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Comment by vinhboy | Hacker News Reader

I am going to predict that Reddit will soon collapse because it is overrun with conservative minded people. It's starting to become a really hateful community.

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Sorry dang. I shouldn't have used such a politically charged word. Will keep this in mind next time.

The real answer, as always, is to stay away from the default subreddits because The Public is shitty.

There's a spectrum of communities, ranging from obscure and niche to mainstream and general. Too obscure, and communities become insular; it's boring because nothing happens. Too mainstream, and it gets overrun by dickheads and yelling. You always want to be on the cusp between the two.

Hacker News straddles a pretty good line - it's popular enough that cool things get talked about by lots of people, but it's niche enough (Yes, it's niche when comparing it to, say, 9gag or /r/AskReddit) that it keeps the worst of The Public away. As a result, it keeps that happy medium.

Subreddits tend to be the same way. If you're finding that a default subreddit is shitty and hateful, chances are very high that there is a very similar subreddit that is specifically made up of people who are fed up with the bullshit from that default. Of course, give that subreddit time to become popular, and it'll become just as shitty and hateful as the default. Then you move again, and again, and again, forever. That's how the Internet always has been, and I'm sure that it'll continue to be that way forever.

Ones I subscribe to are /r/headphones, /r/pbsideachannel, /r/buyitforlife, /r/lowlevel, /r/asmr, and a few others.

Reddit is incredibly, overwhelmingly left. Note the number of socialist and even communist subs, and their subscriber counts. The fact that a tiny minority of right wing people have taken up residence in an attempt to "fight back" does not make the site "overrun" with conservatives. And equating conservative with hateful is pretty disingenuous.

> Reddit is incredibly, overwhelmingly left

Go read /r/Europe and then tell me again... Right-wing xenophobia rules nowadays.

/r/europe is overwhelmingly left. The mods constantly censor things critical of the mainstream open borders stance. The presence of a tiny minority of constantly attacked and banned right wing people does not mean "right-wing xenophobia" rules.

As a conservative: We aren't all that hateful, are we?

From what I see the people who swings the banhammer over people just because they posted in wrong sub and generally tries to stifle free speak are mostly SJW etc, not exactly what I would call conservative people ;-)

I don't think that you really can make that separation. True, reading Salon or Alternet or something equally "progressive" you very much get the same ditohead feeling as when you listen to Rush Limbaugh's callers.

Then again, try to leave a comment on any "conservative" site, which does not conform to the virolent idiocy sometimes encountered at such sites and good luck with ever getting it published. (And if it gets published: good luck with handling the abuse, which follows)

Both camps seem to reside mostly in their bubble, completely intolerant to other opinion, which don't match their group think criteria. Which is sad, because it makes meaningful discussions with differing opinions impossible.

At a loss to us all.

It's not that conservatism is hateful, but that the brand of conservatism propagating on Reddit is a particularly hateful one.

It may not be obvious, and not everyone participating is aware of it, but there is a lot of parody going on in /r/the_donald. I think the prime motivation is disgust at how deeply political correctness has permeated our culture.

What this all morphs into if (when) he wins the election remains to be seen. I'm both excited and scared to find out.

> "I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase 'In these days of political correctness…' talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, 'That’s not actually anything to do with "political correctness". That’s just treating other people with respect.'Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase 'politically correct' wherever we could with 'treating other people with respect', and it made me smile."

-- Neil Gaiman.

http://www.upworthy.com/what-political-correctness-does-and-...

Yes that certainly sounds very nice (pretending that political correctness is only about "being nice"), but in my opinion is an excellent example of the problem.

Some topics are going to hurt people's feelings, there's no getting around it, so if "treating people with respect" is an absolute, then it is in many scenarios outright censorship of ideas. The article you links claims that is simply not true but offers absolutely nothing to substantiate that claim. I find this type of reasoning pretty common on the left.

http://i.imgur.com/dmgpS.png

You can see that process in action on metafilter.com. There, terms like "treating people with respect" are basically euphemisms for a continually narrowing set of opinions-treated-as-fact. You can't go against them without being dog-piled and probably banned (more or less for the reaction your disagreement caused in others).

That hasn't happened to me, but I've seen it happen enough to not want to bother.

Eh. People used to say /pol/ and /k/ were parody, too.

They don't say that anymore.

Also, Weev. Remember how he was just a troll?

http://gawker.com/ipad-hacker-and-troll-weev-is-now-a-straig...

Straight up swastika tattoo.

Since when was /k/ parody?

I never thought it was. But its defenders and minimizers used to tell me that the folks who gave it its reputation and its denizens their nickname were "in on the joke."

