the point where the entire site falls around us, I'd just like to say that it was an honor serving with you all aboard the USS Orville.

It is unclear whether Mr. Chen still intends to publish his post, rumors of which began this chilling war. For now, we can only wait as the sounds of furious keyboard clacking and the cries of rage grow ever closer to the heart of the mainstream internet.

(Photo: Brutal Gamer)

Groupon has launched its own iPad payment system in hopes of rivaling Square. Good luck with that. [The Next Web]

Kids these days don't want a stupid computer, ’cuz they're for old people. [Wired]

A court has ruled that book scanning counts as fair use, much to the chagrin of the Author's Guild. [Ars Technica]

Google has launched a large online museum called the Cultural Institute, boasting 42 different exhibits. [The Daily Dot]

A 25-year-old female Redditor has made it her mission to publicly out those she calls "Predditors" who post sexualized photos of women to r/creepshots without their consent. [Jezebel]

For the last time, please stop giving your startup meaningless, baffling names. [Wired]