I'm really interested in `home-manager` honestly, and while I agree about the benefits of declarative package management, I find it easier to type commands at a terminal like `nix profile upgrade pkg` or `nix registry pin nixpkgs`, with the guarantee of rollbacks.
Since when I'm editing a text file to update a package, I have to look for the latest version separately and copy/paste it into my editor. If I somehow mess it up the file is broken, while no harm is done I still find this workflow a bit brittle.
If there are home-manager commands I missed to do this, I'd be eager to give it a try. That kind of workflow would remind me of running `npm upgrade pkg` and have it reflected on a `package.json` file.
If you don't care about political views of presenters, there's no need to bring inclusion to the table; just consider their technical talents and call it a day.
If you actually care about inclusion, you need to think about how including backwards-views that oppose inclusion itself could affect your effort. Banning only physically violent behavior is behind the times, it's obvious there are many ways of harming someone without lifting a finger. If you're supporting inclusion for inclusions's sake, including everyone may make sense. But if you really care about people who depend on you including them, it's obvious some measures must be taken to create a safe environment for the underrepresented.
> some measures must be taken to create a safe environment for the underrepresented.
Then it comes down to defining what "safe" means. To most people, that does mean basic physical safety, meaning you won't be physically assaulted or have your stuff damaged/stolen.
However, once you get into subjectivity of a listener's interpretation of others' words or social actions (like disinterest in their topics or cultural mismatch), calling any difference from their beliefs or expectations "unsafe", all procedural sanity flies out the window. The only types of meetings that can be rationally and formally capable of running under such specific clauses would be particularly exclusionary meetings of only certain beliefs.
Inclusivity means exposure to difference, and if exposure to difference means "unsafe" to someone, then inclusivity itself is unsafe to them. There are those who also simply equate "socially uncomfortable" with "unsafe", and social discomfort can come from literally anything.
(Edit: I would strongly prefer responses from the downvoters. Defining some specific, actionable policy capturing subjective interpretation by attendees without becoming exclusionary is something I'd be interested in actually seeing. I'm not talking about subjective application of policy, but actual full capture within policy.)
define safety. The problem is right there with all these words "safe","diversity","inclusiveness" which now means something different than what they are supposed to mean at first place.
And people are tricked into agreeing with this narrative because of course, people want to be safe, people want diversity, people want inclusiveness. But by safety you do not mean physical safety. By safety you mean "a environment where radical left-wing ideas cannot be challenged". By diversity you mean "people being there not because of their skills but because of their gender,race or sexual orientation". By inclusiveness you do not mean more of everybody, but "less white males". That's "newspeak" and it's misleading on purpose.
They didn't say hate speech was not bannable. They simply confirmed that the potential of hate speech is not sufficient to preemptively ban an individual without significant evidence. That seems about as much protection as you can provide without just permanently banning people who have ever expressed non-inclusive world views.
> But if you really care about people who depend on you including them, it's obvious some measures must be taken to create a safe environment for the underrepresented.
Please be specific: how is Yarvin's presence making you unsafe? Are you concerned he'll physically attack you, or insult you personally or as a member of a group? If not, you have no reason to feel unsafe.
(And if you feel unsafe anyway and believe that's a reason to ostracize him, well, I have bad news: your viewpoints make me feel unsafe. So sounds like you're not going to be attending, either.)
I know this is about the firing of a reddit mod, but I can't shake of the feeling that the people behind this petition care more about the banning of hateful subs. This is a retribution for them.
I really feel disappointed when people think free speech is more important than anything. Yes, it is important, but we defend it for a reason. Because it protects the weak. But when I see people defending it so they can harass or otherwise spew hate speech about minorities, I wonder where did we do wrong. Maybe, just maybe, we treated it like a dogma and then it backfired? It should've been a means to an end, not the other way.
