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Comment by intopieces | Hacker News Reader

>By volume, those "conversations" make up a minority of a minority of a minority of what happens on Reddit.

This hardly matters when that content makes the front page of the site and is given positive votes continually. Every time someone complains about the offensive content in a "default" subreddit, the refrain goes like this: "That's just because it's a default man. You gotta unsub from the defaults and pick your own."

Let's consider that for a minute. The standard view of your website, the view that is presented to any new member, is so clogged with terrible content that the active members recommend you change it immediately.

When we buy phones and computers like this, we call it bloatware; we nuke the entire filesystem and start over. But when it's actual people generating content that most agree is worthless and often offensive: "well that's just a minority of a minority." Nonsense.

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Reddit's default subs have many problems, including a loss of focus and tendency to focus on popularity rather than quality. But really, as a pretty heavy user, anti-semitism and similar racist / extremist tendencies aren't among them.

I do think Reddit needs to revist its moderation system, goals, and philosophy. But not on account of the points you raise.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content...

You seem to have asserted that this type of content regularly makes it to the front page, but in my experience that's not true at all.

In my 5+ years, I tend to agree with you; there are occasionally little spats that I see, but by and large-- I'd never have known about all of this "bad" stuff if it weren't for other people telling me about it.

>I'd never have known about all the "bad" stuff if it weren't for other people telling me about it.

This is precisely the issue with "bad" stuff. It draws better attention to itself than the good stuff does. All the more reason for Reddit to get control of it if they want to inspire user growth and maintain ad revenue.

Well, like I said, I'd have never known about it if other people hadn't told me. I can't speak to what Reddit "should" do; in _my_ niche area, Reddit works just fine the way it is.

If they were to start "doing something about it", it'd likely not affect me in the least.

Aside from some veiled (but still unacceptable) misogyny, I don't see anything objectionable in the default subs. The ratio of homophobic, racist, and antisemitic remarks seems in the ballpark of any southern high school.

Is this something to still actively fight and change? Yes. But you yourself pointed out that reddit isn't making the content, nor are they encouraging it. What if the solution is MORE connected free speech, not less? The more representative a user base reddit gets, the less bigoted they'll be. I'm more worried about secretive and niche networks of extremists.

Completely agreed, but "southern" is pretty unfair there... I know from personal experience Northern/Western counterparts are just as bad. Young people in general have a large capacity to be cruel regardless of geographic distribution.

Are we saying that a "southern high school" is an environment to which no civilized human being should be subjected? b^)

Then the reddit defenders tell you the opposite, "Oh, those subs you hear about on the news are minority subs, best to stay in the defaults like pics and funny!" Err, so which one is it?

I also think its probably impossible to make a site that appeals to high school and college age males very sophisticated. Their identity politics will rule and that means lots of misogyny, racist humor, 'bro' culture, and anti-US politics with a serving of a worship of oppressive autocratic regimes. Fixing reddit may not be possible and shuffling subs around isn't helping much. No one wants to say this, but young people are kinda terrible. I know I was a worse person at that age.

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