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.
That is an excellent argument for not including those subreddits in the default home page (for users who are not logged in) or /r/all.
But you can find offensive things, or things you don't want your children to see, on just about any site (also, yes, your teens know about redtube).
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.
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.
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.
Context is important.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's more, you can't do anything about the fact that this can happen without making some very ugly sacrifices.
What we're doing now does. not. work.
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.
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.
Didn't we all learn in school that the one thing you didn't do to bullies was listen to them?