Nope. Because it protects everybody, regardless of how the state or the Powers That Be are classifying you - weak, strong, black, white, conservative, liberal, poor, rich, male, female, or neither, or both, any category and any classification - you get free speech. Everybody gets free speech. Once we start choosing - this guy deserves free speech, because he's "weak", but this guy is better shut up, because he's "strong" enough, it's no free speech, it's privilege of speaking for whoever you like.
Now, many people can't handle freedom - freedom means people can do things that you don't like. I mean, really don't like, I mean, things, that positively infuriate you so much you see a wall of red. I can appreciate that, and I can understand - not condone, not agree with, but understand - people that don't want free speech and other freedoms to be around for that reason. It's hard sometimes. But please - if you don't support free speech, don't call whatever privilege structure for avoiding crimespeech and crimethink - "free speech".
P.S. I hope everybody reading this is smart enough so that the above does not need a disclaimer "within the bounds of not using speech to commit actual crimes, such as ordering a hit on somebody", etc. But just in case it's not so, yeah, I know about that.
I can't figure out if you're merely objecting to the idea that it "protects the weak", or if you're trying to actually justify the position that free speech means you're allowed to harass people. Because that's what the banning was really about.
Free speech, at its core, really means the freedom to express any idea. That's pretty much it. It does not guarantee you a soapbox upon which to express the idea, and it does not mean that the community around you cannot react negatively to what you say. All it actually guarantees is that the government cannot restrict what you say. As long as you don't commit a crime. Which harassment is. People can and do get charged with harassment and related offenses, but nobody tries to claim that charging someone with harassment or a related offense is a violation of their free speech. They recognize that there are in fact limits to what you can do and say, which in general are when what you do and say starts violating the rights of other people.
But this is the internet, and on the internet, the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[1] comes into play. Because it's the internet, people think that they're free to say whatever the hell they want, even if it very clearly amounts to harassment of other people. And that's just plain wrong. Reddit is absolutely correct to ban subs that are harassing people, and I wish they'd be even stricter about it.
I think you are confusing two (or more) meanings of the word "harassment" - unless you can provide an example of somebody convicted for saying something not nice about other person on the Internet, at least in the jurisdiction where freedom of speech is not completely dead yet (e.g. not New Zealand where they just killed it this month).
> which in general are when what you do and say starts violating the rights of other people.
Somebody saying something that you won't like does not violate your rights. You do not have a right to control what everybody else is saying and demand them saying only things that are pleasant to you.
> And that's just plain wrong
Being an asshole may be wrong. But if you want to ban people from being assholes, and in general from doing anything wrong (by your definition of "wrong", or anybody else's), please do not call it "freedom".
Of course, Reddit - or any private forum - has no obligation to maintain freedom of speech, and can impose any restrictions they like. I have no objection to it. I just have an objection to hijacking the term "freedom" to describe it. Find some other word, this one is already being used to describe something else.
> Reddit is absolutely correct to ban subs that are harassing people
I'm not sure I understand reddit enough, but how you can harass somebody with a sub if said person never visits the said sub? The mechanism of harassment is not clear to me here.
> I'm not sure I understand reddit enough, but how you can harass somebody with a sub if said person never visits the said sub?
You can't. The whole problem here was that those subs were not restricting themselves to posting within the sub. They were harassing people outside of the sub.
According to one of the Reddit admins[1], all of the banned subs had "numerous complaints that they were harassing people both on and off Reddit".
The problem here was not that they were saying mean things on the internet, as you seem to be claiming. The problem was that they were very legitimately harassing people outside of the subreddit. The people being harassed did not have to visit the sub in order to see it, and didn't even have to visit Reddit. And that's what makes it harassment, and what makes it against the rules of Reddit.
>Reddit is absolutely correct to ban subs that are harassing people, and I wish they'd be even stricter about it.
You're never going to stop all online harassment by fighting fires like this. It'd take a paid army to monitor. Reddit had a free army taking care of that and they're slowly dismantling it.
But that's kind of the point. The subreddits that got banned are ones in which the moderators refused to take any action to stop the harassment That's why Reddit had to step in and deal with it.
