Where Trolls Reigned Free: A New History of Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Where Trolls Reigned Free: A New History of Reddit

nytimes.com

18 pointssmacktoward17 comments

> Maybe the site is no longer so toxic, or maybe the toxic internet has made me numb.

Or, maybe the site was never anywhere close to as "toxic" as you're describing and you're making mountains out of mole hills.

I left the site not because the whole site was toxic, but because it had gotten out of Reddit's control and they had no way to fix it. I got temp-banned for trying to be a freaking adult and make friends with someone who was harassing me. There is no oversight of the mods and it nowhere near a place for intelligent conversation in anything remotely political.

This article still seems unnecessarily harsh. Reddit didn't set out to be bad. Most of the moderators try to do a good job. The bad elements on the site are pervasive and can destroy a positive subreddit with a sideways glance. Let's not forget this is the place where a conspiracy theory was born that caused a pizza place to get labeled a pedophile ring causing a man to shoot up the place.

> but because it had gotten out of Reddit's control

For a long time Reddit's stance was to let subreddits be subreddits. If you wanted to heavily moderate your sub's content, fine. If you wanted near anarchy, also fine. Anything within the bounds of the site-wide rules (no doxxing, nothing illegal) was fair game, and if users didn't like it they didn't have to read the sub. If you found it to be a poor venue for political discourse you were probably posting on the wrong subs.

There's a worrying trend towards authoritarianism on the web. I wish we could get more popular momentum behind truly federated platforms.

People in general, don't like free speech. They just want to be able to say whatever they'd like.

Clearly, some things cross the line but who do you let draw the line?

The company whos resources are being used.

What happens when a small number of companies control all meaningful online discourse?

Either the free market provides or regulation talk begins.

You use decentralized/federalized means of online discourse and dont depend on private for-profit companies. The people dug this hole themselves.

> Even then, at a moment of techno-optimism we are unlikely to see again in our lifetimes, Reddit was a toxic swamp. It was the place you went, shrouded in anonymity, for pornography, hard-core racism, revenge porn, Nazi cheerleading, Jew-baiting, creepshots, fat-shaming, mindless anarchy and pictures of dead kids or of women who had been beaten.

What in the world is the author talking about? I went there to discuss local issues (r/stlouis), look at cool maps (r/MapPorn), find credit card deals (r/churning), and shit-talk sports (r/baseball and r/hockey).

I've been on reddit for almost 13 years. I keep seeing hot takes about what it supposedly is (or was), but they never match my experience.

You can find porn and nazis on the internet, yes, but it would be a profound mistake to describe the internet as a tool for finding porn and nazis. So it is with reddit, too.

Same thing with 4chan. I used to post every day about video games and music (/v/ and /mu/). I still do once in a while.

The reality is a bunch of nerds being pretentious about music do not make for good clickbait. Online nazis do.

On one hand, none of this kind of stuff was ever on the front page, and many users never went far beyond the front page. On the other hand, there was a substantial minority of users for whom that kind of content was the draw. And there was an uproar whenever any of this content was banned (which happened slowly, piece by piece, and continues into the present).

If you aren't aware of any of it, the Gawker story on violentacrez (still available online) is good picture of the nastiest side of the site. Its publication was (and remains) hugely controversial.

FatPeopleHate was on the front page all of the time. It got banned though.

I was going to say that as well. A lot of these groups had large followings and brigaded unsuspecting other subreddits for no other reasons than giggles.

It's not really about quantity. Reddit had subs for the content the article mentioned. I guess one way to look at it is "it's no big deal because only a tiny fraction of Reddit subs were devoted to neonazis, photos of corpses, stolen sex tapes, and child pornography." That's not how I view it.

I reject the framing that suggests these are the only two possibilities: 1) it’s no big deal; or 2) it’s reddit’s defining quality.

Neither is true.

Well, I reject your framing of my framing! :)

Actually, your interpretation is a fair reading of what I wrote, but I would prefer positioning 2) as "its presence is a deal-breaker."

Like, if I go to a shopping center, and they leased three of their 100 lots to the KKK, NAMBLA, and ISIS... I'm probably not going back to that mall. It might not be the mall's "defining quality", but it's enough that I would think poorly of the property owners.

I agree that that quote is giving way too broad a description of reddit at any point in time, but I'm surprised you've been able to use reddit for so long and avoid any brush-ins with its nasty underbelly. The r/FatPeopleHate banning and subsequent hounding of Ellen Pao was only the most recent fracas I remember. And this is coming from someone who uses reddit as you do: an aggregator of niche interest discussion with some neat image/video subs sprinkled in.

Even going back to the violentacrez/JB scandal, reddit dragged its feet for quite a long time on removing the most offensive content & subreddits from the platform. Today they're a bit more responsive to this, likely due to reddit's more mainstream popularity and media coverage. Still, there's quite a lot of hate that festers on the platform. Whether or not reddit wants to be more active about it is of course up to them, and will take balancing of their leadership's philosophy with what their advertisers and users expect. At the very least, there is some evidence that banning the problem sections of the website reduces hate speech on the platform.

http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

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