Its entire culture is in its own special way a joke, from the love of Soviet everything, to the nagant-bolt-as-a-prostate-massager, to the skinwalker stories - and each of these is made even funnier the more that it gets taken over the top. IAmTheStrielok becoming famous from swallowing a DU bullet and nearly dying from radiation poisoning, for example. In that way, sure, layers of irony, inside jokes, etc. But in the end, it's all just memes - superficial board culture used as flavoring for the very real and serious discussions about all things weapon-related.

I was referring more to the openly and unapologetically racist aspects of the board. "It's just memes" isn't an excuse for some of the vile shit that has leaked out of there over its history to the point where they're called /k/lansmen for a reason.

Correct - it's not just memes, it's also leakage from /pol/ and an excellent pleb filter.

But no, having been there for some 5 years now, I've barely seen the term /k/lansmen tossed around.

Overuse of the banhammer is not limited to left-y subs and the dreaded "SJWs". Happens frequently on all sides. /r/the_donald will frequently ban for comments made in other subs, as will /r/conservative. Culturally conservative subs like /r/TrueChristian or /r/European will ban easily as well. Of course, some of the lefty subs will too. Some ideologically focused subs, like /r/kotakuinaction, will allow dissent but most of it will get so viciously downvoted it might as well be censored.

And you know what: I don't really have a problem with that. Wanting to keep your political sub, left or right, focused on a particular ideology, without the distractions of debate from those completely opposed, is not a bad thing. Happens all the time in the real world. The DNC is not going to allow Ted Cruz to give a speech, nor is the RNC going to invite Bernie. Your church, assuming you have one, will probably not be inviting atheists to say "God doesn't exist" from the pulpit.

Reddit? Conservative? Are you joking?

Conservative is probably the wrong word, hateful being more correct. And it's a serious problem on reddit.

The majority of redditors are generally left-leaning. But the hateful people on reddit are more organized and more dedicated. They participate in degrading the experience of anyone who doesn't believe the same as they do, and that drives some people away. Outside of the very few well moderated sub-reddits this is a serious problem. I wouldn't say it's enough to bring reddit down, yet, but it's pretty bad.

Thank you for this very well written response. I was struggling to say what you just explained so well.

The reason I personally think it will destroy Reddit is because it has already ruined a few of the subreddits I subscribe to. Mainly /r/technology, /r/news, and /r/politics.

A lot of the default sub-reddits are weakly moderated, and so very vulnerable to brigading, bullying, harassment, and boundary pushing. You see a lot of carefully crafted racism and "anti-sjw" posts in the default sub-reddits, for example. Bit by bit, drop by drop, they apply a consistent pressure. The mods of those sub-reddits are too dumb to figure out what's going on, or just don't care. Unfortunately, all of this slowly drives away people who are sensitive enough to care, or just ordinary people. For them, it's not worth it to "fight the good fight", is some dumb sub-reddit worth that cost? Of course not, so they leave and go somewhere else. This is a slow dynamics problem, and the "good" parts of reddit aren't strong enough to save the site.

Realistically, if reddit itself does nothing then it's maybe a 50/50 chance whether or not these forces eventually poison the site for average users, and people just stop going there. For most people these things aren't super noticeable, yet, because they're still not the dominant aspect of the site, but they've driven away who knows how many people, and continue to do so, while the racists, homophobes, and misogynists still have their little clubs on the site. Some of the worst sub-reddits were banned a while back, but many horrid ones still exist. And the people who spend their time there spend their time posting and voting on other parts of reddit as well.

> Of course not, so they leave and go somewhere else.

Somewhere else often being another subreddit. Topical subreddits are fine. But I guess all depends on what we mean by "saving the site".

> Realistically, if reddit itself does nothing then it's maybe a 50/50 chance whether or not these forces eventually poison the site for average users, and people just stop going there.

People won't stop going to topical subreddits because main Reddit is not the discovery mechanism - Google, word-of-mouth and websites linking to topical subreddits are. As for poisoning the site for average users - I think average users are the poison.

As an honest reply its not a Reddit specific problem that any discussion of technology, news, or politics inevitably leads to scorched earth where-ever its tried. Its not doomed because its reddit, its doomed because those are really dumb discussion topics to have unless you want to watch the world burn.

Now if everyone present likes a nice bonfire, then sitting around toasting our marshmallows is fun, but there's always some "smokey the bear" who sees his duty as saying "only you can prevent forest fires".

