But a decade after Reddit launched, it has blossomed into a platform for racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic and other hateful conversations.
My eyes just about rolled out of my head. "Blossomed?" By volume, those "conversations" make up a minority of a minority of a minority of what happens on Reddit.
One current dominant media narrative is that any sort of intolerant thought is intolerable, and that the emotional state of a listener is the responsibility of the speaker. There are clear problems with this point of view vis a vi reality, which is why it is a narrative, not actual reporting. This divorcing from reality allows journalists to comfortably include the narrative everywhere that it can possibly fit with no regard for the actual applicability to anything.
I suspect that overall it's about as likely to be successful as religious attempts to sell the narrative that teen sex is wrong. Shame and guilt don't really ever teach the lesson that is intended, but those are the only tools the media truly has.
I don't buy the "Media vs Reddit" narrative. I don't think this has anything to do with journalism or even intolerance.
I just don't like hanging out with racists and sexists (in real life or online). If Reddit wants to keep me as a contributor to their site, they need to do something about that or I will not return. I doubt I'm alone in feeling that way.
If we live in a world, this real world, we necessarily live with people we find tasteless and disgusting. If reddit is a world onto itself or if it's a reflection of the real world, then there will be unsavory characters of all types, sexually, philosophically, politically, etc.
I really don't believe in sanitizing reality. I don't believe in intolerance for the intolerant. It's a nice, easy, euthanistic way to make our own little pure vision of the world.
It'd be like the regular news saying, you know what, crime is disgusting, it's repugnant, we're not going to tolerate it on the news. No more violence reporting.
Showing news of violence is not "giving a voice to violence", or terrorists.
What would be the next step, stop misogynist musicians or filmmakers depicting violence, etc., other than in documentaries?
Don't get me wrong, I'd prefer a world where people self moderated and would act decently, but I also fear a world which proscribes received behavior.
> I really don't believe in sanitizing reality. I don't believe in intolerance for the intolerant. It's a nice, easy, euthanistic way to make our own little pure vision of the world.
Are you comparing the internet to reality? Because the internet is not reality, the type of behavior you see on reddit and 4chan may reflect our nature, but it is enabled by anonymity and the complete lack of repercussions. If people behaved the way they do on these boards they would quickly be ostracized by society if not having the shit beaten out of them on a regular basis.
Applying some sort of freedom ideology to internet communities like reddit is not very useful in practice. We have to look at the shape of the internet and recognize that freedom on the internet is not the problem—after all cyberspace is unlimited, you can have infinite communities, and geography is irrelevant. All groups can find a place on the internet, and they will always be able to. We simply don't need to worry about that, and it's silly to wring our hands over the decision to moderate this or that community.
What we do need to worry about is the ability for formerly marginalized sociopaths to hurt other people from the safety of their basement dwelling. Whether it's unending bombardment of harassment or actual physical harm like swatting, we need to get a handle on this. Arguing that hate speech should not be moderated or restricted in any way is sort of like giving equal coverage to crackpot climate change deniers on basis of "fairness".
>If people behaved the way they do on these boards they would quickly be ostracized by society if not having the shit beaten out of them on a regular basis.
If people talked in public the way they do on those boards there might be consequences.
But if people behaved the way they do, they'd probably be voted into office.
We've just had the British Prime Minister give one of the most offensive and hate-filled conference speeches a lot of people have ever seen. His administration is full of people who are questionably sane.
The Chancellor has turned up in Parliament looking like this:
Cameron's colleagues have been directly implicated in starving dying people - some of whom can't walk or speak - to death by claiming they're "able to work" and so shouldn't receive any state aid.
You want physical harm? We've got as much of it as you can bear to read about.
So really, hate speech on Reddit is a non-issue compared to what goes on in supposedly serious politics.
And did I mention the Internet censorship and surveillance? Because we have that too.
In reality free speech isn't a panacea. There are too many crazy people in politics all over the world, and free speech on Reddit or elsewhere has done nothing to keep them out of power.
It's not the basement-dwelling sociopaths with twitchy keyboards you need to worry about - it's the professionals.
For me having different subs with different moderation policies, etc., satisfies both sides of people's needs.
People who want to be civil and interact with other civil people have their subreddits, people who want to engage in uncivility also have their subreddits. I don't see the problem.
Here is what I have noticed. I like forums where people can voice opposing opinions even be unkind but not vile. But I accept that some forums do harbor people who like being vile, either as a persona or their true selves. I avoid those forums/groups/subreddits.
Also, at times some of the offensive people do have great knowledge in their area of expertise, but otherwise can be very offputting and vile. Despite that, I want to be able to have those voices. Certainly I don't want to have them sprinkled all over. So, for as long as they can exist in predictable places and can be sought out or avoided, I'm for that. If push came to shove, I'd have to allow it all over and just have to dig through the noise.
The reason is I don't want proscribed forums. The problems are group-think, shaming, socio-forming, brainwashing. And you can bring out examples of things we want to eradicate, say ideas about terrorism (killing and raping other people indiscriminately or discriminately, as it were) but the thing is there are slippery slopes, grey areas and social movements of the day. Ideas and preferences change over time. I want to allow all those voices, no matter how offensive to be expressed --I don't have to like those ideas. I'm sure I would have a very visceral reaction to most the monsters on hateful forums, but yet, I think there is value in not shutting that off.
That said, reddit has the authority, obviously, to do whatever they like with their platform.
I'm not so sure that is a thing that happens with any great regularity - and I say that because the previously bright line between "this person offended me" and "this person is harassing me" has become a lot more blurry.
Sure, any of us can point at high profile cases, but there's that old saying about anecdotes and data.
The problem with your entire last sentence is that it's full of value judgements, value judgements shaped by your experience as a human and your own knowledge and biases. One person's "hate speech" is another person's "spirited argument", one person's "disagreement" is another person's "harassment".
You might have a very clear definition of "hate speech" in your mind as you write those words, but I'd be willing to bet if you defined it here in the most clear and unambiguous language you possibly could, you'd find perfectly reasonable people disagreeing with it.
And therein is the problem - I'm on the side of that line that leaves people the hell alone in all but the most egregious of cases, because at the end of the day, it's all words on a screen.
Perhaps the rise of microaggression complaints is exaggerated, but one has to wonder where we're headed as a society when the smallest insignificant things are labeled as (micro)-aggressive[1].
I'm loath to live in a culture where people have to walk on eggshells so as to not offer the semblance of offense. I think it's childish and also hypocritical --as if we can expect no one to think or say anything that would ever offend anyone. They never try to be mean to an ex-lover, they would never think bad of someone who ignored them unwittingly, etc.
This is a huge problem and has actually destroyed something very near to me, video games. The oversensitive attitude you mentioned has poisoned online gaming. Personally, I love to talk shit. A well spoken insult is a thing of beauty to me. It is an art, a craft, a science. Talking shit in video games used to be half the fun of playing, now it's unacceptable. What was once a staple of the culture is now it's greatest crime. Gamers today have this word "toxic". We used to have an antonym for that word, it was called "being a pussy". It's like one day everyone just decided to start taking the internet way too seriously. I can't talk shit in my favorite video game, some college student is facing charges because of a joke he made on twitter, and the presidential candidates are getting asked questions from facebook. What the fuck is going on.
The question is, is the locker room, the powder room, the boardroom, etc. growing up?
There is a place for civil discourse and there is a place for people to be as ugly as they want to be or are. Else you're just pretending it does not exist or that you can wish it away.
This is like religious people thinking that if you only think pure thoughts all will be well in the world.
The same people who want to see crime-ridden neighborhoods bulldozed over to bring about the new society where everything is resplendescent, bright and tame and only the good people live and there is no Other. There are no drug abusers, misogynistic men, cruel women, or human traffickers.
I don't really think that the action of sanitizing reddit could be characterized as "pretending it does not exist or that you can wish it away". Its pretty likely that the people that are trying to do that are acutely aware of the presence of the Other.
I also find it curious that you're using the capital o Other. Is that a deliberately existentialist term?
The capital-O Other is our capital-E Enemy. They stand for everything we don't stand for.
Jokes aside, it seems that has been a growing awareness for the concept of "othering," as in emphasizing the difference between your ingroup (AKA Us, AKA people like you) and an outgroup (AKA Them). Unfortunately it has little to do with the relatively benign idea you might be thinking about.
I think it just became popular. I don't think it grew up at all. This all seemed to start happening after the facebook boom and all of my friends suddenly knew what a meme was.
Play dota instead of league, yes you can get communication banned for being abusive but I think largely they just seem to lump all the unpleasant people on teams together.
dota was the first game to mute ban me. I came home after a night of drinking and roleplayed troll warlord at 3 in the morning. I woke up to find myself mutebanned (something I'd never heard of). I had won 2/3 games and had the best stats in all three games. Very quickly I realized that this mute system was automated. A game could start with me unmuted, a teammate could report me because he didn't like the hero I picked or the lane I was going to, even if I hadn't said anything to said teammate, and I would become muted before creeps even spawned. The whole system was supper shoddy and lazily put together. Valve actually responded by posting an essay on why they were right and how the system wasn't automated, but perfect in every way. As a long time fanboy of Valve, I had never seen them do anything like this and I had never seen them post an essay like this. That was the nail in the coffin for me.
Sure. It's complicated. Heck, even just a passive laugh at a funny picture which is totally innocent and non-harmful in person, can become a crushing attack on a person when it goes viral and it's millions upon millions of people doing it.
But just because these issues are messy doesn't give us a license paper over their complexity with reductive founding-father-esque ideology. It's pretty clear to me that in aggregate freedom of speech on the internet is not suffering—people have unprecedented access to spread whatever thoughts they happen to have. Meanwhile an increasing number of people being hurt by internet bullying, harassment, and other anti-social behavior is growing by leaps and bounds in a way that society is not yet equipped to deal with.
In aggregate is not what we're talking about in this instance. "In aggregate", crime is down worldwide, people are living longer than ever. That does not mean focus gets shifted away from individual criminals and diseases.
People being cut off from any medium based on, not because someone was hurt in any tangible way, but because they were offended, is a crying shame, and that goes double when the medium plays at being precisely against that sort of thing.
Source on "anti-social behavior growing by leaps and bounds", and a definition would be nice, too. It seems to me words like "harassment" and "bulling" are being used as stand-ins for things as innocuous as simple incivility.
> it is enabled by anonymity and the complete lack of repercussions. If people behaved the way they do on these boards they would quickly be ostracized by society if not having the shit beaten out of them on a regular basis.
It depends where you do it - if you've ever been in a locker room or out drinking with the boys or the girls, all sorts of things are said and done that are extremely "inappropriate". Now, keeping that sort of thing off the front few pages of /r/all to me seems completely reasonable - banning it from the entire site (as was the plan) is something else entirely.
> All groups can find a place on the internet, and they will always be able to. We simply don't need to worry about that, and it's silly to wring our hands over the decision to moderate this or that community.
A lot of people liked reddit the way it was and didn't really feel like just finding another place on the infinite internet....why can't the SJW's and their ilk who came late to the party go find their own place? It's like renting an apartment beside a bar and then trying to get it shut down because of the noise.
>why can't the SJW's and their ilk who came late to the party go find their own place?
Because their cause is evangelical in nature.
Were it just kept to Tumblr then they wouldn't have much with which to stoke the fires.
SJW's are specifically about pointing out to others where they are wrong/insensitive/racist/sexist/ableist/etc.. if they just kept to themselves then who would they persecute with their 'justice'?
There are all kinds of subs on reddit, ones with anything goes as well as curated ones. If you like civil talk only head on over there, if you like uncivil conversation, head over there. There is no reason they can't coexist, just not in the same sub.
Physical harm is a crime. Some speech is a tort. Very limited aspects of speech are a crime (doxing, some bullying) but aside from those forms, I think it's disingenuous to want to control people's thoughts, no matter how ridiculous.
Climate change deniers are laughably wrong, by the vast majority of accounts and evidence _however_ I would not want them silenced just because they are in the wrong on their opinion or facts. I do not agree with that.
I am glad that reddit, for the most part, has not greatly changed their stand on speech. I understand they have commercial concerns and need to bow to those pressures, but I am glad they allow, by and large, the full spectrum of humanity and inhumanity.
1. I don't think you actually know what a sociopath is. Slapping labels you don't understand on people you don't like is never going to solve your problems.
2. And are you seriously pulling the "cyber bullying" card here?
3. Since when is this a discussion about swatting?
The case seems pretty clear to me. You are free to create any subreddit you see fit, and moderate it however you wish. Why should every existing subreddit be forced to conform to your personal sensitivities? Just go make your own subreddit.
> we necessarily live with people we find tasteless and disgusting.
Sadly, there is a loose but large movement of people who disagree that this is inevitable and tolerable. Lots of people think that human society can and should prevent the distribution of any expression that is considered to exceed some subjective threshold of tastelessness or offensiveness. This movement is, of course, an explicit and unabashed call for rigid suppression of free expression, and is something I oppose wholly.
> I really don't believe in sanitizing reality. I don't believe in intolerance for the intolerant. It's a nice, easy, euthanistic way to make our own little pure vision of the world.
And most people don't believe in hanging out with people they don't like.
You seem to be implying that it's more important for Reddit to represent unsavory people than it is for Reddit to hold onto a larger audience. I think that's ridiculous, because Reddit's purpose is not to be a safe haven for unsavory people, even if they "represent" reality. That might be an admirable goal for sociologists, but it doesn't have to be the goal of any website.
Let's look at something non-controversial like Doctor Who. There's /r/doctorwho, which allows posts like "My cat pretending to be Matt Smith" and "My girlfriend made me this bow-tie - look how cute it is on my cat!".
Then there's /r/gallifrey, which only allows posts about Doctor Who. Then there's a few others (/r/classicwho for episodes before the reboot).
Now, imagine if /r/DoctorWho banned criticism of Moffat. Obviously, all the Moffat haters would get banned, and go to /r/gallifrey. You'd suddenly have a large Moffat hating sub, and a large sub that couldn't understand why every other sub seemed to hate Moffat. These people wouldn't politely debate anything, because they'd get more upvotes and positive responses for attacking the other side than trying to be reasonable.
FWIW, I dislike Moffat, because I think Doctor Who works better in a more episodic format - long arcs don't work when the Tardis is in the mix. But that's not the kind of nuance you get when there's two subs that both have a bunker mentality, throwing bombs at the brainwashed idiots on the other side.
Anyway, reddit is not a "free speech" site. It's a site that lets mods do what they want, for their sub. It's architecture is not one that allows a free, civil discussion of ideas, so much as a place that encourages group-think. (And while you can blame the "SJWs", there were prominent "hate" subs, like Fat People Hate, that behaved the same way - it's just the way the site is designed and run).
Reddit really could create a code of conduct for mods - only ban people / delete posts enforce reddiquette (it's a pretty good guide). Some kind of appeals process could ensure a bit of consistency.
The problem with reddit is the vast number of warring subs who hate each other. To some extent, this is inevitable (some groups just don't like other groups), but the double standards (often on both sides of any debate) just encourages the level of vitriol.
>And most people don't believe in hanging out with people they don't like.
Isn't that one of the problems we find with lots of people we don't like. They are bigots! They don't like anyone who isn't like them.
Yes, reddit surely may do as it pleases. That's their call to make. I'm simply voicing my preference with reason behind it. Facebook could lock out all selfidentifying males living in new York or all selfidentifying females in Uganda, that's their call. I'd be against it, but that's their call to make, sure.
Also, 2channel is at least one site which finds it important to allow unsavory communication large degrees of expression.
I don't subscribe to any of the "hate groups" on Reddit, frankly, I never really noticed it.
But I stopped visiting the site after all of this.
I don't want a sanitized watered down "approved" bull shit feed of news and opinion. Guess what, Reddit, has a mechanism built in to manage site behavior. Its called the Downvote.
But there are sexists and racists both in real life and online. Reddit is like a giant building with many halls for discussions. You don't have to enter or participate in the ones that racism is welcome but you don't need to avoid the building. I don't see it as hanging out together, but using the same tools. Yes the analogy is a bit of a stretch but I hope you get my point.
In short, IMHO, reddit is a tool and tools don't have political statements to make.
As a heavy reddit user for the past 5 or 6 years I'd say the issue of intolerance on reddit is not entirely the fact that there are subreddits for racist or sexist ideals. What bothers me most is the way racism and sexism has seeped into the general site culture. The large subreddits which appear on an unregistered user's frontpage are full of comments and submissions whose magnitude of upvotes paint a picture of a casually intolerant status quo.
Using your analogy, I'm not upset because I can walk into a hall called "coontown" and see racism; I'm upset because I walk into a hall called "videos" or "worldnews" and see people throwing around stereotypes of women and minorities with great prejudice behind their words. Since I've been using reddit for some time now there has been a very noticeable shift in the status quo when it comes to the level of discourse and the amount of hate speech that shows up, and I'm really not happy with it.
> I'm upset because I walk into a hall called "videos" or "worldnews" and see people throwing around stereotypes of women and minorities with great prejudice behind their words
These subreddits are big enough that their userbases are converging toward a statistically-normal sampling of the world population. To the degree to which the world contains prejudiced people, so will large subreddits. To the degree to which the world contains groups that venerate prejudice, prejudiced comments on large subreddits will be upvoted.
