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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
problem solved and done so in a way that you have complete control over and doesn't impose yourself on others.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.