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Comment by wetmore | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

This is a straightforward way of saying the problem people have here isn't with Reddit, but with humanity.

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?

>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."

"Well, that's how the world is, mostly."

Does that make you want to go back to Best Buy?

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.

Fantastic, power users dominating over everyone else.

Fantastic, another tool for the perpetually offended to abuse en masse.

Doubly broken.

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.

Expectations are different, IMO, as well.

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.

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.

You don't see how this is a problem for Reddit?

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'll take that bet. How much you got?

>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.

That was happening long before any type of this subreddit "crisis" and overreacting drama.

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.

then unsubscribe from /r/videos and /r/worldnews.

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

Or, better still, don't unsubscribe, and instead challenge the intolerance and prejudice.

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.

Hey! Someone is wrong on the Internet!

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.

But these are subreddits whose original purpose is to provide content I want to see, so the problem isn't solved.

Start your own subreddit for sharing content that you like.

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!

The "default" subreddit issue needs to be resolved first. You shouldn't automatically be enrolled in any subreddit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Take a look at http://redditenhancementsuite.com/features.html

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?

Hopefully more of the bigots will continue their migration to Voat and reddit might perhaps 'revert' to its more reasonable, tolerant roots

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