The big difference between a large subreddit, and the world-at-large, is that the majority cannot hang the implicit threat of mob violence over a disliked minority. In the world-at-large, disliked minorities usually meet in secret because they fear what would happen if they were outspoken in the presence of the majority. On a subreddit, there is no such fear to throttle behavior. As long as that fact remains true, large open online communities will always be outspoken-minority cesspools.
>These subreddits are big enough that their userbases are converging toward a statistically-normal sampling of the world population.
How is this information relevant to the experience of the user? If we transplant your explanation to any other user experience, does it work?
"I don't go to Best Buy anymore. It's full of people shouting racist things, men talking about beating women, and general prejudice againt minorities."
That's a broken expectation; pretty much no other "business" has an unsharded, all-to-all visible userbase large enough to get these effects. (I can only think of one: Youtube.)
The more direct comparison, to me, would be a city that has drug dealers and homeless people. Every city has them, because they live at the fringes of everything large enough to be called a "city." It's not a matter of choosing to live in some other city (not shopping at Best Buy, in your terminology); the only option for avoiding the pitfalls of city life is to avoid cities altogether.
>That's a broken expectation; pretty much no other "business" has an unsharded, all-to-all visible userbase large enough to get these effects.
Telling your userbase that they shouldn't expect what they expect is rarely a successful strategy. Again, what does Reddit's unique position as an all-visible userbase have to do with the actual experience of the user? We can make excuses and explanations for why Reddit is the way it is, but that doesn't ultimately address the fact that Reddit, despite being massively popular now, also hosts content so horribly offensive that it risks alienating both common users and advertisers.
Your city analogy doesn't quite fit. People who live in a city are often 'stuck' there for far more important reasons (money, family, culture) than the reasons people stick to a website. And we know it's easy for a website with a massive userbase to collapse, because we've seen it many times over the years.
Some things are social problems that can't be resolved with technology but I don't think reddit's casual racism and sexism is one of them. Borrow from HN: Add site-wide flags for content you consider unacceptable that only users with $x comment karma can use. Borrow from Dota 2: If a user is flagged enough don't shadow ban them, just make their comments invisible to everyone except those who are also flagged. They can make their terrible comments to and with each other.
HN is going to provide the ability to counter-flag as well as moderator intervention in cases of abuse. If your power users are abusing their flagging privilege they lose it.
That will probably work on Hacker News. That will almost certainly not work on Reddit. The scales involved are just not even in the same universe as each other, and that's before any discussion of the corruption or other problems on the latter site.
Again, the user does not care. The user sees blatant racism and sexism being tolerated, and in some cases celebrated, think the place is full of that, and leaves, never to return again.
Oh, I certainly do see how it's a problem; but it will be a problem with anything trying to compete with, or replace, Reddit just as much. I'm not too concerned with whether Reddit lives or dies; that's up to their PR department.
I'm concerned, instead, with the user attitude of attempting to move on to the "next big community" to avoid the problems with the last. If Reddit dies, and the thing after it dies, and the thing after that dies—I hope we eventually stop and look at what we're doing and realize that there's no point in this "grass is greener" pursuit of a utopian community, when these problems eventually face every community at scale. At some point, I hope we just sit down and try to maintain the community we've got (turning it into a society), rather than thinking that rebuilding it with slightly different rules but the same microcosm of people will help.
>At some point, I hope we just sit down and try to maintain the community we've got (turning it into a society), rather than thinking that rebuilding it with slightly different rules but the same microcosm of people will help.
I think this is accomplished with the ability to create new Subreddits. To my mind, the best way to separate the nasty parts of Reddit with the profitable ones is heavy moderation for the defaults, free reign for the non-defaults, and charge money for access to private subreddits. If a particular subreddit draws too much controversy, force it private.
>These subreddits are big enough that their userbases are converging toward a statistically-normal sampling of the world population.
Do you really think the makeup of a large subreddit mirrors the real world? I would be my life savings that they are still predominantly white men on these subreddits.
I think the only problem here is that not everyone can handle the internet. And worse, instead of realizing this, they expect websites to cater to their special needs. They are expecting websites to babysit them, to put people they don't like on timeouts, to exclude participation from anyone they don't like. This has been a huge issue since the internet became popularized. Things were not always this way.
To quote another one of your comments: "The case seems pretty clear to me. You are free to create any subreddit you see fit, and moderate it however you wish. Why should every existing subreddit be forced to conform to your personal sensitivities? Just go make your own subreddit."
So, why don't you create your own internet? You really could if you wanted to.
It seems like you feel entitled to the internet, whereas people on the other side can't feel entitled to generic subreddits?
>Using your analogy, I'm not upset because I can walk into a hall called "coontown" and see racism; I'm upset because I walk into a hall called "videos" or "worldnews" and see people throwing around stereotypes of women and minorities with great prejudice behind their words. Since I've been using reddit for some time now there has been a very noticeable shift in the status quo when it comes to the level of discourse and the amount of hate speech that shows up, and I'm really not happy with it.
What do you expect to happen when you start removing those halls where people can go talk freely about it?
It's not like the subscribers suddenly disappear when you ban a subreddit. They stay there, but without a place for the content they like they will take that same content to other places.
As I see it, the issues are mainly caused by SRS being allowed to police the site. Not only closing "venting chambers" but also causing a lot of backlash and increasingly severe behaviour due to their harassment. Harassment on the level of harassing or threatening family, friends, and co-workers of their target.
I don't use r/videos, but r/worldnews is the youtube of reddit: full of bigoted, intolerant, can-barely-form-a-coherent-thought, what's-spelling posts. In my experience, it has remained pretty much consistent over time.
> I'm upset because I walk into a hall called "videos" or "worldnews" and see people throwing around stereotypes of women and minorities with great prejudice behind their words
Yeah, well I'm upset because I walk into a hall called 'politics' and see people throwing around stereotypes about anyone who's not a coastal leftist with great prejudice behind their words.
I am, actually. I remember when one could actually have a somewhat decent political conversation in /r/politics. But, well, that's life.
Perhaps it helps to think of the subreddit labels as merely suggestions. Each community is what it is, despite its label.
> Since I've been using reddit for some time now there has been a very noticeable shift in the status quo when it comes to the level of discourse and the amount of hate speech that shows up, and I'm really not happy with it.
Are you sure this isn't just a personal bias? None of this is new on reddit, the volume has increased, sure.. but so has the general userbase of the site.
Reddit isn't static. I think the whole fatpeoplehate debacle and it's preceding growth demonstrated that reddit is capable of generating large, biased communities that can dominate the site.
Put bluntly, the problem (as much as opinions can be a problem) is of your own creation - you want to impose your standards of behavior and decorum on strangers on the internet.
And that's fine, there's a widely-accepted and successful mechanism for doing that: creation of your own community which you can gatekeep as you see fit. If enough people agree with you, perhaps it'll even eclipse the original!
This can just as easily be turned around. Why do people who spout racism get to impose that standard of behavior and decorum on those who want to discuss video? Why does racist or sexist discussion trump relevant content in a content-specific forum?
You're right about the problem -- the problem at its root is that some people feel that having no standards that deprecate these off-topic discussions is equivalent to free speech which is equivalent to freedom, while others feel that some standards that keep people "polite" (for lack of a better word) and on-topic are useful to the discussion. You are not necessarily right about who created the problem. Why not say it's the people who want to be racist in the video forum who created the problem? Why don't they create their own community as you suggest? Because part of their desire is to spread their ideas -- they don't actually want to stay on-topic or primarily discuss video, they want to get a rise out of other people. It's engagement in bad faith, really.
> This can just as easily be turned around. Why do people who spout racism get to impose that standard of behavior and decorum on those who want to discuss video? Why does racist or sexist discussion trump relevant content in a content-specific forum?
It can be easily turned around, but it can't be reasonably turned around.
It's reasonable to expect someone to simply not participate in a community whose culture they don't agree with.
It is NOT reasonable to expect that community to be forced into the behavior that an individual, or a small number of individuals, disagrees with.
I can tell you right now I'm a huge fan of vim, but I stopped posting on /r/vim several years ago due to the behavior I saw from some posters there.
I don't post much oh /r/programming for much the same reason. Or /r/politics.
Your problem is in not understanding that reddit gives you the TOOLS to curate your own experience. It sounds like you haven't been putting much effort into it, and you've, understandably, been inundated with shit. Which is why so many of us DO curate our own experience.
I'm not sure that's possible. The only other option that comes to mind is asking people what their interests are and subscribing them to those rather than the same set for everyone, but then all you've done is create de-facto, topic-based defaults.
You could show people random content, but that's both not PC from a business standpoint and would lead to the outright destruction of smaller communities.
The thing about communities is that they don't always do the thing that you want them to. You can always start your own subreddit and fork the community if you want to.
Seriously, though, I find this is rarely a debate worth having, and certainly not in the quip-centric, 3 sentences or less culture that makes up Internet discussion boards. I would much rather pursue systemic solutions to problems like this than embark on trying to convert anonymous strangers.
If reddit means so much to you that you're willing to spend the time brigading against it, be my guest. Just don't be surprised with many people (most?) don't want to put that sort of emotional investment into a news aggregation site.
>Or, better still, don't unsubscribe, and instead challenge the intolerance and prejudice.
Good lord, no. 99% of the "intolerance and prejudice" is from out-and-out trolls. They're posting because they want to see a bunch of angry denunciations. Don't give them what they want.
No, I don't believe that is an acceptable solution to the problem. Especially from Reddit's point of view, where they want users to stay and therefore generate revenue.
I understand your issue is with the underlying platform and it's users, however, RES will allow you to setup filters by word- across all subs. I believe alienblue (the reddit client for iOS) allows for this functionality as well.
Those two are very large, general subs. You find sexism and racism in them as you would in any other semi-randomly sampled population extracted from the planet. You're actually angry that the subs are large enough to contain people whose opinions you don't agree with, which is exactly like the real world.
So what exactly are you proposing. Are you saying that the large subreddits that appear on the front page should be replaced with other subs because the moderators aren't doing a good enough job of excluding the kind of participation you want them to exclude?
Most of the sub reddits I hangout in don't have those tones or maybe I'm used to ignoring those types of comments online. I think any community starts to have those problems as they grow. HN isn't immune but it's still a small enough niche that we tend to still get higher quality comments than your average site. If you're in r/funny you're going to get comments from the lowest of the low just like youtube. I don't see it as a reddit issue it's more of a human nature problem. When you get enough of people in one area you're going to find the assholes.
I don't see those issues either, OTOH I have a tendency to stick with specific subreddits of interest to me.
I've never viewed reddit as a community, but as a community of communities, and I've always chosen to be a part of specific communities, ignore others, and stay the hell away from yet others.
I don't go anywhere near /r/politics or /r/programming, for example. I just can't deal with the people in either. But I love me some /r/cpp and /r/startrek.
Pretty much this - at least it was while I still used reddit.
The default large communities were crap, not because of any "-ism" as the article states, but because people were just plain disagreeable, non-contributing assholes, up to and including the moderation staff. It's the YouTube comments problem, writ large.
> I don't buy the "Media vs Reddit" narrative. I don't think this has anything to do with journalism or even intolerance.
Right, it's about selling ads. Reddit wants to keep its users (who want free speech) which sells ads. But Reddit also wants a PC site, which sells ads. Newspapers want to whip a popular whipping boy because it sells ads. They're all morally bankrupt: none of them care about the other or intolerance.
> I just don't like hanging out with racists and sexists (in real life or online). If Reddit wants to keep me as a contributor to their site, they need to do something about that or I will not return. I doubt I'm alone in feeling that way.
You're welcome to unsubscribe from racist and sexist subreddits. You're also welcome to subscribe to TwoXChromosomes and other similar subreddits. I'm literally subscribed to 4 very specific interest subreddits that don't tolerate hate speech and I haven't encountered a comment that could be even construed as racist or sexist that I can remember since shortly after I created an account.
So let's stop pretending that this isn't about you not wanting to hang out with racists and sexists: that's easily within your power by using the services Reddit offers. Let's admit that this is about silencing racists and sexists.
I don't have any skin in this game (the subreddits I subscribe to could easily be replaced by going back to the bulletin boards I used in the early 2000s) so I really don't care if Reddit crashes and burns, or if they have free speech: it's just not a platform that I care about. But I do think it's a bit disingenuous for people to pretend this isn't a free speech issue.
Do you ever visit YouTube? Some of the worst comments I have ever read have been on YouTube?
Its up to the reader to decide what they want to read. Usually I skim over the bad comments and talk about what I want. Ignore the rest even if they PM you.
Do what, exactly? Prevent you from getting linked to racist or sexist threads? Because almost certainly the only way you see racist or sexist content on reddit. You will very rarely see it on the logged out front page (the big reddit blowup is obviously a major exception), and probably rarely in any threads on default subs unless you deliberately browse the heavily downvoted comments.
> I just don't like hanging out with racists and sexists. If Reddit wants to keep me as a contributor to their site, they need to do something about that or I will not return. I doubt I'm alone in feeling that way.
Many, many people think Tech has a sexism problem.
The logic you are applying to Reddit would in theory require you to leave HN as well. It would also apply to any venue that is commonly felt to have a sexism and/or racism problem.
Leaving because a subset of a given population is a "problem" is silly.
Look at the numbers of women or racial minorities in tech: in fact, exactly what you suggest happens. It's unfortunate that you think it's "silly" but everyone's got to live their life and subjecting oneself to constant discomfort just doesn't appeal to everyone.
Really? I work at a software house. Looking around me in my room, right now I can count: 8 males and 7 females. Overall I suspect we do have more guys in the company but by a very small margin.
Have you considered that the issue you're looking at is not a tech industry issue but rather a country-specific issue? Most studies I've read about it seem to have been made in the US.
You may not be alone in feeling that way, but that doesn't mean that being on the internet means that you're "hanging out" with everybody on the internet.
You hang out with racists and sexists in real life and online. You just are not comfortable acknowledging that others can have opinions you consider racist and sexist and still be human. Were you to actually probe your friends about their beliefs, you'd likely come across some that have beliefs that are incredibly sexist in your view, and that's okay.
For example, some of my friends believe that spaces need to be made 'safe' for women, and that means you cannot make any joke that references rape. Some of my friends are dark humored rape survivors, and find spaces where they cannot make those comments unsafe. I am friends with both of them, and they are friends with each other, despite disagreeing vehemently on what and where those spaces are. When they are around each other, neither of them can consider the space they reside 'safe', and yet, they survive.
This might be counterproductive, but hopefully it isn't (and is, at worst, neutral):
by "racists" and "sexists", do you mean these terms based on the beliefs of those described, or are you including things like, subconscious(?) biases, (which one might be trying to correct in oneself)?
It seems like it might be useful to have two different terms for the two concepts?
But maybe this is not a context where this would be a useful addition.
the emotional state of a listener is the responsibility of the speaker
The desire for consequence-free speech is hypocritical in the extreme, as it requires that others refrain from speech in order that you may suffer no consequences for saying whatever you like.
People, on Reddit and elsewhere, are generally free to speak their minds. If their words produce an emotional state in their listeners, should the listeners be required to remain silent in order to avoid potentially causing the speaker to feel a sense of responsibility for their actions?
Nobody asked that the listeners remain silent, merely that they:
* Respect the right of the speaker to speak
* Take responsibility for their own prejudices and mental state
If someone on the internet is saying things you (the collective "you") don't like on a social network of any note, you're a button click or two away from never, ever seeing anything that person has to say ever again.
The problem is thus solved.
..unless the problem was not that someone was saying things you don't like and wished you didn't have to see that, but that they said something you didn't like and you want to retaliate in some way against the speaker.
I'm not sure if you realize, but reddit has actually banned this speech. Not doing that would not force the listeners to "be required to remain silent", they could
1. Not go to the subs that have such speech, and only frequent subs that have enforced rules against such speech (of which there are many, and people are free to create their own)
2. If they feel a burning need to go to a sub that has speech they don't like, they're free to respond to that speech (unless that subs bans opposing speech, which is rare), vote on it, etc.
As I mentioned, there are plenty of subs that ban specific types of speech. If you see a banned type of speech on such a sub, you can report it directly to the mods.
No, the listeners are very welcome to express themselves, but I still see no possibility of the emotional state of the listener being the responsibility of the speaker.
>and that the emotional state of a listener is the responsibility of the speaker
Reddit is not a nonprofit Free Speech machine. It's a business. So, yes, the emotional state of the listener -- in so far as that emotional state (positive or negative) is a determiner of traffic and therefore returns for investors -- is the responsiblity of the speaker (the website itself).
I thought by now we had shed our idealism about platforms and corporations. We've mocked Google's now-defunct "Don't Be Evil" for years. The idea that Facebook is just a way for distant friends to stay connected has been subsumed by the reality that it's actually a privacy nightmare. But the myth that Reddit exists as a bastion of free speech at all costs has somehow held firm. It's puzzling.
Even John Stuart Mill, one of the biggest proponents of free speech philosophy, was okay in limiting free speech when allowing it would harm or cause damage to others. SCOTUS has also explicitly stated that first amendment (gov censorship) rights do not apply to threats of violence.
