Hacker News Reader

Comment by ppod | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought that the day they crossed the line was when they arbitrarily changed which subreddits were default, removing some (such as /r/atheism) with no real reason. At the very early days of reddit, discussing atheism positively was still kind of unusual in the news. Then, over time, it became a very popular position and advocacy case especially among developers, and new users found the stridency and repetition of the subreddit annoying. I think they ultimately took the decision to remove a default subreddit that supported a community that is in general still one of the most hated in the US and in the world, just in order to appeal to new users outside of the hacker culture demographic that reddit started in.

View on HN

/r/atheism was absolutely obnoxious, to the point that the obnoxiousness of some of the users is still a meme:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-this-moment-i-am-euphoric

> a community that is still one of the most hated

As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians.

If you really think that's true I'd invite you to count the number of politicians (in the US at least) who are self-declared athiests. I think the data speaks for itself.

> As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians.

I can't speak for Europe, but as of 2015, at least, about three-quarters of Americans identified as Christian. There are still large swaths of this country where being relatively outspoken about your atheism is, if not out-and-out dangerous, likely to have a negative impact on your social circles and even your career.

Remember that the HN crowd -- e.g., tech workers who by and large have pretty cosmopolitan outlooks -- is not really representative of "median America."

My experience is that there's rarely a time that is appropriate for it to come up in polite conversation. People talk about it all the time within their social communities as the social communities are more likely to be in line with their beliefs, but not really in "public" IE work, etc. The guy running around talking about "god is dead" at work is just as much of a jerk and treated as such as someone who loudly proclaims their christian beliefs as the basis for everything they do.

The two things go hand in hand. People strike a more defiant attitude when they anticipate punishment. They can seem clueless and overly confrontational when they cop that attitude in a context where it isn't warranted.

Also, religion comes up routinely, though perhaps not frequently, in contexts where religious belief is assumed. In an ordinary conversation about the right way to handle a situation, people will ask you, "Do you think God wants me to ______?" It's just a manner of speaking, but it forces you to either pretend belief or out yourself and face their judgment. It's only in "mixed company" where people avoid the topic.

When I was in high school in the late 90s, it certainly wasn't a popular opinion to be an atheist, the few times I brought up that religious organizations were questionable, or seemed to do a lot of backtracking through history, it did not go over well. I kept my atheistic beliefs to myself. This wasn't bible belt territory either, we are talking about a suburb of NYC.

I read Nietzsche on my own in high school, and just felt so relieved that I wasn't alone with these thoughts and wasn't just some weirdo. The internet was nothing like it was today, chatrooms were the forum for discussion and there might have been some geocities pages devoted to atheistic belief, but it was still in the dark corners.

It amazed me when I saw that /r/atheism was a front and center thing when I first started going to reddit. It devolved over time into a version of /r/IamVerySmart, but that IMHO was an amazing outlet for those having doubts about all the crap being shoved down their throat their whole lives. It would have saved me a lot of anxiety growing up.

Al Gore got up and apologized for a funding policy theory he had. He thought if we brought the Internet to rural areas that the brain drain would stop. (I argue that with Seattle and the Valley getting so crowded we might be on the cusp of something like what he thought would happen, but with smaller regional cities).

What happened instead was that marginalized people all over the US found out they weren’t crazy or bad. There were people who thought just like them three hours away. So they picked up and moved to the city faster than ever.

That is an interesting thought. It might also help explain why we have become far more polarized as a nation over the last 20 years. I think net/net we are better off as a society though, I don't recall the source, but I do remember reading a research paper that concluded that colocating minds had a multiplicative effect on increasing scientific knowledge.

On a somewhat related note: A lot of people cite the "faces of atheism" meme/trend whatever you want to call it as being the tipping point when /r/atheism just went too far and it became cringey. I mean some of those posts were a bit cringey, but overall I think it sent a very needed message- that there are lots of people out there from all walks of life that think like you do, don't think you have to give in to the prevailing beliefs. I don't think my upbringing was that abnormal- questioning the existence of god, my parents/family would have smacked me, probably verbally but if I really pushed it they likely would have punished me. My friends all seemed to firmly believe as well but were generally tolerant, it certainly seems you could be a social pariah in more religious parts of the country. Being exposed to new ideas like this I am sure spawned some people to say to themselves I don't have to go along with all this crap, there are bigger and better things out there.

