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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then they shouldn't do that.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1]http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise...
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 also find it curious that you're using the capital o Other. Is that a deliberately existentialist term?
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.
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBtXxYrp7mo
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.
Besides, Cameron does plenty of stupid stuff as an adult anyway.
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.
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'?
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.
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.
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.
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.
In short, IMHO, reddit is a tool and tools don't have political statements to make.
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.
problem solved and done so in a way that you have complete control over and doesn't impose yourself on others.
If you don't like that, then perhaps you can unsubscribe from places where people don't want to put up with this kind of behaviour.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
"Well, that's how the world is, mostly."
Does that make you want to go back to Best Buy?
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.
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.
Fantastic, another tool for the perpetually offended to abuse en masse.
Doubly broken.
HN is not a free speech zone and does not even try to be one.
reddit, inc. executives have previously stated that reddit is a place for free speech.
You don't see how this is a problem for Reddit?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So...its a question of picking what part of a larger whole that you hang out in. Just like you don't hang out in the racist/etc parts of Reddit.
Sorry if that message was lost.
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.
Then don't?
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.
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.