The reddit execs have said as much through their communications, that they're okay with allowing hateful and biased communities so long as they're not targeting, damaging, or causing harm to individuals.
People are misinterpreting that as reddit being a "bastion of free speech" without fully understanding what free speech really is.
"harm or cause damage" has been redefined such that what this now means is "free speech as long as it's positive". These days, making someone feel bad is considered harm. Obvious hyperbole such as you would use with your friends is considered a serious threat. With these kinds of qualifications/limitations of free speech, what's left is something else.
John Stuart Mill even acknowledged this by disseminating between harm and offense, the former of which trumps free speech and the latter of which doesn't.
Burning flags and racist remarks are discomforting, yes, but sending an individual death threats and stalking them is harmful. Reddit admins asserted that the latter behavior was happening.
..but then they turn around and flatten said communities out of annoyance.
A lot of subreddits with the same idea as FatPeopleHate got swept up in their ban despite being run by different people and having never harassed anyone. A racist subreddit was banned out of some vague argument of being the focus of a lot of their time. (In other words, not for violating the rules.)
It feels very much like another instance of what intopieces just described, a transparent PR lie.
Dox? From what I've understood a user got annoyed with them removing images so a collage¹ were created using the pictures from the, now removed, Imgur "meet the team" page².
That's exactly the point - they're banning behavior, not ideas. They didn't ban all racist or biased communities, just the ones that they saw causing harmful and damaging behavior. Or evading the bans.
And before you demand internal information, just imagine the witch hunt that would start if Reddit had released the evidence of such behavior. That would have caused even more harm, even against innocent bystanders.
The fact that they selectively banned communities based on their behavior and not their ideas proves they are for free speech, but it's not the "bastion of free speech" that some people interpret it as.
Nope. I assumed you already knew that you couldn't prove they didn't break the rules when the admins said they did. Unless you think you can prove it without internal information.
It was also pretty obvious that they were attaching the imgur staff.
You hit almost all of the in vogue anti-free speech equivocations except the "fire in a crowded theater" argument.
Regardless, you've just moved the goalposts from "what is free speech" to "what is violent speech" which contributes nothing to the conversation but adds the specter of "danger", which throughout history has been mostly used by those who wish to curtail political speech under the guise of "safety".
> Even John Stuart Mill, one of the biggest proponents of free speech philosophy, was okay in limiting free speech when allowing it would harm or cause damage to others. SCOTUS has also explicitly stated that first amendment (gov censorship) rights do not apply to threats of violence.
The SCOTUS and John Stuart Mill would limit the prohibition to actual harm and actual damage and actual threats. Being made to feel excluded from a community isn't harm, having your ethical lapses exposed isn't damage (or at least, it is not actionable), and being told your opinions suck is not a threat of violence.
> The reddit execs have said as much through their communications, that they're okay with allowing hateful and biased communities so long as they're not targeting, damaging, or causing harm to individuals.
That is a fair summary of their words. However, a fair summary of their actions is that they will allow those communities to exist until they become embarrassing for Reddit, and then the banhammer comes down.
And yet here they are, "censoring" their site to rid itself of content that makes advertisers recoil. Corporate myths exist because the organization benefits from their propogation. Reddit likes to tout itself as a bastion of free speech, but all of us can read the writing on the wall: unfettered free speech is unpalatable to the groups that fund such platforms.
To be fair, most of the things they deleted were also unpalatable to the vast majority of users, not just advertisers, and many were actively detracting from Reddit as a whole. Why shouldn't Reddit be allowed to do what is best for the group? They have no obligation to provide anything to trolls.
Excellent point. Advertisers don't act unilaterally to content based on morality they came up with themselves. Ultimately they are concerned with the perception of their brand by the same people who visit the website and experience the "offensive" content.
The people who are asking for the offensive content to remain on the site are not asking for "free speech" because Reddit isn't free. They're asked for "sponsored speech" -- they want the people who pay for the servers (directly) to sponsor their hate speech, or the hate speech of others.
If this is how Reddit would like to run things, it should become a non-profit and operate on donations. I'm a member of three websites that feature message boards and operate like this. No ads, no data tracking, all funded by donations. The rules vary in strictness among them.
The site is a community and is only profitable at the whim of its users. Those users were pitched the idea of a "Free Speech Machine." If the company Reddit doesn't deliver on that promise, the users will go somewhere else- as demonstrated by the Pao blackouts.
Don't be so eager to defend a corporation's right to be profitable. They also have to satisfy their customers/users.
The Pao blackouts were orchestrated by the moderators, a group whose influence I did fail to consider. They're essentially Reddit's paying users, insofar as they pay with their time. Advertisers pay the server cost, though, so I imagine that in an all out battle between the two, Reddit would switch to being completely closed. I understand the community aspect has a wide appeal, but I wonder how much of the revenue-generating userbase exploits that aspect. Are most users subscribed to communities they choose, or are most users subscribed only to the default subreddits?
>Don't be so eager to defend a corporation's right to be profitable.
I neither condemn nor defend. I'm only interested in getting a realistic view of how Reddit plans to proceed as a company and website. Part of that is analyzing who is making decisions and who is influencing those who make decisions.
With the advent of the internet, even the smallest minority has been given a voice. This has done great things for spreading information and ideas (e.g. Arab Spring), but it has also given a platform for spreading bias and hate as well. I'm not talking about name calling or childish acts, but threats of violence and damaging behavior.
This increased noise is easy to ignore until you become the focus of it, which is why private website owners are taking steps to protect individuals from harm over allowing a blank check for freedom of speech.
If anything - it revelaed very clearly the force of power and corruption that governments have -- just like OWS in the US.
Man, OWS was a truly eye-opening event that really showed the power of the Oligarchy (The Fed) in the US.
So, while not much change actually happened from wither the Arab Spring or the OWS movements -- at least we know now where the common man stands. That information will really gel over time in the minds of all men and I think changes the world-view of most people in such a way that people now know what institutions are against humanity.
> One current dominant media narrative is that any sort of intolerant thought is intolerable, and that the emotional state of a listener is the responsibility of the speaker.
Speaking out against gay-marriage is intolerant. Threatening blacks or publicly shaming fat people is violent speech. Violent speech is not a problem because of the "emotional state of the listener". It is a problem because it creates an atmosphere of fear, and fear is a means of oppression. Sure, fear is an emotional state. But if I point a gun to your head, I think most would agree that society should place the blame on your emotional state in my gun-holding hand.
> which is why it is a narrative, not actual reporting
Except that this is actual reporting. I had never read anything (good or bad) about Reddit (wasn't interested) until I started visiting the site (which has lots of great stuff, too), and was amazed at what was going on there. Because most threats weren't aimed at me, I found it fascinating, but I could clearly see how it could really make others afraid.
> Shame and guilt don't really ever teach the lesson that is intended, but those are the only tools the media truly has.
Shaming those who create an atmosphere of fear is not a goal. The goal is to take that fear away. Besides, it seems like you're bemoaning the fact that some sort of speech is more effective than others. Maybe that's a lesson for those who call for free verbal-abuse-and-bullying to make better use of their speech? They should most certainly regard this as a lesson.
I don't dig generic jabs at fat people since it's in bad taste (calling out fat people that try to say being fat is healthy is another thing entirely) but I'm not sure how it's "violent".
To go off on a bit of a tangent: Don't get me wrong, I know the power words have since I was bullied for several years. I also understand how much of a struggle weight loss can be. But part of the reason that those words are so powerfully negative for a fat person is because of the shame they already feel for being obese, unhealthy and having no self control.
Besides the rare medical exception these people are in a bad place mentally and physically. Hiding external confirmation of what you already know about yourself doesn't do anything but reenforce the downward spiral of self destruction.
Are you tolerant of other peoples' religious beliefs? If so to what extent?
I find people are quick to defend certain religious beliefs and people's right to believe in them; but start drawing lines where religious beliefs don't mingle well with their own personal beliefs.
For example - a Jew's right to avoid pork and shellfish is respected but the right for an evangelical Christian to avoid people they see as ultimate sinners who could soil them and send them to hell for eternity is completely disregarded and not tolerated at all.
>It is a problem because it creates an atmosphere of fear
If I were a hell-fearing Christian I would be very understanding of being afraid of going to Hell and being afraid of anyone who might increase my chances of doing so.
The issue is you do not have a concept of sin or that your interpretation of the Bible (and thus sin) differs from theirs. From their religious perspective, you're in the wrong. You're a sinner - and a good Christian doesn't listen to sinners. That's how you go to Hell. From their perspective it's very logical to not want to go to Hell and to condemn sinners.
The issue stems from you not being tolerant or understanding of their religious beliefs.
What's my point here? It's that arguing between right or wrong will depend entirely on beliefs. You believe you are right so they must be intolerant - they believe they are right so you must be intolerant.
> people they see as ultimate sinners who could soil them and send them to hell for eternity is completely disregarded and not tolerated at all.
And if that were true, this could be an actual problem (don't think "soiling" is a thing in Christianity). In any case, no one who wants to tolerate anything means that it takes precedence over everything else. Some cultures allow murdering unfaithful women. Even the most tolerant of free societies would not tolerate that, yet that doesn't make it intolerant. Society doesn't operate according to boolean logic and values have relative importance.
> The issue stems from you not being tolerant or understanding of their religious beliefs.
But I am tolerant of their expressing their beliefs. I'm all for Reddit allowing intolerance. I'm against it allowing mobs of intimidation.
> It's that arguing between right or wrong will depend entirely on beliefs.
Except I'm not arguing about right or wrong. I'm arguing about building an effective community (or a society) that can function well, given the composition of its members.
If someone feels uncomfortable in a community where threats of rape are not acceptable and would rather spend time in a community that enjoys bullying and threats, it stands to reason that they should form a separate community and not spend time with the 99.9% of people who feel different.
>For example - a Jew's right to avoid pork and shellfish is respected but the right for an evangelical Christian to avoid people they see as ultimate sinners who could soil them and send them to hell for eternity is completely disregarded and not tolerated at all.
The right for evangelican Christians to avoid people they see as sinners is respected just as much as the right for Jews to avoid pork and shellfish is; nobody forces a Jewish person to eat pork, and nobody forces evangelical Christians to interact with sinners.
The right of evangelical Christians to enforce their beliefs on others, i.e. by making it illegal for homosexuals to get married, is a very different right, and you haven't made an argument for why that right should be respected at all; should Jews be allowed to shut down a restaurant just because that restaurant happens to serve pork or shellfish?
>you haven't made an argument for why that right should be respected at all
That's because I don't think it should be. You're entirely missing the point of my argument and why arguing from morals and right/wrong is completely pointless. You're arguing about enforcing beliefs - I'm arguing about what is and isn't immoral and how people treat behaviors they deem to be moral or immoral. It's only immoral when you don't agree with it. If you thought homosexuality was a sin and marriage should be banned defending the cause is moral. Enforcing beliefs would be impossible because everyone has their own beliefs and there would be contradictions everywhere.
I'll use a different example, since people are missing my point entirely.
A despised terrorist to one group of people is a glorified hero to another. The only difference is which group you belong to.
It's all a matter of perspective and shouting down about how immoral or intolerant they are being will change nothing from their perspective because you are in the wrong. Not them.
Tolerating a homosexual in their presence goes against their beliefs. It's a sin to tolerate such a presence. You are asking them to sin and go to hell. I can easily understand why they might not so willing to sin and go to hell, no matter how politely you ask.
>Tolerating a homosexual in their presence goes against their beliefs.
But nobody has said that evangelical Christians have to tolerate the presence of homosexuals? Unless there's been a movement to ban homosexuals from doing things like being in public spaces; I'm not currently aware of any such movement, although I admit that I'm not really up on such things. If somebody doesn't want to be in the presence of a homosexual, then they can arrange their life in such a way that they never need to do that, and I don't think anybody is really going to force them to do something like travel to San Francisco to watch a pride parade.
edit: I guess I'm not sure what your argument is, because you say that you're not talking about enforcing beliefs and then you say that evangelical christians are forced to interact with homosexuals.
Tolerance of everything is impossible. You have to be intolerant of certain beliefs or practices in order to tolerate others. What you choose to tolerate come down to little more then your personal beliefs. Saying something is intolerant is ultimately an empty statement.
>Speaking out against gay-marriage is [against my] beliefs
>Promoting gay marriage is intolerant [to Christian beliefs]
Allowing gays to marry - regardless if Christians have to be around these gays or not is against their beliefs. Not being respective of their beliefs is intolerant (this is a must, and intolerance is not necessarily a bad thing any more than tolerance is a good thing)
I tried to be as succinct as possible.
E:
I feel this is a necessary disclaimer after re-reading this response, lest I offend any Christians who are tolerant of homosexuals... Not all Christians...there are too many branches and sub-branches with different opinions, I use it as a blanket term for the specific (and known to exist) branches that are intolerant of homosexuals and hope it is taken as such for the sake of communication.
> But nobody has said that evangelical Christians have to tolerate the presence of homosexuals?
Laws exist saying that public businesses must serve all customers without discrimination, there has been a lot of controversy over, for example, a baker refusing to make a cake for a gay couples wedding.
This is an example where government enforced capitalism has been enshrined in law and it is a good thing. Discrimination distorts the market in horrible ways, American history has plenty of examples of stores discriminating meaning other stores pop up providing substandard non-competitive service to a population.
>a baker refusing to make a cake for a gay couples wedding.
>This is an example where government enforced capitalism has been enshrined in law and it is a good thing.
No, it's a government-enforced liability, it has nothing to do with capitalism (if anything, it's borderline anti-capitalistic). The fact that the second store serving the disenfranchised is substandard or non-competitive has nothing to do with the fact that the original store would not serve some population. A third store could also service those disenfranchised by the first and unsatisfied by the second. That's capitalism. Now if there's some kind of regulation limiting the number of stores, that's anti-capitalistic government action (a government-sanctioned oligopoly of sorts).
Let's say the baker decides to close their business rather than be forced to serve some group of people. Is that baker still obligated to make that cake? Why? What if the baker moves their business to a region that allows personal biases, is the baker obligated to bake that cake?
Your example is more akin to stores requiring patrons to wear shirt and shoes to receive service. Potential customers are being discriminated against here for an arbitrary reason based on some ideal of what is considered public decency. Do you think that a Muslim store requiring female customers to wear a burqa is discriminatory, or are they practicing freedom of religion? Does the government forcing the Muslim store to allow female customers without a burqa violate the first amendment?
> there has been a lot of controversy over, for example, a baker refusing to make a cake for a gay couples wedding.
A better example is a wedding planner or a marriage counselor. At some point, the freedom of speech and freedom of association comes into play and cannot be disentangled from the services provided. Saying a marriage counselor has to help save marriages or close up shop is to ban people with certain beliefs from certain occupations.
Sure, but that's still a choice that evangelical christians are making; they choose to run a public business, which means they have to interact with the public. If they're not comfortable doing that, then they don't have to run a public business.
> If they're not comfortable doing that, then they don't have to run a public business.
On the other hand, you're implicitly banning a certain class of people from owning a certain kind of business. I'm not sure why that's the most tolerant option.
A ban you choose to participate in (since it by definition only affects people who choose to be devout Christians to the extent that even interacting with homosexuals is forbidden, a philosophy which I'm not at all confident is in the bible, who also choose to own a business devoted to serving the public) seems more tolerant than a ban which is forced upon you (since nobody chooses their sexual orientation).
Do you disagree? I'm not arguing that it's completely tolerant, but unfortunately we have a case where one person completely refuses to tolerate the mere existence of another so I think it's clear that one hundred percent toleration is off the table. Since one person is choosing to be intolerant and the other isn't, it doesn't seem unreasonable at all to place restrictions on the person making the choice; if they feel that the inconveniences are too much, they're obviously welcome to rethink their choice. You can't really ask that of a gay person.
>but the right for an evangelical Christian to avoid people they see as ultimate sinners who could soil them and send them to hell for eternity is completely disregarded and not tolerated at all.
If there are any Christians who actually believe this, then they clearly have not read their gospels. Jesus, in word and deed, emphasized being around people who are sinners. The only people he ever pushed away were those who were abusing religion for their own gain.
And entrance to Hell is not gained by being around or talking to sinners. If this were true, Christianity would have died out because its members would not have been able to talk to anyone outside the group, and therefore would have had zero converts. The reasons for going to Hell vary based on what part of the Bible you read or what theologian you favor, but all the reasons can basically be summed up as the individual rejecting God in some way. People aren't sent to Hell just because they picked up cooties from some random sinner.
In short, your example is incredibly ridiculous and has no theological basis. Yes, some Christians separate themselves from the world. Some enjoy playing the "holier than thou" game. Even for people like that, none of them would think they were in danger of eternal damnation for spending time around a gay person.
>In short, your example is incredibly ridiculous and has no theological basis.
That's really beside the point, isn't it? If they believe something, however wrong it is in your eyes, it's still what they believe. Of course there's no reason to accommodate people whose beliefs actively affect someone else, but people have a right to refuse associations for any reason.
True, and pointing a gun isn't firing it, and some people feel even guns don't require regulation. But that doesn't mean verbal violence doesn't cause real harm and shouldn't be regulated, and in fact, it is regulated in virtually all free societies (and even non-free ones). The debate is on the degree to which it should be regulated, and this varies from one society to another.
