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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

What is this trend with Reddit, Twitter and Facebook suddenly going full gestapo and [REDACTED] everything? These kind of services are very important and if the companies don't want to play ball, then they should be circumvented to preserve the record.

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The sad truth is (in the case of Reddit anyway) that allowing people to freely publish their opinions on your platform hurts your brand and your advertising revenue.

This is why /r/creepshots was taken down, despite being completely legal and within the Reddit rules. It damaged the brand.

Same reason why the "hate speech" against Islam was taken off of /r/news.

>The sad truth is (in the case of Reddit anyway) that allowing people to freely publish their opinions on your platform hurts your brand and your advertising revenue.

They're a user generated site (UGC). Truth is that their brand was mostly in the hands of their users from day one. And it's extremely hard to wrestle that control out of the hands of your users without suffering some pushback. In come cases, this pushback can even kill a site by making community disenfranchised.

Reddit has been doing a lot of censorship lately and people are slowly leaving that site. By exerting more free speech restrictions, they're starting to alienate large swaths of their userbase.

Here's an example of Reddit censorship in action: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/06...

And then there's this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/06...

And this is just creepy:

‘We know your dark secrets. We know everything.’ Boasts Reddit CEO Steve Huffman

http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2016/05/30/reddit-knows-yo...

> they're starting to alienate large swaths of their userbase.

Alienating racists, woman-haters, and pedophiles! Heavens, what an awful thing to do!

This behavior has still alienated people who hate every one of the subreddits that has been tanked, and were never a member. There are people of the opinion that a place like Reddit should as a policy extend the same kind of freedom of speech that many enjoy (or at least in principle should enjoy) from government interference. I don't always agree with them, but they have a logic that has nothing to do with secretly loving racists, woman-haters, or pedophiles.

Personally as long as Stormfront, etc.'s ISPs don't get hit by government orders to shut them down I don't mind Reddit deciding to nix such stuff on their site. Social pressure is in some instances a good way to push change that we for whatever reason don't want to mandate legally. But if the discourse surrounding the recent political upheavals that the US and UK have experienced has demonstrated anything, it's that immediately accusing anyone who even considers disagreeing with you of secret racism does nothing but preclude anything productive from happening.

Even if you think such tactics are fair game, they are consistently ineffective. Save such things for people you actually know enough about to know they are racist, sexist, etc.

I imagine he was referring to normal people who wanted news about the Orlando shooter but instead found thread after thread of [DELETED].

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>Avoid gratuitous negativity.

Although I detest that incident, I haven't seen any evidence that this went further up the chain than renegade moderator(s). This doesn't seem like the kind of thing Reddit's staff would get involved in so quickly and so heavy-handedly.

Have you seen the threads before the deletion? There was a huge brigade of "DEPORT ISLAM" and "Yes all muslims" comments – over 90% of the comments were that, and /r/the_donald ensured they would be constantly upvoted, too.

If such a thread happened here, you can be sure @dang would nuke them, too.

If you have a significant % of the population screaming X, you don't have a problem. You have a population that believes in X.

of course, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) still apply.

What I am saying is, terribly as it may seem, hate can also be belief.

Yes, but belief is not something that is supposed to be on that subreddit. The subreddit is for a balanced discussion about news.

(And that belief is very similar to "The Third Wave" experiment – I recommend reading the books or movies to try to understand the right-populist movement in many countries today)

Thank you for the books, will look them up.

It’s an experiment from the US from the 60s I think of a teacher trying to understand how the general population could support the nazis – the events really happened, but the book differs from the reality in most parts except the ending, while the movie differs only in the ending, but there it’s very different from what really happened.

After all, though, it’s well worth it, and should be standard material in all schools.

If you want a more technical view, there’s also scientific writeups about "The Third Wave".

It's also that Reddit isn't a place without culture. If people don't want something on their platform, they're under no obligation to do so.

Granted , Reddit is a bit wider in scope than Something Awful (for example) but it's still a community in itself that can make decisions on content.

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