I spent some time noodling with Buddhism. One of the interesting things there is that outside of certain places in Southeast Asia that means you are an atheist.

This gets interesting when talking to theists because, if you don’t point it out, many people will hear “he has a religion, he’s one of us”. Many assume Buddha is a deity.

If you do push the point, you learn that some people’s brains short out when you tell them there is a religion with hundreds of millions of followers that doesn’t have a God. The Venn diagram in their brain of Us and Them can’t process this fact.

> As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians.

If you believe that, I don't even know where to begin.

People in the US Bible Belt get death threats if they declare their atheism.

Online isn't offline. And most people still exist more in the offline world.

Both of your viewpoints are right - it entirely depends on what one is considering community.

In meatspace there are plenty of social communities where you will be looked down upon for being religious (if you really don't believe this, you either need to travel more or you need to keep questioning social dogmas even after you've found some place you fit in). The many more places where you'll be looked down on for being atheist does not support making one sweeping generalization - opposing flavors of intolerance do not cancel each other out!

It's similar to how the KKK is still a problem, yet we've got this new trend of oppressing free speech online. It's tough to affect the entrenched players in any game, and all too easy to attack easy targets in a simulation of fighting the good fight.

> Both of your viewpoints are right - it depends on one's actual surrounding community. It's much easier to choose your online community, which creates the impression of the whole space lining up with your beliefs.

No, I'm not letting you get away with "equivalency". That kind of mental gymnastics is what allows these kinds of "talking points" to exist.

Christian churches are not taxed. Atheist non-profits are. Christian religions get "marriage" enshrined in law and get to define what "marriage" is. Atheists get their partners decisions questioned in the hospital. I can go on and on about the privileges that religion enjoys in the US.

Taking away undeserved privileges is not persecution. If you want to see persecution, go to the middle east--THAT'S what Christian persecution looks like.

The US qualifies are one of the most religious of the countries that don't qualify as theocracies. Claiming that Christians are being persecuted in the US is hogwash.

If you want to talk to me about persecution, come back after every church in the US is actually paying taxes--I won't hold my breath.

It's not "mental gymnastics" to attempt understanding the viewpoints of a different group of people. FWIW I'm atheist myself - I've just gotten to the point where I can accept that religion as a concept has some positive aspects, and that knee jerk dismissal is the exact same vein of ignorance that atheists are persecuted with.

> Atheists get their partners decisions questioned in the hospital. I can go on and on about the privileges that religion enjoys in the US ... Taking away undeserved privileges is not persecution

So, you have implied that it would be progress for a traditionally-married couple to have medical decisions for their spouses questioned, in the same manner that an unlegalized gay couple does. This is the inherent problem with framing things in terms of privileges instead of rights - it implies that the way to make things equal is to tear others down, rather than supporting rights for all.

IMO, but I'm certainly not a scholar here - if you look at the actual messages of Jesus (et al), they were preaching against the oppressive power structures of their time. Their specific dogmas were then calcified and turned into their own oppressive power structure, because real understanding requires continuing vigilance.

If you're not yet to the point where you can forgive the overly religious, then I understand. But closing that door is just setting your dogma up to be a tool of the next oppressor.

You are giving a great example of why r/atheism was removed as a default subreddit.

Lots of people were fatigued by daily threads like this microcosm. It’s obviously important to folks in the sub, but it was many instances of people just not caring. There must be some form of directed apathy where a description is not that I care about something, but I definitely do not care enough to be aware of it. It’s not apathy as I dislike encountering it, but I am fine with its existence.

> it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians

This was a story line in HBO's Silicon Valley.

> As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians.

If you believe that then you're living in a bubble. Please, go outside your comfort zone and see how the rest of the population thinks. Hint: It's not what you believe.

There’s an episode of Silicon Valley that talks about how hard it is these days to be a Christian and work in the valley.