In any case, the ideal of free speech originated in the desire to share novel ideas and speak truth to power. It's sad to see the same term used to justify tolerating bullying by angry mobs.
The idea of "verbal violence", especially on the internet, is absurd on its face. On every social network that matters, permanently dismissing someone from your attention who's committing "verbal violence" against you is a mouse click or two away.
Call it what it is: People saying mean things on the internet.
> She describes how the effects of the harassment she has received have been life-changing. Her personality has changed long-term. She describes panic and fear and horror. She feared the abusers would find her and carry out the threats. She felt hunted. She remembers feeling terror every time the doorbell rang. She has had to spend substantial time and money ensuring she is as untrackable as possible. She gives a detailed and personal account of the physical effects of the fear on her. The emails from Sorley and Nimmo (she says) are imprinted on her mind – “I don’t think I will ever be free of them”. It is a moving, detailed, and entirely understandable account of the effect of these crimes on her.
> These offences have caused serious and entirely predictable harm to her.
> The effect on Stella Creasy has also been substantial. She became concerned for her safety to the extent that she had to alter her behaviour. She had a panic button installed in her home. She describes the effect of the crimes on her public duties, on her staff, and on her family. Again the offences have caused serious and entirely predictable harm to her.
Most people on the receiving reading words on a screen do not react this way. I wonder why? Perhaps Criado-Perez is an exceptionally sensitive individual.
Hm, reading further:
The messages were posted on a number of different sites, and continued after being blocked and or warned.
This goes well beyond "saying mean things on the internet" at that point, and is also well beyond the level of what this conversation is about. The behavior described in your link is nothing short of stalking. Something which is rightly already against the law.
(And I think you know that, and I think your accusation of "lying" is especially troublesome in that regard)
We're not talking about stalking and actively attempting to make someone else afraid for their life.
It is important to understand that those who have power rarely need to exert it over others physically. Intimidation is enough, and is common in nature, too. Any sort of physical struggle bears a lot of risk for both sides involved (even if it's leopard vs. gazelle), so animals try to avoid violence by communicating their strength both to rivals in their own group as well as to potential prey or predators. It is called signalling[1].
Obviously, being intimidated is not the same as being killed or wounded, but that doesn't mean that this form of signalling is not very real or not a very common form of exerting power over others, in humans as in other species.
Intimidation is very common in man and in nature, and its goal is to save the intimidator's the chance of injury and the intimidatee's life -- if they learn their place. If it weren't very real, animals wouldn't have spend so much energy on it[2].
What constitutes "reasonable" is a hard question. What I know is that all societies on this planet curtail speech to prevent intimidation. They only vary on the degree of intimidation they forbid. As a matter of fact, I am not aware of any single system of ethics where free speech is a higher value than preventing all forms of intimidation.
I also, again, must take issue with the use of "free speech" in this context. It is not at all clear that it even applies to every sequence of letters a person types or every utterance a person makes. At its very core -- or consensus -- free speech means the freedom to express all ideas and opinions without fear of arrest. It is not at all clear that "I would like to rape Ellen Pao" is either an idea or an opinion, and therefore I don't mind discussing whether we should allow such things to be said, but I do mind including them under the umbrella of "free speech" (my objection is not on principal grounds but on aesthetic grounds).
I do believe that every person should have the right to freely express his or her ideas in public without fear of arrest, and I think that this value is rather high in priority. But I agree with all other free societies (including the US[1]), which think that this freedom does not apply (and I'm not talking about various exceptions to that freedom based on offense) to certain combinations of words that constitute neither ideas nor opinions.
> ...I am not aware of any single system of ethics where free speech is a higher value than preventing all forms of intimidation.
I'm not sure how you define "system of ethics", but systems that eschew relativity and focus on universal principles (as defined by the philosophy) are more likely to value freedom over prior restraint. I'd be surprised if you've never heard of anarcho-capitalism, that is the first such system that comes to mind.
> but systems that eschew relativity and focus on universal principles (as defined by the philosophy) are more likely to value freedom over prior restraint.
Every system of ethics contains a relative ordering of values (the alternative is having a single value or none) to decide how to act when values conflict. "Freedom" is not such a well-defined (single) value -- i.e. it contains internal contradictions -- and therefore requires finer-grained prioritization at the very least, because all it implies is a lack of restraint, which is impossible in a system with more than one principal (two individuals can't both be completely unrestrained as it yields a logical contradiction: one is either allowed to restrain the other or not, either choice contradicts lack of restraint).
In short, anarcho-capitalism most certainly doesn't value speech over freedom from intimidation absolutely. It might have different relative priorities of different forms of speech vs. different forms or measures of intimidation. But this is just a difference in measure. An example that requires resolving the contradiction with prioritization is as follows: am I allowed to say, "if you deny evolution, I will stab you"? Prohibiting this speech is a restriction of speech, and allowing this speech is also a restriction of speech (and bear in mind that every kind of law requires intimidation for enforcement -- otherwise laws are not laws, but voluntary behavior -- so we have two options here, both involving intimidation, and both involving speech). This applies even in anarchic systems that don't have laws at all, up until the point that you get an anarchic system that has no values (other than individual values).
The latter, BTW, is my personal preference, but short of that I prefer a socialist liberal democracy. Any system that places the limit at physical violence (basically all American-style libertarian thought) seems to me to be both arbitrary and not truly anarchic (i.e. far from free). And if we can't have true anarchy, we might as well prioritize freedoms in a more principled way. Drawing a single line at physical violence to me seems not only arbitrary but ignorant of how social systems work (both human and animal), where freedoms are often restrained but only rarely through physical violence (and commonly through intimidation). This can be easily observed empirically.
> Every system of ethics contains a relative ordering of values...
> ...anarcho-capitalism most certainly doesn't value speech over freedom from intimidation absolutely.
It has been several years since I last gave this a lot of thought, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I only remember one universal principle in anarcho-capitalism: aggression is immoral. From that single precept every other value is derived - property rights, self ownership, etc. As I said, it has been a while, but I do remember being impressed by the logical consistency. So do you have a contradiction that you can point to?
> ...am I allowed to say, "if you deny evolution, I will stab you"?
Yes. I don't understand how you view that as a restriction on free speech, maybe the point of confusion is around your use of the word "allowed" - because there is no central authority to grant permission in a state of anarchy.
> This applies even in anarchic systems that don't have laws at all, up until the point that you get an anarchic system that has no values (other than individual values).
An anarchic system that has laws is not an anarchic system... maybe this is another hint at the point of confusion. Anarcho-capitalism is not really a form of governance, it is a philosophy that informs thinking related to interaction between individuals. It leads to a highly distributed system of justice, where each individual relies upon their own system of ethics to mete out justice - you decide if you want to do business with murders or those who consort with murders.
I am very interested to hear about any logical inconsistencies you've found, because absent that your first two paragraphs are totally wrong.
> I do remember being impressed by the logical consistency
While I'm very fond of anarchism (not its libertarian interpretations), I've always find its libertarian forms completely inconsistent (and very, very restrictive and far from free) under a guise of consistency (and freedom). The key is that everything can look consistent if you ignore the facts. It's ethics for spherical cows, and it's not simple but simplistic. Every ethics begins that way, but then there are lots of complications that stem from how the world works. Libertarian anarchism stops there, at the logic stage. It describes a consistent model -- for spherical cows -- and chooses not to examine whether the model fits the real world.
The main issue is what constitutes aggression. A clever teenager could say, "let's draw the line at physical harm!" but an educated scientist knows that physical aggression is rare, and is only used in those circumstances where common aggression fails. Common aggression works by intimidation (as I've shown -- even in the animal kingdom) and emergent social forces (like economics). You can only draw those arbitrary lines if you choose not to study aggression. If you choose not to learn something, then everything seems simple and consistent because it remains a Platonic ideal. Once you study aggression and see how it really works you realize that preventing aggression requires a very intricate ethics.
Which is why I'm for anarchism without false and arbitrary restrictions on aggression (which only serve to increase it in its common forms), or an intricate system of ethics and law that serves to really reduce aggression, but is a far cry from anarchy.
Just to very quickly explain the difference, in a real anarchy, the threat of physical harm must always be present to offset other forms of aggression. If it isn't, there's no balance in the system. The rich can inflict economic aggression without fear of reprecussion. Once you add "no-agression" to anarchy, you've basically created a very lopsided, very non-free, and a very inconsistent system.
> Yes. I don't understand how you view that as a restriction on free speech, maybe the point of confusion is around your use of the word "allowed" - because there is no central authority to grant permission in a state of anarchy.
I used the word "allowed" loosely in this case, to mean a combination of ethics and a possible enforcement structure. The belief that only a central authority grants permission is a common mistake among libertarians, that, as I said, stop at the logical reasoning stage and don't examine the facts. Centralized government is a recent invention, at least in the Western world -- 400 years or so (that the Roman Empire appears to us like a central authority is an anachronism based on extrapolation from what we know). Yet enforcement has existed throughout human history in much more diffuse ways.
Now, back to the example. So you say it's OK to say, "if you deny evolution, I will stab you". Fine. Now what happens when I deny evolution? If I know you'll never stab me then there must be some enforcement at play. But that means that I know your threat to be empty to begin with, and so no intimidation took place. In the real world, that's not the case. The possibility that you will stab me is always on the table. If so, stabbing me for denying evolution is most certainly a restriction of my free speech. And if that option exists, intimidating me with the threat also restricts my free speech.
> It leads to a highly distributed system of justice, where each individual relies upon their own system of ethics to mete out justice
Because that's how human society existed until not too long ago, it isn't some thought exercise, and we know how that looks in practice. That is a form of governance, but without a central authority.
> your first two paragraphs are totally wrong
No, they are not. Your confusion stems from the anachronistic conflation of laws with a central state. Laws are rules based on ethics with some enforcement mechanism. That enforcement can be excommunication. In fact, that was the primary form of enforcement until not long ago. A highly distributed system of justice was the norm (again, at least in the West; I haven't studied the history of Asia).
> It describes a consistent model -- for spherical cows -- and chooses not to examine whether the model fits the real world.
Ok, so to be clear, you don't have a logical inconsistency to point to? Your complaint is purely utilitarian? Well, I don't really have much to say about that except that such a perspective only ever serves those presently in power.
> The main issue is what constitutes aggression.
The initiation of force, force strictly related to property rights (derived from universal preference, not state fiat). But before you equate my views to that of an adolescent again, let me first say that you've consistently redefined words. You've indicated that english isn't your native language, which could explain it - despite your command of the language otherwise, except for the fact that all your redefinitions shift the meaning to a very broad definition that supports your position. That is what kicked the whole thread off, your redefinition of violence to include spoken word - and you've done it several more times here: aggression has been redefined to include economics, laws are now derived from ethics and not simply government decree, one's own fears (rational or otherwise) and choices as a consequence constitute restriction by some other party.
If your political opinions are so informed by nature, I don't understand how you could possibly think any system could exist where individuals enjoy the total absence of any outside stimuli that may cause them discomfort or hinder them in living out their every fantasy. Especially when the terms are subject to redefinition, and all definitions are equally valid - because... feelings.
> ...in a real anarchy, the threat of physical harm must always be present to offset other forms of aggression.
Well, that is really no different than the way things are now. I believe you are pointing to a lack of monopoly on force, which does nothing to change the net amount of bad things that can happen to you - just the likelihood of total personal destruction as delivered by the state.
> ...you've basically created a very lopsided, very non-free, and a very inconsistent system.
Consider for a moment the sort of world that we'd live in if aggression was redefined to your liking. The internet would be a very quite place after a few hundred are arrested as word rapists. Economics would grind to a halt as VCs are shuttered for all the human rights violations perpetrated in not funding everybody who approaches them. Theological laws become the norm as the vocal insane grow in number. You'll find no freedom if you live at the mercy of somebody else's emotional interpretations, but you'll certainly find consistency and equality: constant misery for everybody.
> Ok, so to be clear, you don't have a logical inconsistency to point to?
No, there is a logical inconsistency, but it can't be uncovered by looking at a statement in isolation. It's like saying that the statement A /\ B has no contradiction, but if you look at the definition of B and see that it's defined as ~A, then the contradiction is apparent. My example contains such a contradiction.
> aggression has been redefined to include economics
No. Aggression is defined (at least in the dictionary I have in front of me) as: "hostile or violent behavior or attitudes toward another; readiness to attack or confront". Nowhere does it say that aggression means a physical attack. I do not define aggression to include economics. I state that if you study the world (I studied history in graduate school) and learn how aggression works, you see that it often works through economics (sometimes through religion, sometimes through other social forces). If you say that your ethics include just a prohibition of physical aggression then I say that 1. it still leads to contradiction in my example, and 2. it is completely arbitrary. After all, you've chosen those values to achieve a purpose -- say freedom -- and you correctly note that aggression restricts freedom. But then you make the factual error -- that can only be confirmed through empirical observation, not logic -- that it is physical aggression that restricts freedom, and that's false.
How do you know that it's a good place to learn? Well, because it was written by people who have actually studied the subject rather than people who speculate on it, and therefore, while it may be wrong, it is probably a better source than that of people who want to prescribe ideas without learning how the system really works beforehand (i.e. they prefer their own imagined explanation to how the system works, which they take great care not to accidentally verify in the real world).
> laws are now derived from ethics and not simply government decree
I'm sorry, but it is you who are unfamiliar with some definitions (I spent years of my life studying these things). My dictionary says: "Law: the system of rules that a particular country or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members and may enforce by the imposition of penalties". You see government mentioned? Decree? A law is rule + enforcement accepted by a community. That's the only definition.
> Especially when the terms are subject to redefinition, and all definitions are equally valid - because... feelings.
You're making the same mistake. You want my statements to include redefinition of words (because you believe that that's what people of liberal or anarchic (as opposed to libertarian-anarchic) views or something do. But it's not really what I'm doing. If you want to argue with me you must first try to understand what it is that I'm saying, not misunderstand it based on what you'd want me to be saying.
> I believe you are pointing to a lack of monopoly on force, which does nothing to change the net amount of bad things that can happen to you
Ah, but if you want to limit the amount of "bad things" you must first study how "bad things" happen. As someone who has studied it, I can tell you that more bad things are caused by intimidation than by a release of violence. I'll gladly argue over facts with you, but we should at least be talking out of some knowledge and not a "feeling" that bad things happen because of physical violence.
Anarchy and the sanctity of private property can't go together. A system where the poor are not allowed to steal from the rich (because private property) but the rich are allowed to starve the poor as long as they don't do it through physical violence (i.e. they're allowed to do it the way this has actually been done in history) is not a free system. In a real anarchy, if the rich starve the poor, the poor will gang up and kill the rich. Only in such a system you can have true freedom. Otherwise, your "anarchic" society will quickly devolve into a system of masters and slaves (with no physical coercion!) We know that because that actually happened, and in quite a few distinct societies (including Europe).
> aggression was redefined to your liking
You mean that if aggression was defined the way you think it is
> The internet would be a very quite place after a few hundred are arrested as word rapists.
What? Arrested? I'm an anarchist! And short of that, a social-democrat! Neither anarchists nor social democrats advocate the arrest of people who threaten rape online. We just don't think communities should tolerate them.
> Theological laws become the norm as the vocal insane grow in number...
Look, study some history instead of making these Glen Beckian sci-fi fantasies. Pretty much every legal or political system you can think of has been tried somewhere more-or-less. I'm not saying we know how things will turn out -- far from it -- but we can at least make a few informed bets or knowledgeable comparisons. Your projections are similar to someone who'd try to create a model of the physical universe, but who's simply unaware of the electromagnetic force. There's a gap of information here, and without information you can't build a model.
You don't need to. First, you hardly measure anything in the justice system objectively. That's why you have judges -- to use judgement. Second, you can measure the effects the distress has on one's life -- e.g. being unable to get out of the house, being startled by noises etc. -- and you get an expert opinion from a professional. There are harder things to measure in court cases.
The same as who's in charge of their general (physical) well-being: it depends on the circumstances. Of course, it's all a matter of degree. Raping someone is obviously worse than threatening to rape them, but threatening with rape might be worse than, say, stepping on their foot or slapping them.
> In any case, the ideal of free speech originated in the desire to share novel ideas and speak truth to power.
Did it? Or did it originate from the idea that it is immoral to react violently to noises coming out of somebody's face hole? By violence I mean real violence, not verbal violence, the kind of violence that a free society uses to control the activities of its members... hmm - that doesn't sound right at all.
Is not a thing, you mean verbal abuse. equating verbal abuse with physical abuse doesn't make your point genuine, what it does is cause those of us who employ critical thinking to disregard your opinions as those of an unreasonable person.
Words can be important, but you cannot try to manipulate language in order to alter reality without alienating a lot of people from your cause.
Googling the term pulls up a few the wiki article for verbal abuse, but even that article makes no mention of violence. The closes you can find are a few blog opinion pieces where people are doing exactly what you're doing, attempting to equate verbal abuse with physical violence.
I would be interested in learning more.
As for your response, you don't get to tell me how I react to people. Blunt, but true.