Hmm, I read that there was no notice given. Either way, I agree with you that personally identifiable information should be forbidden and censored by mods, admins, and the community as general policy. I may have misunderstood your meaning. I read that you support blocking offensive speech.
I'm not convinced that removing/blocking the old content (as much as I did not think it was funny) is a good idea. It stokes a fire. Giving notice to the moderators, and then either replacing them, or closing submissions to that sub, and cleansing old data of personally identifiable information seems more appropriate. Under the current circumstances, it's really difficult for the community to verify that what was claimed happened actually happened: we're blocked from seeing it all. There could be more transparency, and I think that's what folks are clambering for. The firing of Victoria, santa, and the leukemia boy with no notice point to the same issue, and these were just the final straws that broke the camel's back for many people. Reddit still has an opportunity to be both an awesome community and a monetizable business. It just depends what steps are taken from here and if they're consistent with old policy, or if managers will really get introspective and work with the community to make some changes, even if they aren't the exact ones demanded in this petition. The way I read this saga is, each time something happens that demonstrates a lack of transparency or oversight in how the community operates, more people get upset: it is more evidence that the lack of communication was not a one-off mistake. Rather, it's habit and deeply ingrained.
Why go to great lengths to preserve content in a subreddit that was found to be in significant enough violation of the rules to warrant banning? There's nothing sacred about that content that demands it be preserved. And trying to preserve the subreddit itself such that people can still participate, while merely attempting to replace moderators, would not solve any problem. The toxic community that engaged in the harassment would still exist, and there's no good way for reddit admins to appoint new people as moderators anyway, because they didn't form the community in the first place.
> There could be more transparency, and I think that's what folks are clambering for.
In the case of the banned subreddits, there was actually plenty of transparency, and a plethora of various posts explaining what happened. But a lot of people spread a lot of FUD about (whether by accident or deliberately I don't know) and in general did their best to obscure the reason for the banning. It really feels like there's a bunch of users who are doing their absolute best to try and stoke up the fires and create a witch hunt, which is why you get a lot of this misinformation being spread around and a lot of discredited claims being repeated over and over again.
I do agree that the firing of Victoria was handled badly, mostly in that there was no notice given to the subreddits and moderators, and no plan in place for how to handle the AMAs that she had been responsible for. As for whether the act itself was justified, I have no idea, because we don't know why her employment was terminated. And we probably never will, unless she publicly states the reason herself.
I don't think it's great lengths. And why? Well, because you want your userbase to trust you and increased transparency helps that. I don't care about that sub but its complete removal lends credence to the FUD you mention, or at the very least leaves it as an open question. Many people don't trust Facebook, but it's irreplaceable. It's a great way to communicate with your friends and share photos, there's no easy way to migrate your contacts list to another system, plus user adoption of a new interface would be difficult, etc. Reddit doesn't have any of those leg-ups, and as you mention the users are more technologically able. The only thing going for it is the existing architecture and userbase, but as we've seen, given sufficient alternatives, users will move.
At the end of the day, EP said Reddit should not be a free speech platform, and that's something with which I'll never agree. If she had instead said, "We ARE a free speech platform, yet we also remove personally identifiable information and ban those who post it" then it would be an entirely different story. As it is, it looks like she's trying to enforce Europe's definition of free speech, which limits hate speech, and that brings more hate than it limits (see: Muslims trying to sue Charlie Hebdo, failing, and then killing them 7 years later). The scale is much different but the concept is the same.
> It really feels like there's a bunch of users who are doing their absolute best to try and stoke up the fires and create a witch hunt
That may be. I think there's an opportunity here for management to be proactive and more open about what direction they are taking the website. Right now I don't see that. "Wait six months, I'll give you useful tools" is not something I could say to my manager at work about my software architecture plan, and it's not something Reddit should be telling its users.
EDIT:
> Why go to great lengths to preserve content?
