I used to live, eat, and breath Reddit. For most of 2012, I was not working my cubicle job, and was working for The Weed Blog full time. I used to spend long hours on Reddit looking at articles, participating in conversations, and ‘up-voting’ comments, links, and pictures that I liked. Ever since I went back to my cubicle job I don’t spend that much time on Reddit anymore, but it will always hold a special place in my heart. If you like marijuana, and like social media, then I’m sure you are familiar with the very popular marijuana sub-Reddit /r/trees. For those that aren’t, Google ‘Reddit trees’ and it will be at the top of the search results. There is lots of good stuff over there.
I was passed along an article by Jay Smoker that talked about how the Russian government wants to block the popular sub-Reddit. Per The Guardian:
The Russian government’s technology and internet watchdog is threatening to block Reddit across the country if it does not remove a thread dedicated to growing cannabis.
The federal service for supervision of communications, information, technology and mass media (Roskomnadzor) has taken to one of the largest social networks in Russia, VK.com, requesting the takedown, after it received no direct response from Reddit.
Roskomnadzor writes that Russia’s federal drug control service opposes a particular subreddit, thought to be /r/trees, which “posted an article on the cultivation of growing narcotic plants”.
The watchdog has also mocked up a “wanted” poster of Reddit’s alien mascot, and slighted the company for not responding to its emails, suggesting Reddit’s staff are “too relaxed during the August holidays”.
While I’m sure that Reddit staff are certainly relaxed during the month of August, I think the real reason that they didn’t respond to the Russian government is because Reddit believes in freedom of speech and expression. If you are in Russia, enjoy /r/trees while you can before your government tries to block Reddit altogether. Although, it’s my understanding that people will be able to get around a total block of Reddit, as they do with a lot of blocked sites in Russia, so Russian ents will hopefully still be able to get their knowledge and ‘up-vote’ or ‘down-vote’ as they see fit. [4].