> Googling the term pulls up a few the wiki article for verbal abuse, but even that article makes no mention of violence
Well, pull up Google translate and see which languages translate "verbal abuse" as "verbal violence". There are more than one, but I'm sure the process would be very educational.
> exactly what you're doing, attempting to equate verbal abuse with physical violence.
I never did such thing just as I don't equate murder with theft when I call them both crimes, or 53 with 75 if I call them both positive integers. Equating means putting things on the same level, not in the same category. I'm not even sure I did that. I may have only made an analogy, which is a rhetorical device using comparison to draw attention to specific properties with similar function in different categories in order to assist in understanding or viewing a subject from a certain perspective.
> As for your response, you don't get to tell me how I react to people. Blunt, but true.
I didn't. Blunt, but true.
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P.S.
Your reaction, however, perhaps ironically, raises a difference between physical and verbal abuse (although, just to make sure -- I've never said there wasn't any), which is people who are victims of physical abuse usually know it, but those who are victims of verbal abuse may not. This opens the door to some very interesting discussions no only on the nature of humiliation (e.g. most people would agree that humiliation causes harm even if the humiliated is not aware of the humiliation if there are spectators), but also on the very core of ethics (and in particular ethical naturalism vs. non-naturalism and phenomenology).
alright, well you had your chance, but if you can't do something as simple as describe the culture in which they translate as such, then I'm going with my initial reaction.
You're unreasonable and not to be trusted on this issue.
You are free to hold and express your opinion. Nevertheless, it is a fact that all societies on this planet have chosen to regulate speech even when it falls short of being a credible threat of physical violence, even though it makes some of their members flabbergasted.
If, however, you were referring to my use of the term "verbal violence" as opposed to "verbal abuse", it's nothing other than a linguistic mistake on my part. Verbal violence is how verbal abuse is called in my native language.
> If, however, you were referring to my use of the term "verbal violence" as opposed to "verbal abuse", it's nothing other than a linguistic mistake on my part. Verbal violence is how verbal abuse is called in my native language.
Ah, ok. Verbal abuse is a sensible term to me, whereas verbal violence is not.
In French, where English got the word violence from, "violence verbale", is how you say verbal abuse. And it's not the only language where it is so.
And it is funny (and perhaps even ironic) you should bring up that nursery rhyme. One of the very first things you learn when you study history is that in order to know the state of certain societies, read what they legislated, wanted to legislate, or warned against. No one legislates or warns against things that don't happen. The reason that is a nursery rhyme, rather than, say, "Sticks and stones may break my bones but bubbles never hurt me", is precisely because words do hurt.
But a much more profound thing to understand is that those who have power rarely need to exert it physically over others. Intimidation is enough, and is common in nature, too. Any sort of physical struggle bears a lot of risk for both sides involved (even if it's leopard vs. gazelle), so animals try to avoid violence by communicating their strength both to rivals in their own team as well as to potential prey or predators. It is called signalling (you can read about it here [1] and here [2]). Signalling is a very real thing in most (advanced) animals.
Obviously, being intimidated is not the same as being killed, but that doesn't mean it's not very real.
> Anyone who endures verbal abuse chooses to do so.
That is factually wrong. People are abused in school and in their workplace. Of course, they could choose to change schools or workplace, but the existence of the abuse is a severe, coercive, limitation of their freedom.
Most common form of coercions work in non-physically-violent ways, both in human and animal societies. Coercion is not binary, and bodily harm is not the only coercive force. Not recognizing that is simply ignorance of both human psychology and sociology as well as zoology. It's a little like saying, "in physics, the only force that matters is the electromagnetic force!"
I understand that you're making an assertion of value, but values should (I believe) at least be somewhat based on fact. If an experiment were to show that physical force coerced 100% of people to do something, and intimidation coerced 80% of people, you could not say that intimidation is not coercion. You could say that intimidation is a strong coercive force, but one that is weaker than physical violence, and with that I -- and everyone else -- would agree. My point is that the effect of intimidation on people is a matter of empirical observation -- not an assertion of value -- that yields clear results, even if the effect size is less than 100%.
>By volume, those "conversations" make up a minority of a minority of a minority of what happens on Reddit.
This hardly matters when that content makes the front page of the site and is given positive votes continually. Every time someone complains about the offensive content in a "default" subreddit, the refrain goes like this: "That's just because it's a default man. You gotta unsub from the defaults and pick your own."
Let's consider that for a minute. The standard view of your website, the view that is presented to any new member, is so clogged with terrible content that the active members recommend you change it immediately.
When we buy phones and computers like this, we call it bloatware; we nuke the entire filesystem and start over. But when it's actual people generating content that most agree is worthless and often offensive: "well that's just a minority of a minority." Nonsense.
Reddit's default subs have many problems, including a loss of focus and tendency to focus on popularity rather than quality. But really, as a pretty heavy user, anti-semitism and similar racist / extremist tendencies aren't among them.
I do think Reddit needs to revist its moderation system, goals, and philosophy. But not on account of the points you raise.
In my 5+ years, I tend to agree with you; there are occasionally little spats that I see, but by and large-- I'd never have known about all of this "bad" stuff if it weren't for other people telling me about it.
>I'd never have known about all the "bad" stuff if it weren't for other people telling me about it.
This is precisely the issue with "bad" stuff. It draws better attention to itself than the good stuff does. All the more reason for Reddit to get control of it if they want to inspire user growth and maintain ad revenue.
Well, like I said, I'd have never known about it if other people hadn't told me. I can't speak to what Reddit "should" do; in _my_ niche area, Reddit works just fine the way it is.
If they were to start "doing something about it", it'd likely not affect me in the least.
Aside from some veiled (but still unacceptable) misogyny, I don't see anything objectionable in the default subs. The ratio of homophobic, racist, and antisemitic remarks seems in the ballpark of any southern high school.
Is this something to still actively fight and change? Yes. But you yourself pointed out that reddit isn't making the content, nor are they encouraging it. What if the solution is MORE connected free speech, not less? The more representative a user base reddit gets, the less bigoted they'll be. I'm more worried about secretive and niche networks of extremists.
Completely agreed, but "southern" is pretty unfair there... I know from personal experience Northern/Western counterparts are just as bad. Young people in general have a large capacity to be cruel regardless of geographic distribution.
Then the reddit defenders tell you the opposite, "Oh, those subs you hear about on the news are minority subs, best to stay in the defaults like pics and funny!" Err, so which one is it?
I also think its probably impossible to make a site that appeals to high school and college age males very sophisticated. Their identity politics will rule and that means lots of misogyny, racist humor, 'bro' culture, and anti-US politics with a serving of a worship of oppressive autocratic regimes. Fixing reddit may not be possible and shuffling subs around isn't helping much. No one wants to say this, but young people are kinda terrible. I know I was a worse person at that age.
If they're going to attack Reddit, they should at least point out that the same is true for any platform with user generated content. For example, the comments section of every news site, Facebook, Twitter, IRC, etc..
I think the world, and especially the corporate world is struggling with the idea that people hold disgusting, ignorant, or hateful opinions and that we're not nearly as nice as we believe ourselves to be. But of course I don't hold any opinions like that -- obviously I'm better than those people.
There isn't a minority group of hateful people who have are expressing their hateful opinions on social media -- it's that each person's hateful opinions are a minority of their total opinions which are expressed in proportional frequency.
For a lot of people the whole point of Reddit is the comment threads. The voting turn it into a game, and oppositional views are an intrinsic part of that. People learn which arguments are most insidious or effective. I don't think Facebook is like this as unsound arguments are more likely to be tolerated.
Reddit may have hotrrible offensive comments but they will often be razor sharp and highly effective at winning arguments. That makes it endlessly interesting.
Of course HN has this to a lesser degree. I live in fear of being accused of "anecodotal". Looking at this comment that is ironic.
I mean, if you read the comments on many of the default subs, there is a clear undertone of those cultures. I don't believe that's an editorial statement, but really a pretty accurate depiction of how many people (both inside and out) perceive the reddit community. It's sad.
but really a pretty accurate depiction of how many people (both inside and out) perceive the reddit community.
Shout something long enough and hard enough, and people will widely begin to believe it. Wired doing what they just did here is at least part of the reason that perception exists. Certain rabble-rousers within the community itself are another.
It's an accusation. A smear. For it to be otherwise, there'd need to be proof, something sorely lacking from this meme.
I have been a participating member of the community for years. I can see it myself, I'm not being shouted at.
EDIT: Honestly, looking at everything that happened a few months ago with the blackouts and multiple events surrounding Ellen Pao, it's nothing but embarrasing how vocal some communities can be that cause many people there for good reasons to be silenced and unheard.
I am neither shouting, nor being shouted at, but I use reddit a lot, and the large default subs are rampant with racism and sexism, and people defending the same. And when people from marginalized groups say hey, this is not cool, and you ignore them or call them rabble-rousers, that is exactly what you are doing.
> And when people from marginalized groups say hey, this is not cool, and you ignore them or call them rabble-rousers
You can also just do what everyone on reddit does: label them a SJW, a term with near-limitless utility on reddit, and dismiss them. Anyone with a mind toward social issues will be labeled a SJW in short order, and for some reason that particular accusation resonates with much of the reddit community. This is all just my experience, of course.
There are also a lot of rather large subs like /r/shit____says that serve as downvote brigades to harass people over their opinion. It's online-bullying at its worst.
Well duh, hence why fatpeoplehate got banned and shitredditsays stays because they're pretty much the same subreddit, except the latter actually breaks the rules.
> fatpeoplehate got banned and shitredditsays stays because they're pretty much the same subreddit, except the latter actually breaks the rules.
Except for that time that fatpeoplehate doxxed the staff at Imgur on reddit when Imgur no longer tolerated FPH posting images of fat people to laugh at on their servers.
In this case, "doxxed" means "taking the staff pictures from the Imgur website, putting them in a collage, and adding a caption that says 'even the dog is fat'"
But it's pretty easy for the average user to find offensive content on Reddit -- things that would upset them if they or one of their children was involved. An existence proof for ugly stuff on Reddit is trivial, while it's much harder to give an average user a feel for what ratio of content they find offensive vs not.
I think a lot of the offensive comments that are easy to find on Reddit can also be found on other popular sites, such as Youtube, Facebook, or comment sections on news sites.
You could very easily replace "reddit" with "the internet" and wow, all of the sudden it's like we've time traveled back to the early naughts with hysteria over kids having internet access
If you make it easier for people to find the sub reddits then you get those people who are making the comments in the sub reddits now. It's a catch 22.
Oh read your local news comments. My news is full of racist comments. They blame everything on our Latino community and paint the city as a crime filled haven. To bad we had over $1,000,000,000 invested in our City and have had lower crime every year for the past 10 years.
This is a good point. It's the same way where I live, though most of the hate is directed towards black folks (KY). People with strong opinions (good or bad) will tend to be more vocal about it, and racists have very strong opinions. Therefore they will have a high visibility anywhere.
The Southern Poverty Law Center might as well classify the air we breath to be racist because it is used as a platform for transmitting ideas.
I still think we really need to create a distributed open reddit alternative based off of ipfs or something similar. Ideally all posts would be treated the same at a low level but different curation sites could be built on top. Users that wanted to be 'protected' from 'offensive' material could be while users that value free speech could look at unfiltered views.
Is this really what you want to strive for? To be surrounded by hatred, and shrug your shoulders and say, well, there's nothing to be done? Do you have no ambition?
There's a lot of hatred all over the internet. There doesn't have to be.
> There's a lot of hatred all over the internet. There doesn't have to be.
Ultimately I think it's probably a good thing that people can express these hateful ideas online, instead of being forced to bottle them up where they can't be addressed. You don't win the battle against bad ideas by shouting people down, muzzling them, or driving them away. You win it by engaging them and consistently showing them they are wrong over time.
I think that might be an intuitive reaction but I don't agree because those type of hateful ideas aren't engaged with. Those people just enter echo chambers with other like minded people and their opinions bounce back and force, picking up velocity until they can't be altered in those people's minds.
If you think echo chambers are the problem, driving people away from the mainstream discussion is quite possibly the worst thing you could do. You don't deal with a racist by shouting "RACIST!" and ignoring them (which is what we do now, which plainly doesn't work), you show them how and why they're wrong, repeatedly and often.
Racists and sexists are human beings with human thoughts and human feelings just like every other human. People need to start looking beyond their own personal "ick" factor if this is to ever be dealt with.
There's a saying I like: you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
Racism isn't a reasonable position, showing someone how and why they're wrong isn't going to do anything. Showing someone that spouting that junk isn't socially acceptable anywhere is how you'll end those attitudes.
People are social creatures long before they're rational ones--use social tools, not logical ones.
> Showing someone that spouting that junk isn't socially acceptable anywhere is how you'll end those attitudes.
I disagree. Attacking people for their views (for example, calling them a racist or down voting them to hell) is how you reinforce existing negative attitudes, not end them.
If you'll indulge me, I'd like to present some anecdata. I remember entering into a comment thread on HN using a throwaway in which hacker culture was being attacked as being inherently misogynistic. The statements being espoused seemed extremely overblown based on my experience. It also seemed ridiculous to throw an entire culture under the bus because specific elements of it may be bad. When I voiced these opinions I was immediately attacked by someone who didn't even know me, who implied that I was a misogynist by not agreeing with their position. This shifted the discussion away from being about ideas to being about my personal character, so my internal reaction was something along the lines of "well fuck you and your stupid ideas then" and I left the thread. Any chance for productive dialogue was immediately over, and I left with a highly negative view of feminism and a bias against feminists which I didn't have when I entered the thread.
Fast forward a few months and I was hanging out with a good friend of mine who is a female developer. Sexism in the workplace somehow came up in conversation, and I again stated that the opinions being voiced by some of these women seemed like bullshit (using stronger terms than my first statement). She calmly said she could see how I would think so given my experience, but that it was indeed as bad as it sounded. We continued the conversation, and I came away with my mind changed. This would never have happened had she not engaged me in dialogue, and I would likely still harbor a subtle or overt bias against feminists to this day.
What do you mean by reasonable? Logical? Acceptable? Natural? Normal? Understandable?
I'd argue a lot of the low level racism and sexism we see on Reddit is entirely natural.
It's natural for a woman who has been sexually abused to be a little bit sexist towards men.
It's natural for a man who has his kids taken away from him by his ex-wife to be a bit bitter towards women.
It's totally understandable that a Chinese kid who has been heavily bullied for years by black kids at his school will have reservations about black people in general. Etc etc etc.
Wouldn't the racist want to self alter their behavior if they kept being excluded from a group?
Sure I'd love a world where I could really help change someone's mind but it is often easier and safer to just ignore those people as putting effort into trying to "help" them doesn't really offer me anything besides more abuse.
When they can immediately turn around and be welcomed into the arms of a group that doesn't call them names and agrees with them, what do you think the outcome of that is going to be?
What's more, you can't do anything about the fact that this can happen without making some very ugly sacrifices.
In my head it is the difference between coming to a thread and seeing some hypothetical hidden racist/sexist/ist comment that has been downvoted to hell and ignored or seeing the conversation being dominated with people having a discourse trying to change the ignorant opinion.
I'm all for trying to help people understand the reaction to their comments but it also sidetracks every conversation and there seems to be an endless supply of people making ignorant comments.
I have no problem with racists having to bottle of racist shit. In fact, I think it'd be best if they all bottled it up so deeply that no one ever knew how they felt at all.
There is a lot of crime all over the world, but there doesn't have to be.
We could stop it all. But history has shown that the cure is worse than the disease, so we don't. And the imperfect attempts will frequently increase the levels of crime.
I'm all for ambition, but people with ambition to suppress or oppress others based on a value judgement for the greater good make me nervous in general.
Well, considering the concept seems to more or less be "create your own community" I'm not sure there's a way to do this kind of tone policing without pretty much doing away with the concept.
Yeah but it's accurate about basically any community. It's not like reddit is overtly *ist compared, to say, youtube. Plus when you get out of the default subreddits that attract everyone there is a pretty good community.
This. If you stay out of subreddits specifically devoted to that kind of stuff (plus a handful of others), you're not going to see it. I'm amazed at the extent to which people are willing to attack posts they have to go out of their way to see.
Reddit is going to lose far more people trying to police out non-PC stuff than they will ever gain from it. And when people move on they do so quickly and in large numbers.
Agreed. There were and are some terrible subreddits, but they aren't the default subs, you had to go looking for them. In that sense it's really no better or worse than the rest of the internet.
I also think the article is pretty misguided in saying that somehow wealthy white men are treated better on the site. First of all, unless you tell people who you are, nobody knows. Secondly, the idea that revealing your wealthy white dude status would lead to better treatment on Reddit it laughable to anybody who's used the site for more than a few minutes.
You're absolutely right but that doesn't mean those small subreddits didn't have an impact, /r/fatpeoplehate and /r/imgoingtohellforthis were increasingly showing up on the frontpage.
Neither of those were small when they started to show up on the frontpage. /r/fatpeoplehate was definitely growing very quickly in the six months leading up to it's demise.