On the other hand, /r/mechanicalkeyboards is pretty awesome. Some of the modded minecraft specific subreddits I read are pretty awesome (shout out to /r/feedthebeast)

Because there's never anything really new under the sun, the ham radio guys figured out codes of conduct about a century ago that actually worked along the lines of forbidding politics, religion, and other issues, at least in civilized company, along with some basic protocol, etc.

News and politics make sense, but how does discussions of tech inevitably lead to a scorched earth?

Or maybe authoritarian?

I'm not sure if it's intentional, but you make it sound like left-leaning people can't be hateful. The left-leaning crowd of redditors can be just as hateful towards the people they disagree with as the right wing.

As a right-leaning, generally-conservative guy, the most organized hate I've gotten on reddit is because I'm a right-leaning, generally-conservative guy rather than being a more-reddit-acceptable left-leaning Sanders-supporting liberal.

Honestly I think when communities become large, it's the moderates who lose. I'm regularly downvoted into oblivion and most of my opinions are moderate-left. It doesn't matter how much you support Sanders, try pointing out that just saying "Fukushima" a thousand times isn't justification for deriding nuclear energy and you'll quickly find your comment straddling the bottom of the page at -500.

This mirrors my experience. I take my ideas from both right and left, but if I post any left-wing viewpoint on something (corporate taxation, say) the hard right might disagree but they keep it respectful. Whereas say anything even centrist and I get instant, vicious hate and bile from the left.

Fortunately those people have very poor impulse control and are prone to rage-blocking, so I never have to bother with them for long, but there's always more.

Describes my experiences as well, both online and off. People love to paint conservatives as dumb and intolerant, but like you I generally find the right to be willing to debate, whereas the left considers themselves right, end of discussion.

I don't think that it actually breaks down that way. In my experience both conservatives and liberals are composed 80% of people who can talk rationally with only their own side and 20% by who are prepared talk rationally with people from either side. You need to be a lot more knowledgeable about a subject to constructively discuss it with someone who disagrees with you.

A big part of the problem, then, is that if you are not paying close enough attention it looks like your side is 100% reasonable and the other side is mostly unreasonable, regardless of which side you are on.

Heh, not my experiences at all. Especially the right wingers in the comments section of my local paper--post anything about bikes, for example, and the folks with Reagan as their user icon immediately come out with stuff about how badly they'd like to run any cyclist down in their truck.

But, even given that, I'd hasten to put anything down as "those people are the real jerks," because I don't think anyone has a monopoly on being a jerk.

I have a mild suspicion that a lot of it comes down basically to what the cultural norm is for your area in terms of political leanings, as that's likely to rope in the most people who aren't really paying attention to what they think as much as what "their people" think -- and so they make politics into a team sport.

I certainly won't dispute that the lows on the right are waaaaaay lower than those on the left.

Conservative is the wrong word but a lot of people on Reddit hate everyone that's not a white socialist atheist anti-Zionist middle class man

For a "community" that preaches tolerance, a large number of people on Reddit seems to lack just that, tolerance. I use the term community lightly, because sometimes Reddit appear more to be an angry mob.

There is a very limited set of opinions and beliefs that are accepted on Reddit. Mostly the moderators don't seem to mind, but it's pretty obvious that derivation from the accepted truth is down voted to an extreme. Being exposed to a large number of different opinions is generally a health thing, but it also highlight the possibility that you might be wrong, and people, Redditors least of all, don't want to be proven wrong.

Personally, I think it's a generational thing; the notion that everyone deserves to feel honored and precious on the internet first and foremost is a new one.

"You're unique! You're special! You matter!"

This is the sentiment that seems so pervasive, and as Gen-X, one I find saccharine and stomach-churning.

Everyone loves democracy and freedom of speech until they get to be in charge

"Conservative" != "Hateful". Speaking from experience, some of the most prejudiced people I've had to deal with in my life were my most liberal college professors.

That's called a liberal by American terms

As an actual liberal, I prefer the term "authoritarian liberal" to distinguish anti-free speech and 'edgy' sexist/racist left folk from liberals. And I've never understood conservatives as much as I do now.

"Liberal" in American terms means nothing in particular other than New Deal supporter.

The correct word is "alt-right".

https://www.google.com/search?q=alt-right

Alt Right is generally identified by not even pretending to be progressive. Reddit is not "alt-right."

It all depends on what subreddit you are on.

Some of the Redditors went to http:/voat.co/ after the Ellen Pao incident. Mostly Gamer Gate and Red Pill people.

Of course generalisations are stupid. To understand where the grandparent's coming from, though, try e.g. /r/europe sometime.

I think internet libertarian would be more accurate http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Internet+Libe...

More like the regressive left.

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