Also, because this should not be a great effort. If it is, then you are admitting that the job of a moderator is difficult, and therefore they should be given more support. This is the realization reddit management is now making. I suspect the truth over what happened to FPH is both what Reddit Inc says and what the moderators say. Moderators say they have inefficient tools to tackle doxxing, and Reddit says moderators aren't doing a good enough job. Whose burden is that? The banning of FPH clearly demonstrated that admins felt it is the moderators' burden. The blackout showed the mods feel it is Reddit Inc's. I'll side with the mods as they are unpaid and don't need to do any of this. I personally don't need to see FPH, but I can see that Reddit Inc does not understand the needs or wants of its user base, inside or out of FPH.
> As it is, it looks like she's trying to enforce Europe's definition of free speech, which limits hate speech
You're still confusing the issue. Are you doing this deliberately or do you really not understand the difference between "we're censoring speech we don't like" versus "we're cracking down on people that are harassing other people"?
> I don't think it's great lengths. And why? Well, because you want your userbase to trust you and increased transparency helps that.
Ok, let me rephrase. Why preserve the content at all? The sub flagrantly violated the rules by harassing other people. Therefore it's banned. We all know what happens to a sub when it gets banned. I see no value whatsoever in trying to preserve the content of a sub like that.
> Moderators say they have inefficient tools to tackle doxxing, and Reddit says moderators aren't doing a good enough job. Whose burden is that? The banning of FPH clearly demonstrated that admins felt it is the moderators' burden.
The banning of FPH says absolutely nothing about whether the moderators' tools are sufficient to track doxxing. The issue was not that the moderators were incapable of doing their job with the tools provided. It's that the moderators refused to step in. The moderators of FPH and the other subs were willing participants in the harassment campaigns being waged by the subs. Hell, FPH put information about Imgur employees right in its sidebar as part of the harassment. And the only people that can do that are moderators.
I appreciate the spirited debate prior to this comment but your tone is now more harsh than I want to engage.
I understand you have a different viewpoint on this and I don't think either of us will convince the other. It's been real, have a good one.
PS. I'm not doing this to annoy you. I have given this subject a lot of thought over the years, and I genuinely believe everything I wrote to the letter. Maybe there is some miscommunication due to not being face to face but I tried my best to be as clear as possible.
Harassment is awful and I feel individuals do better at dealing with it than policies or enforcement. We do not need police to protect people's feelings as long as comments do not contain PII. The imgur photo is borderline as that came from their staff page anyway. Policing it covers the problem in the short term and does not expose the violators to other communities' reactions. Reddit is segmenting populations and reducing diversity, destroying the whole point of the site to begin with, which is a place where everyone, however you define them as good or bad, can come together to communicate. And this, because they fear that hatred will spread. That is the real FUD and it is coming from Reddit Inc
Looks like this headline has been removed from the front page, despite being only 2 hours old and having a lot of votes. It's marked as "DEAD" on hckernews, whatever that means: https://archive.is/8RxuV
I can only imagine reddit investors (PG?) do not appreciate the heavy defense of free speech making its way into HN forums
The mods keep saying that they do not do stuff like that. If you search for user dang (who is a mod) you can probably find him saying that.
When a post is killed or dropped off the front page it is normally as a result of user flagging. I'm not a mod so I don't know, but I suspect that's what happened here. Many users flagged the article; it drops rank.
If anything HN works to avoid censoring these topics: mods often unban / unkill these types of articles. (Again, a search of dang's comments will probably find examples.)
Debating whether free speech should be upheld, and to what degree, on the biggest online forum that exists, is a pretty interesting topic to me and many others who upvoted the article. And I do think building a successful social network ought to be of interest to HN. While the topic may not satisfy everyone, it's a single extra headline on a page with 20 others and is easily ignored. Right now there is NOTHING about reddit on the front of HN, which is pretty odd given its origin as a YC project and the number of people interested in recent news about reddit.
This is exactly why I don't participate on HN often. If the mods want everyone to hold the same opinion, great, but don't expect much real growth or interesting discussion from that policy. Shutting down debate is childish
"The mods" probably haven't done anything to shut down discussion. The reason the reddit articles don't stay on the front page is probably a result of user flags (and the karma threshold for flagging is low so many people can flag articles).