The core problem with reddit is there's no firewall between communities. So the fact that there are communities specifically set up with the goal of hating blacks or fat people or women or what-have-you means that those people spend a lot of time on reddit and end up spilling over into other popular communities. The moderation tools and admin support on reddit are comparatively underpowered so for a lot of popular sub-reddits it's very easy for the overall quality to plummet when a tiny group of vocal assholes decides they want to squat there. And for most sub-reddits this just starts a spiral of death as good people decide not to waste their time wading through toxic garbage and just find somewhere else to be, while the toxic minority gets stronger and more brazen.
Imagine you have several subscriptions to a bunch of different print magazines. Every couple days a new magazine shows up. Stuff like Scientific American, The Economist, Better Homes and Gardens, National Geographic, TV Guide, Rolling Stone, Cat Fancy, etc. All fine and good. Except sometimes, maybe once every quarter per magazine, maybe less often even, there's some really weird stuff in your magazines. There's a 10 page article praising the KKK in your copy of Rolling Stone. Or there's a thing about how the jews did 9/11. Or the ads in Cat Fancy are all relentlessly making fun of fat people. Or there's an insert in the October edition of Scientific American that's actually a personal letter to you that is filled with hate and vitriol and ends with a plea for you to commit suicide.
Who would put up with that? They wouldn't. But that's what people have been asked to deal with on sites like reddit, and it's beyond a reasonable level. How much shit is acceptable in your drinking water? Just a tiny bit? How about just 1 hour a year where the tap pours out 50/50 shit & water? Is that acceptable? No, it's not. There's far too much shit in the drinking water at reddit, the fact that the drinking water is not, in fact, mostly shit is not a defense.
Reddit is not a magazine, though. (Although Upvoted is!)
EDIT: That said, I think better moderation tools and stronger firewalls between subs would be a huge improvement. The existence of /r/fph absolutely shouldn't spill over into /r/worldnews or wherever.
It's not, but it's a comparison that helps clarify. I've been participating in online communities since 1994, I've seen the full range. I've watched, and participated in, epic flame wars on Usenet that went on for weeks. I've had people make death threats against me. I've seen legitimately mentally ill people spew all kinds of nonsense.
And in comparison to all of that I'd say reddit is worse. I like many things about reddit, it's got plenty of good parts. But there are fundamental weaknesses in the design and administration of the site which mean that it's difficult to avoid incredibly terrible interactions with assholes on a regular basis.
Has the wired blogger ever been to 4Chan or read youtube comments?
The same could be said about both of those sites. Main subs have their share of filth but it's not only those things. There are some very racist and morally challenged subs but I wouldn't conclude all of reddit is like that.
Have you been to Reddit in recent years? A majority of the site may not exhibit this individually, but most highly-visible threads that touch race will be dominated by racists, and most highly-visible threads that touch gender will be dominated by sexists. It's very gross.
> By volume, those "conversations" make up a minority of a minority of a minority of what happens on Reddit.
Right, because the rest of them are just non-sequitur memers fishing for upvotes. Such meltdown. Very epic.
---
Unfortunately it doesn't matter if it's a minority of all the content on Reddit if it's what's on the frontpage 24/7 since that's what everyone is going to be looking at. Yay feedback loop!
It wasn't the fat hate as such, it was more that the users from that particular sub-reddit took it upon themselves to harass and mock other reddit users outside of that sub-reddit.
That's correct. And as the reddit execs et. al. have stated, it's not that such communities, whether based around fundamentally hateful memes or not, can exist on reddit. In fact, many morally/ethically reprehensible communities have been explicitly allowed to continue existing. However, when they start moving outside of their communities and harass other communities through vote brigading or doxxing or PMing hateful messages, then it breaches a line (or smudged line) that allows reddit admins to take action.
I'd believe that if the behavior of the administrators were consistent with that explanation.
Example, the ban you're talking about, communities which had the same idea, with different staff, that had existed before that one had, were also caught up in the ban. In other words, they were banned despite not breaking any stated rules.
Another example: A racist subreddit, not getting banned because of harassment, not for breaking rules, but because they were a frequent target of admin attention.
Another another example: Colluding with the governments of other non-US countries to censor content at those governments' request.
It's their website, they can run it as they please, but I wish Ohanian and Huffman would stop playing lip service to "free speech" and "open discussion" (something that up until recently, they did loudly and often) if that's not the goal they intend to live by. Actions speak a lot louder than words.
Exactly. People are saying that /r/fatpeoplehate "violated copyright" but every meme does that. (See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/09...). And reddit never said they were getting legal takedown notices for material published there.
Most of the posts I saw were responses to fat-acceptance bloggers and their postings on their blogs. Obviously these blogs were created to foster discussion and that was happening. When the discussion wasn't positive, they got upset.
Obviously, it's a private website and they can do what they want with it. But it never was a place for "free speech." If you didn't go along with Reddit groupthink (which is an odd mix of socialism "college should be free" "Koch Brothers are Evil" and libertarianism "Go Uber!" "Open Access to the Internet") you would be quickly down voted away.
I'm not so sure that /r/fatpeoplehate did anything worse than any other "funny pictures" subreddit. (For example, ones about "rednecks" or "ravers") I think just a lot of obese people got offended, and for some reason Ellen Pao felt for them.
I've seen their page before the sub was banned. Half the posts fell into one of two categories:
- Creepshots of people taken and published without the subject's permission in order to harass them.
- Pictures taken from people's friends-only Facebook albums stolen and published on Reddit for harassment purposes in violation of the privacy settings chosen by the original uploader.
Both are harassment, and the latter is a gratuitous copyright violation. The former probably also falls afoul of laws against using people's likenesses without permission.
Oh, and once imgur began removing their images for TOS violations, they began acting like a pack of wild monkeys flinging their feces: they began targeting individual imgur staff members for harassment, and multiple people began inciting DDoS attacks against imgur.
Reddit admins have been cracking down on witch hunts for quite some time, and DDoS attacks are highly illegal.
They dug their own graves and deserved to be banned.
They also reposted images from other subreddits, causing hordes of FPH regulars to find the original post and spam the poster with PMs telling them how much FPH hated them and how awful they were. Some of the posts even pointed people at the right subreddit, with the knowledge and complicity of the FPH moderators. We know this because at least one person who was on the receiving end of this complained to the mods, and they responded by posting another post drawing more attention to the original one and posting her photo in the subreddit sidebar. She later posted on r/suicidewatch saying she was thinking of killing herself, and FPH regulars piled into that with some nasty comments too. It got to the point that some subreddits started discouraging people - especially women - from posting selfies solely because they kept getting posted on FPH.
Yep, and I believe this is what caused /r/BadFattyNoDonut to get banned after it was allowed to exist for about a month after FPH was banned. They loved to play innocent and say "oh, we're not FPH, we don't harass people", and it only took a month for them to get caught in that lie.
I call BS on DDOS-ing imgur. There was no organization going around to DDOS them or anyone at the time of imgur purging fatpeoplehate content from their front page galleries. Additionally, FPH was still using imgur even until their subreddit was banned as slimgr was still very early in development. 14/25 Top page links were to imgur at the time of the ban.
Also the reddit user "harassment" wasn't in one direction. Plenty of FPH members got hate PM's and 0-reason bans to other subreddits for their participation at fatpeoplehate, regardless of what content they have posted or commented.
@amyjess
>they began acting like a pack of wild monkeys flinging their feces: they began targeting individual [...] members for harassment, and multiple people began inciting DDoS attacks
If you were to start banning subreddits based on this behavior you'd be banning pretty much every single meta sub on the site, SRD, SRS - they'd all have to go under such a policy.
>“ When we see harassing behavior, we can speak up to challenge it,” the authors wrote. And that’s true. We can. But if we aren’t white men, it’s likely we won’t be heard.
Here. This doesn't make sense. Why are people, or do people feel the need to link their identity to their thoughts online. If you're pushing for equality then why are you assigning a gender, race, or political affiliation to your comments? If we are all equal then why separate yourself with labels?
This is why having your online identity linked with your real identity is a bad thing in lots of cases. This is why anonymity is important.
Every conversation I've had on 4chan I have no clue what gender the other person is, what race they are, where they live, how much money they make, what organizations they support, or what their name is real or not. The only thing that matters is what they're saying or what pictures they're posting. Even identifying yourself as a female results in "tits or GTFO" responses. You can see this as hate speech against women or the community saying in it's own fucked up way "we don't care and you shouldn't announce these labels to us". But in the end it pushes away the labels that people have such a problem with. And nobody's comments are getting downvoted so there goes the echo chamber mechanic built into Reddit.
In an ironic twist the "internet hate machine" can be far more inclusive than Reddit.
I'm not sure how you can see "tits or GTFO" as a fair response when so many on 4chan readily identify themselves as male with no consequence. Furthermore, they also frequently identify themselves as straight based on the pictures they submit or the stories about their latest success or failure with girls. Economic status also frequently comes out, at least partially, when someone discusses the gadgets / games / toys they can or cannot afford.
So some identifiers are apparently OK. But it's beyond the pale to reveal openly as female in your anonymous paradise. "Show me your tits or shut the fuck up!" And you think this is perfectly good and inclusive?
Everyone gets called out on everything that might be wrong on 4chan (mostly /b/). Even a perfectly normal being will be called out on whatever, simply because they can.
"Tits or GTFO" is used because it has a lot higher success rate than one would imagine. It detracts greatly from being able to have actual discussions, but if you're on /b/ you waddle through it.
I would say the response "Tits or GTFO" is not so much as to say that "we aren't interested in your gender" as the more popular ending of a post "I'm a grill btw" was. This was a play on people that, when telling a story or asking a question, where their gender played no role at all, stated their gender for no reason other than to gather attention.
>they also frequently identify themselves as straight
They also frequently identify themselves as gay. I have seen more gay shit on 4chan without trying than any other website I have ever been to in my entire life. It's not easy for a 13 year old boy to see three men making love while dressed up like bunny rabbits. But hey, that was the internet, and that was 4chan. You had/have truly free speech. The beauty of the old internet in which OP is talking about is that everyone is discriminated against equally. No one gets a pass. If you reveal who you are, you are opening up yourself to heavy criticism. This is true in the real world, people just aren't honest about it.
I'm sorry but I have to call you a liar. 4chan even has a board dedicated for gay people. Keep in mind this board was around way before any of the social change that's come about in the last 5 years. I used to frequent /gifs as a teenager, and there were were always tons of gay gifs. They were not 'paraded as gross or weird'. They were just gay. As a straight person, I can tell you that there were a lot more gross and weird straight gifs than there were gay ones (cough beastiality cough). I really don't know if this is just your interpretation or if you are a liar like I'm accusing you of being. But your experience certainly does not speak for all gay people. And I find it difficult to believe that someone who's gay would feel alienated like you claim.
/b/ used to actively mock heterosexual guys who were weirded out by all the gay porn and general naked dudes on there. I think they've suffered a certain amount of cultural drift/rot over the last few years though.
Men on 4chan usually get called out for not being able to attract females or generally just not being masculine enough. A lot of the time the insults seem to sting almost as much (or, to be completely honest, just as much in my opinion) as the "tits or gtfo" comments. I think this comment applies to those situations as well.
> Here. This doesn't make sense. Why are people, or do people feel the need to link their identity to their thoughts online.
Some people cannot conceive of handling the thoughts of another without an identity attached to them. Thus, the need for all thoughts to have identity attached. It is believed that linking a certain identity to certain thoughts lends them weight and credibility, and linking a different identity to the same thoughts saps them of any credibility.
In either case, some people choose not to deal with ideas as separate from identity.
Some people consider the person conveying a message an inextricable part of the message.
I, personally, don't particularly agree. I think it's far more common for identity to be used as a cognitive shortcut by people looking to avoid engaging with and thinking about a message.
> Every conversation I've had on 4chan I have no clue what gender the other person is,
And yet I'm pretty sure that most people interacting with other anonymous people on 4chan assume that they are interacting with a male until proven otherwise, hence memes like:
* There Are No Girls On The Internet[1]
Or
* "Internet, where men are men, women are also men, and children are FBI agent"
> Even identifying yourself as a female results in "tits or GTFO" responses.
I'm not sure if you realize it, but "Tits or GTFO" responses do not mean "We don't care what your gender is, so don't bother to reveal it to us." If you believe that "Tits or GTFO" is an inclusive phrase, then you're either a massive troll, or I've got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn...
That response traces its origins to the proliferation of attention-seeking "camwhores," and the idea that Anonymous is male until proven female. Neither of these things has anything to do with 4chan being a gender-neutral inclusive community.
No I completely understand it and know where it came from. I've been around for 8+ years on a daily basis on many boards.
You're not seeing the side of this where identity is seen as a negative thing. This shows itself in the response to tripfags on almost every board that's not /o/ or /p/. Regardless of the use of the meme (it was an example, not gospel) it boils down to the same roots which implies "this is an anonymous site, you are not to be identified and if you out yourself then we will troll you". This happens to anyone of any identification. Identification is not important to the community and thus your interactions with others are judged on content and message and not identity.
I actually think that comes more from the fact that a lot of people post pretending to be a women to either get attention or to trick people into going along with whatever ploy they have going.
EDIT: I'm commenting on the quotes specifically. I think the first part is probably correct.
You can see this as hate speech against women or the community saying in it's own fucked up way "we don't care and you shouldn't announce these labels to us"
This was more of the case when they first started doing it. More recently its devolved into actually being hate speech in accordance to poe's law. You really only see it on /b/ though.
It's an honest interpretation on a lot of boards. Of course this is a trend, not the rule. I can't speak for everyone. This wouldn't be true on places like /pol/ or /b/
> Every conversation I've had on 4chan I have no clue what gender the other person is, what race they are, where they live, how much money they make, what organizations they support, or what their name is real or not.
Yes, but these are assumed to be male, white, American (or European), not poverty and right-wing ones, respectively. If you intentionally or unintentionally reveal that you are not one of these, you're in trouble.
>Yes, but these are assumed to be male, white, American (or European), not poverty and right-wing ones, respectively.
You're defeating your own argument. Assumption doesn't mean it's the rule or it's true. There's no census on 4chan and there's no reason to assume that the assumption is correct.
I could argue against your views by citing the 4chan conventions which had quite a number of women and minorities. Obviously the largest group was 18-25 white males but this was by no means a significant majority.
I can also cite my own experiences in 4chan IRC channels where a lot of our members were located outside of Europe and America.
Or how about doing a census on /cgl/? It's well known among experienced users that the vast majority of users there are women.
> You're defeating your own argument. Assumption doesn't mean it's the rule or it's true. There's no census on 4chan and there's no reason to assume that the assumption is correct.
Whether the assumption is correct or not is immaterial to the point I am making.
> I could argue against your views by citing the 4chan conventions which had quite a number of women and minorities.
That doesn't go against what I'm saying. Re-read my comment.
> Yes, but these are assumed to be male, white, American (or European), not poverty and right-wing ones, respectively. If you intentionally or unintentionally reveal that you are not one of these, you're in trouble.
On the other hand, you also get a white male middle-class privilege by default, don't you?
Identity is part of the message, and that is the challenge we all face as we try to communicate and be a part of a community (and in Reddit's case, build such a community).
This is why when communication is anonymous, not only does it change the message, it also breaks it in many ways. If we hear Obama say something, we will hear something else than if Trump said it, even if the words are exactly the same. And what if either said something anonymously? We would certainly care less, if at all.
It is only natural to consider the source of the utterance together with the utterance, and vice versa. When we speak, we skip a lot of what is included in our identity and the context we bring along with it. The kicker being, even if our identity is not part of the message, the message is still signed with it. We think of you when you speak, even if you're talking about someone else.
Not quite anonymity, but body language and tone also provides bandwidth. That is why emails can be dangerous when sent to someone who infers emotions from words that would otherwise not have been communicated in person.
Identity doesn't have to be part of the message. Sometimes people want to send a message stripped of identity. This is a good and necessary thing.
It doesn't break the message to lack identity. It forces you to consider the message on its own, stripped of whatever cultural context or baggage you might attach to it.
Who decides identity? The speaker can implicitly mark their words anonymous, but what does that do for the recipient? Slashdot automatically labels anonymous comments as being from "anonymous coward". But they have a point. If someone is posting anonymously, we can infer they must be hiding something, or that they must be protecting something, or that their true identity is inconvenient. Possibilities are real enough to alter our reception. So anonymous caries consequences of its own. It carries it's unique plot lines.
Though it can take practice, we can and do make use of anonymous messages. It is merely a new "mode" of communication, and it gives rise to certain types of communities. However, anonymity must be consensual for it to work. Law enforcement will still come after your identity depending on what you say, and that is a case where the consent is broken (or never acknowledged according to them). Messages become drive-by shootings, and this has an effect on the exchange.
Also, user names are not the equivalent of anonymity. On HN, karma is a feature of each identity, and baggage can be attached just as easily. And if someone says anything interesting, we can read their other comments to learn more about them. As we read more of what they've said, their user name will begin to have a unique aura. Now if we happen to read a new comment and recognize the name, it will ring a bell automatically, and we will already be working with more information than what was included in the utterance alone. At this point, we are not forced to consider the message on its own. We are working with identities that just may or may not be real.
Identity is a complex thing. It's an interplay of what a person declares about themselves and what society is prepared to accept as an identity. Who gets to decide identity is thus a mix of you and everyone else, and the weighting is dependent upon parts of your identity.
