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Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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

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.

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.

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.

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