Reddit admins announce January 18 blackout to protest SOPA

[Archangel]

I don't see the good in their endeavors but whatever, I suppose:

The Internet has been rumbling and mobilizing in response to SOPA. One of the latest acts of protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act is a planned blackout by social website reddit on January 18.

Reddit admins announced the plan in a blog post on Tuesday. The post acknowledged the activism by redditors in the fight against “powerful forces trying to censor the Internet.” However, the admins explained that it was time for the next stage of the fight, and they’ve decided they will be blacking out reddit on January 18. The blackout will last all day from 8am to 8pm Eastern Standard Time.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/reddit-admins-announce-january-18-blackout-protest-sopa-062713699.html

 

[Veronika11]

hm..not sure how this could help or change anything

 

[Archangel]

Yeah, it seems like a pointless idea.

 

[silentg]

They are leading the blackout and hoping for other major sites (amazon, fb, google, and others) to follow.

---------- Post added at 02:12 AM ---------- Previous post was at 02:00 AM ----------

Send this message to Google and Facebook:

As a user of your service, I thank you for your continued opposition of H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and S. 968, the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PROTECT-IP). I implore you to consider one-half or full-day of restricted site access to your global services in protest of the aforementioned bills in the way that news-sharing site Reddit plans for January 18th between 8am–8pm U.S. Eastern Time.

Contact forms:
http://support.google.com/contact/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=bizdev&rd=1
https://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=ui_other

 

[Archangel]

Sites like Amazon won't dream of this. It'd achieve 100% nothing, won't help the cause in any form, and they'd lost a lotta revenue. ppl should have thought this retarded idea over before doing it lol

 

[silentg]

The point is to raise awareness. They won't just shut down the site without any message. Obviously they'll put some message letting people know how they can (oppose the SOPA bill (http://techland.time.com/2012/01/12...-18-blackout-wikipedia-and-others-may-follow/).

Just some FYI:
1. GoDaddy boycott began from Reddit and spread all around.
2. Wikipedia is part of the blackout as well.
3. Reddit stats from December:

2.065 billion pageviews, up from 829 million in December 2010

34.9 million unique visitors

12.97 pages per visit

16 minutes average time on site

Over 100 million monthly pageviews per employee


Read more: http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/2-billion-beyond.html

 

[Bannen]

2. Wikipedia is part of the blackout as well.

Yes, Wi'pedia is doing the 24hr blackout on their English-speaking sites; other language sites will just post the ad that this is happening. Still, when Wikipedia blacks out for 24 hrs, that will definitely be an attention-grabber since even huge numbers of the not-too-computer-literate still know about and use Wikipedia.
They state that they refrain from getting directly involved in politics, but in this case they are involved not on behalf of the politics but rather they're adding their voice as a website that might possibly and strongly be affected by these bills.

 

[enlytend]

More sites joining the blackout tomorrow:

Wordpress
The "Cheezburger" network of sites (LOLcats, Failblog, etc.)
Tucows
Mozilla
Namecheap
MoveOn
XDA-Developers
TwitPic
BoingBoing
Webhostingbuzz
dotSub

 

[rngrdanny22]

How funny would it be if Google's spiders decided to use tomorrow to crawl wikipedia for search rankings?

 

[Ms Domainer]

*

Oh, no! Wikipedia going dark for 24 hours?

What will all those 7th graders do without homework help for 24 hours?

:D

*

Yes, Wi'pedia is doing the 24hr blackout on their English-speaking sites; other language sites will just post the ad that this is happening. Still, when Wikipedia blacks out for 24 hrs, that will definitely be an attention-grabber since even huge numbers of the not-too-computer-literate still know about and use Wikipedia.
They state that they refrain from getting directly involved in politics, but in this case they are involved not on behalf of the politics but rather they're adding their voice as a website that might possibly and strongly be affected by these bills.

 

[silentg]

They'll have to use the Google Translate to translate the foreign articles from Wikipedia.

 

[enlytend]

How funny would it be if Google's spiders decided to use tomorrow to crawl wikipedia for search rankings?

You have to do it the right way. If you return a header response code of 503 (temporarily unavailable) and don't block robots.txt you'll be fine. Google's Pierre Far posted a "how to" the other day.

PS - Google's spiders are constantly crawling everything and probably hit Wikipedia many times every day .

 

[JB Lions]

Obama Says So Long SOPA, Killing Controversial Internet Piracy Legislation

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngau...ng-controversial-internet-piracy-legislation/

 

[Corey]

The fact that were chatting about it means the tactic has worked. It made the news here in Australia!

Cheers
Corey

 

[silentg]

the fact that Google will place a link on front page is big. These internet illiterate politicians need to know they shouldn't mess with the internet.

 

[iowadawg]

Clear up one minor thing here.
It is not the dumbass politicians, okay?
It is your hollywood companies, your music companies, etal.
They pay out enormously to any politician who will see things their way.

Want to blame someone for this?
Go to the source!

As far as blackouts?
PFFFFT....

 

[Mark Talks]

Well it can't be that bad of an idea.. I mean, it seems to have worked. It gathered strong supporters and gained attention like it wanted.

And it's not done for sure, but SOPA is at least on hold..

 

[Veronika11]

I know I was doubtful before..but maybe this is the right way..or at least one way. better than just sitting back and letting American politicians censor our online world.

 

[Chris.]

Source dailymail.co.uk

U.S Senators withdraw support for anti-piracy bills as 4.5 million people sign Google's anti-censorship petition

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2088860/Flood-online-protest-downs-U-S-senate-websites-4-5-million-people-sign-Googles-anti-censorship-petition.html

 

[Veronika11]

source dailymail.co.uk

u.s senators withdraw support for anti-piracy bills as 4.5 million people sign google's anti-censorship petition

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2088860/flood-online-protest-downs-u-s-senate-websites-4-5-million-people-sign-googles-anti-censorship-petition.html

nice