It's kind of a mess, and it's really not fair to anyone.
Anyway. Yes, anonymity carries its own baggage. But it's a separate sort of baggage, out there to be assumed by anyone at any time. There's a long and proud history of anonymous authors affecting politics or writing biting satire that would have been impossible without anonymity.
I like that you at least admit to the bias, certainly an important stepping stone. However, I don't think you can ever have it both ways, you can't believe that the 'identity' should be part of the message and all identities should be treated equally, not if you believe it's natural to consider something like identity in the first place. I mean the whole point is to choose an identity, thus you can't be all of them, and you don't need all of them anyway, just yours.
'Identity' really isn't necessary, anyone and everyone can see the logic in something (or perhaps lack thereof). I guess what I'm saying is identity is tied to things that are often controversial like sex or race, but also issues that should be universal (like respect for all races and sexes), but it doesn't take an identity to make those things true, those things are true because (hopefully) we believe people deserve to live and live as they chose.
"I like that you" is already references to two identities. You as yourself, and I, who did something you liked. Maybe you don't consider this exchange anonymous, but when we have conversations, we instinctively associate something which, however slight, is still shaped by what was said, and this becomes part of the collage associated with the source.
Identity is mostly shaped by reputation and by impression, both of which are not in our full control, and both of which just happen. So there isn't anything to believe. Identity is already part of every message, and the lack of identity is already consequential, unless one deliberately dismisses those consequences. At this point, anonymous exchanges require skill, and this is a new skill that, for example, my parents would not ever be comfortable with. The idea that "no one is talking" is new and quite novel actually. And has only become possible at large scales (as communities) with the internet.
Equality doesn't mean hiding the parts of your identity. You may want that total anonymity where I can't even tell if you're a human or a very smart dog but some people enjoy bringing in parts of their identity to conversations and that isn't wrong or anti-equality. It is akin to saying "I don't want to see race". Well that may seem equal but you're really just ignoring something that many people find very important to their identity.
And there are plenty of times on 4chan when people identify as male without any aversion to the label. It sounds like some people just don't want the "others" to identify themselves.
We will never have perfect equality, there will always be discrimination upon some sort of vector. At that point anonymity is vastly better than an endless hamster wheel of trying to eradicate increasingly irrational and engrained biases.
Even anonymous-online-presence doesn't protect you from those people though.
If you're a woman online trying to hide your gender from bigots/sexists/perverts, you have to make sure you don't say anything that'll give you away. You can't talk about being pregnant or morning sickness or any kind of events in your life that are female exclusive... or near exclusive. And online videogames that have realtime audio/visual with other players? Those features are pretty much off limit since your appearance/voice will most likely reveal your gender... most of the time.
If you're a minority online trying to hide your identity from bigots/racists, you have to avoid talking too much about your family history or parts of your childhood growing up because usually those contain events that'll give strong hints to your nationality. For example, if I wanted to hide the fact that my family is from Nigeria... I can't talk about my trips to visit my family in Nigeria. I can't talk about the fact that my wedding was in Nigeria since I know what most people would assume and/or ask once they learned that fact. I can't tell you how/where I first saw my wife. I probably can't tell you some of my favorite meals. Sure, on some sites like HN that's mostly tech focused I can probably go a pretty long time without anyone figuring out I'm black. But sites that aren't tech focused, sites that are more... i dunno... human focused, with topics all about life in general, not bringing up my background will be harder if I want to partake in conversation.
Historically discriminated-against sectors of our society shouldn't have to double-think every statement they make online or offline to keep some part of their identity a secret. If we go that route, then the those sectors are on constant defense and the bigots are on constant offense... and eventually, bigots win because their biases will only grow. This is equiv to the military's "Don't-ask-don't-tell" position on Homosexuality. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_ask,_don't_tell ...at best, it's a temporary "solution"(BIG quotes here) but it did not solve the problem at all.
Why would you care what some anonymous person says about you on the Internet? I've been called sand n---er, paki, etc, but that's just ignorant people being ignorant. I'm sure some of the people I interact with on a daily basis think the same thoughts. But again, it doesn't really affect me.
Ironically, the kind of Internet you push for is flawed because it will make everyone self-censor and "doublethink; which is dangerous. We must protect unabridged free speech, even if it is ugly, lest we fall into the trap of an Internet where a lot of people are speaking but are not really saying anything.
It's not anonymity if you have a name attached to your posts. That's pseudonymity. By doing that you have essentially created another identity which can still be linked back to your real identity. If you have true anonymity you can post about your pregnancy and just stop replying to the post chain. Nobody will know your gender in the next post you make.
I disagree partly on a few points and I'll give a short anecdote as example.
As an increasingly global conversation on the internet is taking place with people in places and groups that didn't have a place or a voice before we're muddying the waters of stereotypes and accurate attempts of guessing someone's background.
Anecdote 1: I have a friend I met online. I've known him for about 6 years. We never talked about our families, shared pictures of each-other, shared real names, or shared anything personally identifiable apart for similar interests and vague references. After about two years of talking to this friend every day, I knew a few things: his family wasn't rich, he lived in a crime filled area Richmond, he smoked weed every day, he loves hip-hop, and he's not a fan of school. Now, most people with their biases and stereotypes would say "oh he's probably a young black male" and they'd have a good chance of being right. Around this time we all started talking about our personal lives. I then find out that this guy is a 25y/o white male studying a masters degree in physics who sports and amazing beard. My initial image of him is gone completely.
By anonymizing interests, beliefs, and political standings we can then apply them to anyone of any race of any gender because we don't know the truth. Our guesses could be wrong, and often are, and the ability to stereotype breaks down. Comments could suddenly be from anyone and we are forced to pay attention to the argument and not who's arguing.
Parent poster wrote, "if I, a Nigerian, want to avoid the bigots and racists online, I can't talk about a lot of stuff."
You replied with an anecdote that illustrates how you got someone else's race wrong, but telling the parent poster that you disagree with his personal experience and coping mechanisms? That doesn't sit right with me.
I don't think you meant it to sound like "you're wrong about how you've learned to deal with bigots"--which would be a pretty awful thing to tell him!--but it did sound that way.
I wonder if there's a way to rephrase your rebuttal with more empathy and understanding.
>You replied with an anecdote that illustrates how you got someone else's race wrong
Yes true. However his race didn't ultimately affect how I viewed our friendship or how I interact with him. It's an example that anonymity can break the stereotypes that we put on activities and people by removing identity. If I was wrong in my assumption about him then I may be wrong in my assumption about smtddr after learning things about his life.
>I don't think you meant it to sound like "you're wrong about how you've learned to deal with bigots"--which would be a pretty awful thing to tell him!--but it did sound that way.
You're correct here. I did not intend that. I'm going to read over both posts again and see why you think that and how I can better phrase my arguments in the future.
>That doesn't sit right with me.
Well thank you for expressing it without resorting to personal attacks and anger.
Anonymity only means that everyone is assumed to be the majority, which means that it effectively silences the minority that will be immediately outed if they speak a different experience than the majority.
e.g. a conversation about bra quality; one can talk about how sexy they look, and if someone brings up "but lacy bras can often be overpriced and underfunctional" they more or less out themselves as a person who may know much about bras. Similarly if someone wanted to talk about mythologies, if someone goes "actually nowadays people utilize this in their traditions; I was visiting family in P region where they still practice this and they just use B now" clearly outs them.
Anonymity also tends to just have everyone assumed to be default, which is white/male and breaking out of that is assumed to be "breaking anonymity" when in reality it's merely... not being the default.
So ... inclusivity via nobody talking about themselves or their background?
("We will never ship a product without bugs, there will always be bugs somewhere." OK, so which bugs are we going to fix? Well thats a judgement about how serious the bugs are. And people affected by different bugs will give different judegments there.)
>Why are people, or do people feel the need to link their identity to their thoughts online.
Because a person's identity informs their thoughts. Knowing who someone is allows a reader to evaluate the validity of what they're saying. This is a primary component of information analaysis: source evaluation.
I really don't know why you are being downvoted - but this is pretty spot on. I know one of the science subreddits started to add flair for people who proved they had X degree or background. Which I think it great - you know you are talking to a biochemist working with real science and not just some guy who spent 5 minutes on the wikipedia page.
I know a lot of people want to be anonymous on the internet - and that's fine but it's depressing to see someone pretend to be an authority figure on a subject just to find out the person is a high school student (trolling or not). And it's usually pretty easy to spot.
If this [1] person was actually experienced they would know that the menu setups change depending on how you answered the question when Visual Studio first runs (at least it used to) - and menus/buttons may be missing/moved depending on that answer (I've seen this first hand and it's quite annoying trying to explain to click on something that doesn't exist). But instead he degrades the person asking for help.
> How often have I wished I could at least see the age of someone when reading through comments.
I don't know if age is as useful as something like list of projects, publications, or contributions. Something to denote saying "yes - this guy has been down the path I have and released it's a dead end" rather than just spewing what he learned in class or some random article on the internet.
Someone laughed at me on reddit when I told them you didn't need a lot of money to make a good game (as you can outsource if you need to - trust me there is someone in India who is willing to create that sprite sheet for less than $20 versus your artist friend would charge $200+). They claimed you needed like $X million. An obvious counter-example would be Terraria - I know not everyone likes it but I think it's a pretty successful and well put together game. It was made by 2 guys sitting in a home office somewhere. I asked him how many games he worked on - I believe he responded with, if I remember correctly, 3.
Depending on the topic of conversation, this would often be considered incredibly sexist or racist. (Which has never made sense to me, but that seems to be the case with a lot of people.)
It's been a while since I've messed about on here: http://turing.gatech.edu/ (I don't even remember if it's the same thing I was involved in)
People are pretty good at guessing whether someone is telling the truth about their identity on the internet. Anonymity adds unnecessary obfuscation, makes for a game of trying to guess the other person's perspective. Non-anonymity should be a choice, and I believe that it adds value to a person's perspective.
We need to be comfortable with the differences between persons, we do not need some cosmic blur sweeping across our identities.
In many places online, if you don't announce your race/gender/location, many people will just assume you are a white male living in the US, and respond to you accordingly. Sometimes this is just annoying but other times it results in responses which are nonsensical or a waste of time.
Which board are you referring to as "immature bratty dudes"? Also I'm sorry that you think I use or support using terms like the ones mentioned in my original post; that was not my intention.
People keep focusing on Pao's gender, but IMHO the main reason Pao was not liked in reddit is not her gender or race, but rather that she was too old for the role. Plus her business background was not really exciting. She could barely inspire the rebelious youngsters that frequent reddit. I believe a younger asian hipster girl would be a much easier sell for the changes she wanted to bring about.
Pao had a rough time because she was labeled as an SJW by many people and other weren't happy with her management practices. We're in a turbulent time regarding gender relations with angry and militant people on both sides of the equation and Pao was an easy target by trolls and others caught in the mob mentality of events like gamergate. Pao was treated horribly but it's not something I'm suprised to see.
The way women are treated online is horrific but Pao gave people ammunition and stoked the fires and the worst time to do so. You don't beat people with a stick when they're angry and expect to remain unscathed.
I'm not sure if I agree with the other poster's point. But just the same, your logic is: So if I get into a fight with a drunk concealed carry holder, I deserve to get shot? Of course not. Would it have been wise of me to consider that some of the possible outcomes go beyond a few fists thrown at the pub? Absolutely.
The massive leap you're making to bait the other commenter is tacky.
> People keep focusing on Pao's gender, but IMHO the main reason Pao was not liked in reddit is not her gender or race, but rather that she was too old for the role. Plus her business background was not really exciting.
Grasping at straws. She was met with a massive, organised campaign of hatred. This isn't explained by being "old" or having a "poor business background".
But being a 1) female, 2) asian person who had 3) recently lost a highly-publicised gender discrimination lawsuit and 4) enacted an anti-harassment policy would explain the hatred. There is a large number of people who are misogynist, racist and/or openly hostile to what they view as "political correctness". And a much larger number of people who will listen to and possibly be pursuaded their lies.
That's one way to see it , but one's truth is somebody else's lie. Pao was particularly bad at communicating her intentions - even a white male would be met with rage in this case. She made her position worse by bringing identity politics into it and playing the victim card. I think if she had used a better style of communication she could have stayed. Also, i m not convinced from what i read that there was some global conspiracy against her. Herd mentality is not organized.
#3 and #4, yeah. A lot of people (myself included) felt she was the wrong person for the job. Not everyone is receptive to the constant speech policing that invariably results when you put an SJW in charge.
Having followed the whole situation fairly closely, this is literally the first time I've heard anyone suggest that it was about her age. Meanwhile, reddit's top posts were filled with racist and sexist insults for days.
This is quite a poor article. I'm surprised it made it here.
"Just like that, most of Reddit went quiet."
I'm not a big reddit user, but I never noticed that. Most discussions I am interested in are still going.
Also, the word "misogynist" is one of my litmus tests - it usually indicates prejudice by the author. Most people here have translated that term to sexist but it is usually used to imply "the comments are negative and directed at women". I usually find such articles stereotype men in a negative way (ie. The people who use this term are often hypocritical).
Agreed. It reads like a loving puff piece designed to make investors happy. I don't understand the claim that reddit is a "bastion of free speech" while saying misogynists and racists are nothing but violent, vile trolls. What exactly do they think free speech IS? It means supporting speech you don't agree with!
That's in reference to subreddits, including many of the default ones, becoming private for a day in protest after a well liked Reddit employee was fired. A good portion of the article is about dramatizing Ohanian and HUffman's response to the event. If you're not a heavy Reddit user its easy to see how you missed it, but a lot of the article revolves around its aftermath: Ellen Pao deciding to resign, Ohanian and Huffman putting aside their differences, Reddit the company deciding it needs a concrete direction.
This article was mostly about putting a heroic spin on the story of Reddit's founders, and the challenges they face trying to open reddit to a wider audience. Its very much a puff piece that really isn't a general critique of the seedier aspects of reddit.
>I usually find such articles stereotype men in a negative way (ie. The people who use this term are often hypocritical).
Or maybe it is accurate, but is hard for men to accept that. The world operates generally in a misogynistic way. Is it really hard to believe Reddit, who's userbase is predominantly men, act this way as well?
Source: Man who used to frequent Reddit for years.
> Or maybe it is accurate, but is hard for men to accept that.
There is a clear difference between sexism and misogyny. In fact people that swap one for the other actually have voided both words of any sense and made it a generic insult. Just like racism. That's what is wrong with people seeing misogyny or racism everywhere, especially on the web.
> The world operates generally in a misogynistic way
The world is a place where the strong prey on the weak, no matter what sex/race the weak is. Here, I corrected you. To focus on misogyny is focusing on the symptoms instead of the causes.
I think reddit's issues stem from a simple case of failing to manage expectations -- the users got the idea that Reddit was a bastion of free speech where they could post anything, no matter how offensive. Apparently the corporation never really believed that, despite some of its representatives making statements that seemed to confirm it.
Reddit ought to have been more straightforward with its content policy from the beginning. Some would argue that such a policy would have restricted the growth of reddit, but I think that as long as the content policy was not enforced in a heavy-handed manner, it would not have caused issues.
One thing I've always found interesting with Reddit related news is users will say things like "You (Reddit) never told us..." or other similar statement. It just always came across as an odd sense of entitlement as if Reddit should run every idea, change or whatever by their users for approval.
Some users seem to feel like they are the true owners of the site, and that the corporation exists to serve them and fulfill their needs. This is another example of the corporation's failure to manage expectations. They seem to have lost control over the site they created.
Isn't there an element of truth to that sentiment though? The situation with Reddit is reminiscent in some ways to Digg's downfall with the release of v4 (which ironically contributed significantly to Reddit's growth). What is Reddit without its users?
Is Reddit now directly comparable to Digg v3 -> v4? I feel like because Reddit has so many subs it can easily survive without people in some of the larger subs. When all the drama was happening a few months some sub reddits I read had a fair amount of members who had no clue anything was going on.
I guess the way I'm thinking of it as is the vocal majority the right representation and worry for reddit? Think about the petition they tried to get going. The number of signatures was minuscule comparative to the total number of users.
I think that just exacerbates the problem though as the "power users" of reddit move away from the vitriol of the default subreddits, the vitriol becomes more visible on the surface. So the larger subs end up less and less attractive to users new and old.
> Some users seem to feel like they are the true owners of the site, and that the corporation exists to serve them and fulfill their needs
So you think that reddit has any value at all after you remove the top 20% of users that generate 80% of the content? I think those users you speak about are fairly accurate in their assessment.
I understand this can work with some communities of smaller scale (here or MetaFilter) but I feel like Reddit is well beyond a tight, niche community. I would say that line of think is more appropriate for sub reddits.
IN the early days new features were almost always presented as ideas from the community.
Subreddits started as a way to categorize posts, due to a certain influx of meme's and some users said "hey, can't we mark them, so I do t have to see them" and then later these tags developed into forums of their own.
Apparently the idea was actually from Paul Graham, but it was never presented as a corporate idea.
When your users quite literally run the site by adding and commenting on content - the user has all the power by design. Without the users, you have no content and without content you have no visitors and without visitors you have no advertisers.
