Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

>Reddit... does it know it's job is to prevent outraged reaction? //

Ha, ha, ha.

Cause that'll increase pageviews.

Outraged reaction is exactly what all news media is going for because people rant and rave and in passing see more adverts. It's just they want to sanitise the topics according to their advertisers wishes.

Reddit doesn't have non-censorship values, it's heavily censored; not all from the top admittedly, but the sanitisation that's gone on in the last few years is huge as Conde Nast have moved to make it a more tempting platform for advertisers.

View on HN

Well, yes that's the obvious (and cynical) assumption. It's definitely true as a real pseudo-economic force on the internet and media generally, but let's not just assume reddit are following that "interest" blindly.

If you think reddit doesn't have those values, I guess we disagree. I don't see any way of coming to that conclusion apart from fundamentalism, it's either absolute or it's bullshit.

Let's see - Vanity Fair, Wired, GQ - there seems good reason to think that Conde Nast are willing to compromise and go with the click bait, a lot.

https://www.wired.com/story/bad-actors-are-using-social-medi... .. is the first entry Reddit, is it in the list, nope.

I think Conde Nast are prepared to stoop pretty low in the search for dollars before integrity.

To be fair, Conde Nast also owns Ars Technica, which, in my experience, has a fairly exemplary reputation as far as avoiding clickbait and running good articles.

That said, it certainly seems to me like if not as an explicit business decision, Conde Nast certainly has no problem with their properties sensationalizing their media for views/clicks/etc

I'm not a Reddit user but there are plenty of stories out there about how the corporate managers have permanently closed some offensive forums. To be clear, I'm not claiming that Reddit management did anything wrong; they're under no obligation to spend money spreading toxic content. But obviously they don't value non-censorship as a corporate value.

Increased pageviews, yet many users also hate constant outrage and leave the platform entirely. It is not obvious that a platform with civil, high-quality discussion would lose in the marketplace (not obvious it would win either, though).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com