Well, I will say they changed the title to be somewhat less damaging. It was "Over 100,000 call for the resignation of interim reddit CEO" - Now it reads as "Petition: Step down as CEO of Reddit Inc"
So people can "flag" in addition to downvoting? And too many flags can result in an auto-removal? I don't see the point of that. Flagging should send it to a moderator. If you want to automate removal of articles, voting should suffice, otherwise you're just giving more power to people who don't want to see some topic.
Regardless of how this topic was removed, I think it was an interesting discussion that was silenced prematurely, and that's too bad.
This is a response to you, and not a commentary on what's happening at Reddit right now.
The ACLU would disagree. One of their landmark cases involved defending the constitutional right of a group of Nazis to hold a peaceful demonstration in a town populated with more than a small number of Holocaust survivors.
I am a Jew, and I support the ACLU defending the rights of people that hate me beyond reason.
Not because I agree with their point of view. But because I believe that everybody deserves the same rights, no matter how much of an asshole they may be.
We, or at least Americans, care deeply about free speech, not because it protects the weak, but because it is a fundamental human right.
Agreed and to preface, not a comment on Reddit: Usually the defense of free speech means defending the less worthy of using it for those times when for when its truly worthy, there's just really no middle ground.
Your sentence is a bit muddled. I'm not sure if you're in agreement with the above comment or not. You say "there's no middle ground" but you are also saying people usually only defend free speech at certain "times ... when its truly worthy".
There certainly is no middle ground. You must defend it all the time or defend it not at all, because once you lose free speech you will not get it back without a fight
I read the sentence to mean that you have to defend free speech for the less worthy so that free speech is still there for the truly worthy. Seems like he is in agreement with you.
> We, or at least Americans, care deeply about free speech, not because it protects the weak, but because it is a fundamental human right.
Thanks for recognising that this level of free speech is pretty much an American cultural thing and that most of the rest of the world doesn't see it that way.
English mewspapers talk about how important it is for them to keep their freedoms when they operate under, to Americans, restrictive laws.
And "we're a bit worried about the unpleasant parts of the Internet" is something baked in from the early 90s when commercial providers of Internet started offering services. See the various swearing filters; or Compuserve carrying but delisting a range of porn Usenet newsgroups.
And see also the AUPs of some ISPs that provide restrictions on top of US law about not harassing users (in some but not all AUPs) or not sending unsolicited bulk email (in most AUPs, even before there were laws about spam).
A blog post about the early AUPs of different services would possibly be useful.
Your mention of fundamental human rights is a bit odd; the US (for constitutional reasons) has not fully signed up to the UDHR. The freedom of speech bit is article 19.
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
But the US trashes articles 3, 4 (arguably), 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16(3)(arguably), 17(2).
I'd argue that being allowed to write about the fact a police officer took your house and there's no real recourse for you to get it back is less important than the officer just not taking it in the first place.
I have lived in more than a few countries over the past ten years, which has helped me to understand my own country better, both in terms of what we do wrong, and also, what we do right.
> Your mention of fundamental human rights is a bit odd; the US (for constitutional reasons) has not fully signed up to the UDHR.
Eleanor Roosevelt helped to draft the UDHR, and the United States voted in favor of its adoption in 1948.
That said, we have many problems in the US. Civil forfeiture is one of those, as are privatized prisons -- and the general barbarism of our penal system.
But none of those are caused by free speech, and none of them would be solved by eliminating it.
> I'd argue that being allowed to write about the fact a police officer took your house and there's no real recourse for you to get it back is less important than the officer just not taking it in the first place.
The fact that you can write about it IS your recourse. If you're not allowed to share your issues with others, you'll never get any weight behind them. Places like China and North Korea know this and clamp down on any groups rallying around a cause. Meanwhile, their laws go unenforced and an "every man for himself" attitude prevails, as they know they don't really have protection from the state.