Do something your user base disagrees with? They'll go elsewhere. The site then dies out into obscurity like Digg and a new site will take over.
Not just adding and commenting - the users also moderate. IMO reddit users, particularly people who post topics and/or moderate, have every reason to feel some ownership.
Not that they own it technically. But like you say, reddit dies if they leave.
> an odd sense of entitlement as if Reddit should run every idea, change or whatever by their users for approval
I think that's because Reddit has fostered the idea that its users form real communities and it has let them self-administer to a large extent. In modern society, that comes with expectations of something like a democratic process. People then get angry when Reddit violates those expectations and acts like an autocratic corporation.
> the users got the idea that Reddit was a bastion of free speech where they could post anything, no matter how offensive
Except they don't - because the people yelling most about "free speech" are the first to throw a hissy fit when someone uses "free speech" to suggest that they're being racist or sexist or whatever. They believe in consequence-free speech, where they get to say whatever they want, and no-one is allowed to talk back, or even ignore them.
> Except they don't - because the people yelling most about "free speech" are the first to throw a hissy fit when someone uses "free speech" to suggest that they're being racist or sexist or whatever.
What do you mean by "throw a hissy fit"? There's a difference between disagreeing with someone and saying they should not be allowed to say what they are saying.
People who are saying that they are "triggered" when someone uses the word "rape" and therefore people should not be able to say the word "rape" are against free speech. If someone calls me sexist for saying that, I'll ridicule their opinion because their opinion is ridiculous, but I still they should be allowed to state their ridiculous opinion. The former is anti-free speech. The latter is not. Simply telling someone they are wrong is not taking a stance against free speech.
Uh, have you even been on Reddit? There are definitely people who want to ban words.
But even without going that extreme, Person B in your example is way off-base. There's nothing wrong with Person A, they're just experiencing an unfortunate mental illness. But Person B is creating this moral obligation for everyone to participate in the treatment of Person A's mental illness, and that's an obligation which simply does not exist. It sucks that Person A is sick, and I'd even be happy to devote more of my tax dollars to help them, but I don't think that we should be curtailing our free speech to help treat the vast array of possible mental illnesses we might encounter on the internet.
This is a very good point. For what Reddit has traditionally aspired to be, versus how it works, e.g. as an ebb and flow of community standards, it's a rock and a hard place in my opinion.
Somewhere I've seen the perspective put forth that Reddit is essentially the gateway for things from 4Chan (etc) to make it into the mainstream, and I kind of buy into that.
That is the issue for a (vocal) 1% of users who think that a bastion of free speech means a bastion of threats, shaming and bullying. The issue for 99% of users -- and therefore the actual issue for Reddit -- is that other 1%, that has made Reddit creepy, off-putting and downright scary.
99% of users couldn't care less about an unclear content policy or its heavy-handed enforcement because they've just never wanted to bully or shame anyone on Reddit.
Particularly in America, a lot of people interpret freedom of speech to include allowing hate speech.
These people would say that you can't be a bastion of free speech and ban hate speech at the same time, so if Reddit has banned hate speech it means they're not a bastion of free speech.
IMHO there's nothing wrong with /not/ being a bastion of free speech, though. Who'd want to be, given what it entails?
It's because "hate speech" must be defined by someone, and who is(/are) that someone(s)?
Hate speech is protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. (see R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, Snyder v. Phelps)
If you disagree with that premise, you're free to lobby for a an amendment.
If you're banning hate speech, you're not a bastion of free speech in the United States of America.
I think if a company is more restrictive than the country you're incorporated in (reddit, inc. is a Delaware corporation), "not a bastion of free speech" is a fair description.
Totally agree with you that there's nothing wrong with being restrictive (this is HN, after all, also not a bastion of free speech).
As a avid reddit user, these two sentences scare me more than any of the stuff that happened this year:
> Huffman believes Reddit can be mainstream, embraced by the larger world. But for that to happen, he’ll need to clean up the product so that it is more straightforward for new users to try it out—without alienating the existing community members.
Thing is, reddit is incredible fractured and all of the value I get from the site is because it is incredible fractured. I am not subscribed to any of the default subs (sub forums new users get subscribed to automatically) and in general I avoid /r/all which is just a cesspool of shallow memes. However behind this a some fantastic niche communities like r/worldbuilding and the history community (I avoid r/history though). And I believe, these communities thrive to a large part because reddit is fractured and I fear that a more mainstream reddit would look a lot more like a boring version of the current /r/all.
> I am not subscribed to any of the default subs (sub forums new users get subscribed to automatically) and in general I avoid /r/all
Say that to any non-techie (say, to the average Facebook user) and I'd bet real money their eyes glaze over and they make it a point to forget Reddit even exists. That is Reddit's problem.
It would be a win-win if Reddit goes on with its beautification project. On the one hand reddit will finally become presentable to advertisers, on the other hand the fringe communities will probably move to a non-commercial, impossible-to-censor community.
"Huffman believes Reddit can be mainstream, embraced by the larger world."
It might sound hipster-like, but whatever: mainstream is boring, stupid and brings all the worst type of people. Best online communities are niche, small and focused. Reddit for a long while was just a big pool of niche communities. They were good subreddits, there were ugly subreddits, and things were OK.
But with time it grew popular and now it needs to "take a stance on political correctness, social justice etc", "people get offended", it's bad for business, while the company needs to monetize after so many years ... so rules needs to be imposed, etc. etc.
Racist people will move elsewhere, hate will move elsewhere, they won't disappear - that's for sure. But most creative people will also move as they were on reddit for what it used to be. There's a reason why these "awful" places like 4Chan and Reddit were the source of most of online trends and interesting action: "Pretty Flowers Grow In Shit".
Reddit is doomed, just like digg was. It won't happen over night (digg.com is still around), no, but it will.
Hopefully something p2p and decentralized (zeronet maybe?) will replace it this time, so it won't be owned by any entity to impose some stupid rules.
I started a subreddit called Life Pro Tips. Initially I seeded it with some of the best content I found through browsing reddit and kind of forgot about it. I submitted it to their self-serve advert program and it just kind of developed into what became a default subreddit.
At the same time I started it, I registered the domain with the intent to some day build a standalone site out of it.
That day finally came and I finished the site (I work on side projects like this in my spare time outside of work and always have).
Since it was a subreddit that I created, I thought I could write my own rules for it. We ended up having a community discussion and only allowing self links due to people spamming unworthy "TOP ___ life hack" lists.
When I launched the site, I had an Automoderator rule approve anything that was submitted from the site I built. One member discovered this, reported it, and before I knew it, I was shadowbanned and told to remove everything. Reddit didn't even tell me about the shadowbanning (I found out due to another mod making the discovery of it). They claimed that it was violating their TOS because the site had ads on it (I have lots of reasons why I disagree with this, and how they treat certain sites preferentially, but I'm not interested in explaining it, honestly).
Considering I have a career and this was a side project, I gave up on reddit and it was the best thing for me. I've spent countless hours of my life moderating and contributing to making that subreddit a nice part of reddit (ultimately helping them create content, for free), and there was never any kind of gratitude (aside from a reddit gold I randomly received, which is worthless to me) expressed to me.
At this time there is nothing compelling enough on reddit for me to return, and I have a feeling the company and its employees know they are in trouble.
> I had an Automoderator rule approve anything that was submitted from the site I built. One member discovered this, reported it, and before I knew it, I was shadowbanned and told to remove everything.
I don't know why this came as a huge surprise to you. Reddit has always been strict about posting stuff from your own site. The following statement has been on the FAQ page since 2010.
> It's not strictly forbidden to submit a link to a site that you own or otherwise benefit from in some way, but you should sort of consider yourself on thin ice.
"Tired" starts out by telling us there was a day when "Reddit wasn't there", as if they had a major outage. That's never mentioned again. The article is mostly about their struggle to be more politically correct to satisfy advertisers.
Whatever happened to the idea that the best way to combat speech is with speech? Yet the "bastion of free speech" Reddit feels it must shut down various communities, probably just sending them elsewhere. Society could benefit from the conversation between those who say unapproved things and those who disapprove of them.
I can't really fault Reddit for trying to figure out how to monetize the site and I'm certainly not in favor of pervasive hate speech, but I can't help but feel annoyed at all the gimmicks they're introducing like upvoted.com or the not-so-subtly promoted casual celebrity drop-ins to askreddit threads.
I haven't visited in a few days and that trend is likely to continue. And honestly, there's no tangible reason for my loss of interest. I certainly don't have any better ideas as to how to solve these very real problems. All I know is I just want to forget about it.
When I realized I was spending more time reading r/guitar and r/wearethemusicmakers than playing guitar or making music, I deleted my account and only drop in about once a month to see if I've missed much of anything. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Just my take on it.
I'm not really part of this conversation, but my GF has previously complained that Reddit isn't worth using because "you're just scrolling down looking at cool shit, and then BAM, you get murder-rolled. [What?] It's like rickrolling, but it's a picture or video of somebody getting murdered."
Various client-side solutions to this occurred to me, like identifying domains that will host such media (gotta be just a few, right?) and null routing them on her computer, but then it turned out that she doesn't have root on her "computer", so she just quit using reddit.
What on earth subreddits is she subscribed to that this is a thing that happens at all? I think I have seen such a post roughly zero times in the last five years.
When you make an account, you auto-subscribe to the current defaults. For a long time /r/wtf was a default sub. Its pretty much murder and disfigurement porn. She's probably still seeing that. I believe /r/wtf's tenure as a default tied it with a period of a lot of new traffic, so lots of people still see /r/wtf in their feed.
Whoever decided to move /r/wtf into the defaults back then was crazy. I have a thick skin and have seen more than my share of awful things on the internet, but a lot of that content is challenging even for me, especially anything involving injured, abused, or even dead children. I can't imagine what its like for someone not already exposed to that.
I haven't seen anything like that on Reddit though. Everything is marked NSFW, unless perhaps stuff in 50/50, but even they tell you there's 50% chance that any post is something vile.
It was a default sub last year, possibly with a different mission statement. Or they were just into murder at the time. I mean, lots of popular websites are.
People don't argue about using the word rape on reddit, that place is a bastion for anti-trigger warning rhetoric much like tumblr is a haven for pro-trigger warning rhetoric.
Also you are severely misunderstanding what 'trigger warnings' are. Nobody says you can't talk about rape, just give people a heads up before you do. If you live next door to a veteran that you know suffers from PTSD, you ask him/her about using fireworks before you do it, right? Trigger warnings are the same thing except on the internet and instead of not talking about it the person just knows to stop reading.
Also, this isn't policing thoughts. Think whatever you want. Say what you want. Understand the consequences.
I will think what I want and respond how I want and understand the consequences.
> People don't argue about using the word rape on reddit, that place is a bastion for anti-trigger warning rhetoric much like tumblr is a haven for pro-trigger warning rhetoric.
Sure, if you ignore TwoXChromosomes, Shit___Says, etc.
Reddit is not one community, and talking about Reddit as if it is a bastion of anything only shows your ignorance on this topic. Certain subreddits certainly are bastions of full-on sexism and racism, but others are the diametric opposite.
> Nobody says you can't talk about rape, just give people a heads up before you do.
This is simply incorrect. Most people don't say you can't talk about rape, but there are definitely people on Reddit who say you can't talk about rape.
> If you live next door to a veteran that you know suffers from PTSD, you ask him/her about using fireworks before you do it, right? Trigger warnings are the same thing except on the internet and instead of not talking about it the person just knows to stop reading.
If I know my neighbor is a veteran with PTSD, I probably just wouldn't shoot off fireworks. I'm not an asshole.
But Reddit isn't my neighbor, it's a cross-section of the entire internet, and there's no way I can possibly avoid triggering all of the myriad of possible mental illnesses people could be experiencing on the internet. Completely sanitized content is not something you can reasonably expect in a diverse community.
People who don't want to see content about rape can definitely go to Subreddits that enforce these kinds of rules. None of the subreddits I subscribe to allow hate speech, and talk about rape would be deleted because it's off topic. I've managed to avoid "triggering" content completely unintentionally, just by subscribing to subreddits that are on topics that interest me. People who are at risk for being triggered by talk about rape are just as capable of that as I am. It's much more reasonable to simply subscribe to reddits with content you care about than to try to force every community on Reddit to participate in the treatment of your mental illness.
> Also, this isn't policing thoughts. Think whatever you want. Say what you want. Understand the consequences. I will think what I want and respond how I want and understand the consequences.
It isn't about policing thought for you. You sound like a reasonable person. Unfortunately not everyone involved in this discussion is so reasonable.
>Reddit has a bad reputation for being a repository for hate speech. Because for all of the world’s-largest-secret-Santa programs and for every lonely teen able to find friends on Reddit, there is a small and vocal minority of bad actors trying to ruin it for everyone. And let’s face it, you’re much more likely to come into conflict with them if you are not a wealthy white man.
What a garbage article. Reddit's full of horrible content, but it's mostly on /r/atheism and /r/politics. the hate speech is there, but it's more hidden than it's ever been. And wow, it's the internet, where people can say anything they want. Where's the hitpiece on Berners-Lee?
Last I checked, Reddit was hosted on private servers. Hence, what you can say on their site is dictated by their TOS. The Internet is not a place where you can "say anything you want". It's a collection of servers. If you want the ability to say anything you want, start your own server. Reddit is not the government; it is not their obligation to protect free speech.
I didn't claim it was my Constitutional right to say what I want on reddit. I just find it abhorrent that free speech is being attacked on Wired, regardless of host. And there are plenty of places on the Internet - large, small - where there are very liberal speech policies. That they are making mountains of molehills on reddit is frustrating.
The bigger an internet entity is, the harder it is for them to maintain free speech purism. The places with very liberal speech policies are small, niche places, sometimes mostly-abandoned places.
Nor do they have the obligation to protect the delicate sensibilities of any person on the internet who feels "triggered".
The conflict here is that most of Reddit's users want Reddit to support free speech, while advertisers don't want to risk their brands by juxtaposing them with hate speech. Of course it's not about "rights", but Reddit's struggles are largely motivated by the fact that they're trying to keep everyone happy when that is an impossibility.
"trying to keep everyone happy when that is an impossibility."
This is something I think we can all agree upon.
There's no need to denigrate people who may feel triggered or are offended, though. Reddit just needs to decide what's most important to them. If they want to give a platform to anyone, regardless of how vile their speech, that's totally fine! But, they should not also expect widespread adoption of their site. Most people are not vile and will be happy to move along to less hateful pastures.
> There's no need to denigrate people who may feel triggered or are offended, though.
I think that's a misrepresentation of my opinion. I have nothing against people who feel triggered or offended. Frankly, a lot of the jokes on Reddit offend me. What I think is ridiculous is to try to force people to change what people are allowed to say just because you're offended.
Re: triggers: at a point in my life, there were certain sounds and words that could trigger me. But what I did was I fixed it: I got therapy and I avoided situations where I was likely to experience those things. I didn't go around trying to force everyone to participate in the treatment of my illness.
There are people who have immunodeficiency diseases that mean being around other people without a mask is dangerous to them: a sneeze could kill them. But we don't make everyone everywhere wear face masks to keep them safe, even though they have a much stronger argument for protection: a trigger word at worst causes you to go into mild shock or have a panic attack, while an infection is likely to kill someone with an autoimmune disease.
Of course there are places where it makes sense to limit free speech to inoffensive material. Rape support groups are a good example (and there are subreddits for that). But at least in its heyday, Reddit was a platform of communities, and that's most effective when you let those communities choose their own rules.
> But, they should not also expect widespread adoption of their site. Most people are not vile and will be happy to move along to less hateful pastures.
...like most subreddits?
This is what I really don't understand about this discussion; I feel like 99% of the people arguing about how bad Reddit is have little or no experience with Reddit. Most subreddits don't allow hate speech.
If you host on someone else's servers, you need to follow their TOS for what you can and can't host. For instance, lots of places don't like hosting porn.
I don't know Amazon's TOS very well, nor am I implying it comes in to play here. I just remembered seeing some posts about Reddit being hosted on AWS.
I was curious about this, so I went to the SMBC site. It says by Zach Weinersmith; not Weinberg. Also the CTO of Reddit is Marty Weiner. That's three different last names. I think you're a little confused!
Zach Weiner changed his name to Weinersmith when he got married. I think the parent was mistaken when he said Weinberg, but Marty Weiner being Zach Weiner's brother does make logical sense (I don't know if it's true though).
Reddit is like Craigslist 2.0 -- stark, text based with arcane cultural conventions, there is a lot of gold out there but also a lot of crap. Whereas craigslist is for locals to meet up, this is for online denizens to comment.
I wonder how often fallen-out relationships between cofounders get reconciled. It seems like the force driving change needs to be pretty compelling... something much larger than the two individuals.
I think they both love reddit. I know as a user I love reddit, and despite the myriad problems with it, if I was in a position to give it some TLC and make it a place I would want to be, I would put aside interpersonal differences to make that happen.
Professional fall-out tended to be due to professional reasons. If the root causes could be fixed or overridden with a greater cause, why could they not work together again?
My eyes just about rolled out of my head. "Blossomed?" By volume, those "conversations" make up a minority of a minority of a minority of what happens on Reddit.