Is America perfect? No. But freedom of speech is the one open door we have towards making our country better. Remember the Boston Tea Party, the I Have a Dream speech, Women's Suffrage, Antiwar movements, Gay rights, labor movements...
None of these are possible in places that do not have free speech.
Right, countries define it differently. England's in a different part of the world, I can understand that.
My response was to your comment that having the correct laws in place is more important than giving people freedom of speech. And I'm saying having freedom of speech IS your path to enacting just laws.
As donw pointed out, civil forefeiture laws were not created as a result of free speech in America. The two are unrelated
> I'd argue that being allowed to write about the fact a police officer took your house and there's no real recourse for you to get it back is less important than the officer just not taking it in the first place.
But free speech is more powerful because it's a generic tool. You don't need to anticipate every possible injustice with specific laws when you have an open forum for criticizing the government and appealing to your fellow citizens to support change. Free speech is vital to let liberty, justice, equality grow organically alongside evolving technology & society.
The problem was that /r/fatpeoplehate was banned while other "vile" subreddits continued to exist. Censorship is weird. In the US we can't show breasts on TV, but someone can get their head blown off. On reddit, you can't hate on fat people, but you can watch someone's face get ripped off in a car accident. You can also still hate on black people or deny the holocaust.
I think sites have the right to censor what they want, but reddit has to tread carefully when dealing with it. The free organic growth it enjoys can also turn into organic backlash. The massive energy exerted into managing and creating the content that fuels reddit can also go in the opposite direction, with reddit being the platform of it's own destruction.
reddit has a history of problems, from technical stability issues in the past, to now more managerial/executive issues. reddit needed help and a guiding vision, but Ellen Pao has the reputation of being a professional griefer, and was probably the worst fit possible to fix reddit's problems. Removing Pao seems like a difficult proposition given the lawsuit at her previous employer. The firing of the only admin who was proactive with the community seems to indicate more tone deaf action on management's part.
This is probably the biggest crisis reddit has ever faced, and it could be it's demise. The snowball seems to keep getting bigger.
> The problem was that /r/fatpeoplehate was banned while other "vile" subreddits continued to exist.
But that's not a problem at all. Anyone who is making that claim either seriously misunderstands why those subreddits got banned, or is being disingenuous.
There are plenty of vile subreddits that I wish didn't exist. But as long as they're not breaking the law or reddit's rules (the relevant one in this case being about harassment), then they're allowed to exist. r/fatpeoplehate and the other banned subs broke the rules by harassing people, and by having their moderators refuse to do anything about it. That's why they got banned. It had nothing to do with the content being objectionable and everything to do with the behavior of the subreddit.
While reddit stated they weren't banning an idea, only the subreddit, alternative subreddits that popped up on the same topic were also shutdown. The belief is that the idea leads to negative unacceptable behavior, and thus they have actually banned the idea, not just the subreddit.
A more community minded approach may have been better, along with threats of working with law enforcement on matters of real-world harassment. This segues right into the next issue of poor community management and oversight. Poor tools & poor admin oversight of subreddits until they are too big to handle in a graceful fashion. Instead of working on these issues, they fired more staff.
All of these actions may have actually been completely justifiable, but were communicated and implemented very poorly.
I think the issue was the activities escaped the subreddit and surfaced other places. Say you disagree with the Healthy at any Size crowd in the subreddit? Fine. Start harassing them on their Facebook pages, tumblers, etc and it was deemed (in my humble opinion) going too far.
The irony is not lost on me that to make Reddit a "safe place" for all some ended up booted off the site for activities outside the site itself. Same as the fact that the primary object of fph's disdain got far more attention and perhaps even sympathy than she would have otherwise.
> Yes, it is important, but we defend it for a reason. Because it protects the weak.
Is that why we defend it? I strongly disagree with this idea. There is a lot of distasteful speech that I think we should defend, and much of it doesn't concern disenfranchised or weak groups.
I find it hard to articulate an exact reason for defending free speech. But a large part of it to me is that we grant an _enormous_ amount of power to whoever we let define what ideas and speech is allowed, and disallowed. In an ideal world, you would let free speech be the absolute rule; since truly distasteful things would be seen as such and just be noise.
Pragmatically though, free speech often has real consequences, and in some case real, actual victims and that must be balanced. But understand that if you defend free speech in any venue, you have to accept some level of speech you find distasteful. I think you get to draw the line at showing actual harm or damage to other people; and that harm needs to be more than "It hurt my feelings".
> I know this is about the firing of a reddit mod, but I can't shake of the feeling that the people behind this petition care more about the banning of hateful subs. This is a retribution for them.
Most people signing seem to be doing so because of the firing (or firings [1]). We can infer this from how slowly the signup count was growing before the firings, and how fast it is growing now.
Edit: it was at 10000 three weeks ago, and 14000 a day or two ago. It was over 100000 9 hours ago, and now is at 125000.
[1] Also fired was the women who ran the Reddit gifts and secret santa programs, which were very popular.
Expression is one of those things where either you have freedom, or you don't have it. You can't compromise it. There are a few things that are not allowed because of the possibility of immediate bodily danger. But otherwise once we start veering into accepted and non-accepted speech/expression, we're getting into subjective territory (who feels or gets insulted by what -the pope, the fairy god mother, your doctor).
But none of that matters much in this case where the ultimate arbiter is the company itself. We can argue all we want what should and should not be, whether realistically or ideally speaking, in the end, it's what the company allows. And if they want to ban the word 'water' well, they can do it and it's perfectly legal. That's not to say people should just go on and accept it. No, they can protest online or whatever, maybe build their own community -where they can one day establish their own mores and ban the word ice instead.
That said, a civil community is much more pleasant, though somewhat sterile, to participate in. That's to say, I prefer engaging in cites where people have strong opinions but have a modicum of comportment --however, at times, I can feel they don't reflect daily life where insults are hurled unexpectedly, so, from that standpoint, it's a bit sterile and stiff.
Anyhow, It'll be interesting to see how this works out.
I think you're generalizing about people's reasons for supporting free speech. I, for example, don't defend free speech so I can harass people. I never posted or contributed to FPH, or any other hate group. Like you, I don't believe in it. But I believe in free speech enough to tolerate those small groups. I believe WBC has a right to protest, as do other hate groups, because I firmly believe that their disgusting views, when expressed openly, weaken their cause. It's worked well for America, and the government sets an example for its people and businesses.
That said, reddit can do what it wants. I think people do use each new event as a platform for replacing who they see as the root cause, the CEO. However I can't shake the feeling that the issue is deeper. As alluded to in these comments about reddit acting like children, large communities are very difficult to satisfy. Protests will happen now and then, regardless of whether you as a country (China vs. USA) or company support free speech or not. So you can embrace that, expect it and deal with it, or try to make everything perfect. I think Alex and Ellen are trying really hard to make everyone happy. I imagine it's stressful for them and I personally don't feel that's the right approach for reddit. Getting rid of illegal things like jailbait was a good idea, and consistent with American values.
It's been said, but really, it should be opt-in rather than opt-out. If you really need this, just ask. If I'm feeling particularly nice that day, I might even allow it, but when I discover their mischief after they've done it, there's no way I'll be okay with it.
If there's one good thing, they remove the data they've collected from you if you opt-out. (But it'll be already fed to the machine learning system, I guess.)
Author here. I haven't seen SQRL and I'll check it in detail later. It looks like a more complicated thing than what I did and much more work compared to a simple, hackathon-like project.
My project works only on Dropbox and it doesn't require Dropbox to support any other authentication mechanism. It just uses OAuth2 behind the scenes.
Well of course it has no anti-malware features, the only protection it has is that no credentials are sent to the client, just an authorization token, which you can disable using your phone.
Other than that, I agree with the general premise of React becoming the new IBM, that's totally fair.