For workplaces, I think that ship has sailed. But it probably won’t help you with awkward thanksgiving or high school reunion conversations yet. All the kids I know hang out with the atheists but I can’t tell if that says something about these kids or kids in general.

> As far as I can see in the USA and in most of Europe it’s way more socially acceptable to declare to be atheists, rather than observing Christians.

I don't know what it's like in Europe, but in the US, it's a very divisive topic. Really divisive. Like brawls in the streets divisive. Like secede-from-the-Union divisive. There's cities that will shun you for being religious, and other cities that will shun you for not being religious, sometimes even in the same state.

That's why the government shut down happened, frankly. The religious and non-religious parts of the United States literally hate each other so much that they'll act against their own interests just to hurt the other side.

Another clear red line was when spez started editing comments.[0] It was childish and non-consequential, but should have resulted in an immediate exodus from the platform. I'm not politically aligned with r/The_Donald, but I think this sort of petty power abuse should not be forgiven; the platform needs to die, as an example to other platforms.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ekdy9/the_admi...

That was beyond unacceptable because it didn't show the comment as have been edited with an asterisks. Which means they have and use special admin powers at will.

The only issue to Reddit it seems was that he was caught doing it.

There are people sitting in prison RIGHT NOW from Reddit posts. Now think about the damage admins editing posts can do. You're right, it is beyond acceptable.

> Now think about the damage admins editing posts can do.

Why, their actions can lend plausible deniability to incriminating information in posts that have not been edited.

I don't think admins can edit comments using the regular website interface. The CEO edited the comments directly in the database. That's why the asterisk never appeared. (Which, by the way, means the CEO has direct access to the database. Why?)

Really? I thought it was a fantastic reminder to users: they hold all the cards, and pretending otherwise is just diluting yourself.

If only other online platforms were that honest! Imagine Google sending out misleading gmails in your name, or Facebook mining your private messages for incriminating secrets and offering to "share" them with all your friends.

There's nothing technical preventing any of these kinds of abuses, and the sooner average users understand that, the sooner we'll have support for strong legal protections to rein in big tech companies.

For the record, systems at both FB and Google prevent internal employees from doing either. "There's nothing technical preventing any of these kinds of abuses" is only true in the sense that you can imagine implementations that don't prevent these kinds of abuses.

You're claiming that a rogue employee can't take it on themselves to do that on their own initiative. Either of those companies could trivially choose to do those things as a management decision. Maybe it doesn't make good business sense today, but who knows what the business landscape of 2025 or 2030 looks like?

And then my comment would be false. But as it stands today, it's true.

I do think you overestimate how trivial it would be for "management" (who? a senior PM? Sergei? Zuck?) to decide to turn off all internal security controls so individual Googlers could send emails using someone else's identity--it would likely run afoul of multiple current laws and contracts, to speak nothing of the universal, strong internal objections there'd be to that change and the high engineering cost to migrate off those systems. And I can't imagine a business landscape that would encourage any company to let individual employees do that.

There are tons of things to worry about wrt BigTechCos, but preventing and auditing rogue employees are something where their incentives align pretty strongly with the public good.

FWIW I do support stronger legal and privacy requirements (with some caveats, mostly because compliance is very expensive and potentially harmful to smaller companies).

Do they actually prevent malicious abuse, or do they just catch people after the fact and fire them? I know from reading about the NSA that they watch what data agents retrieve, and they're restricted by policy from going snooping, but there's nothing except fear of losing their job that stops them.

Google's servers have the ability to send email from myname@gmail.com and it comes with all the appropriate DKIM signatures to be from "me". They have some kind of auto-reply system such that their computer can automatically send "as me". They're already 90% of the way there: I think you've overestimating how big a change this would be.

I'll also say that I have little to no confidence in "strong internal objections". VW engineers built the emissions-cheating system, Facebook engineers built Beacon, Google engineers dutifully slurped up everyone's private wifi traffic. As long as management dressed it up a little bit and/or reassigned any dissenters, I'm sure they'd get a compliant team to build whatever garbage they wanted.

Obviously you think you're the good guys, and you'd never do that, but you'd be surprised how "good" people can gradually slide into really unethical behaviour. If you haven't read them I recommend https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/558867.Disciplined_Minds and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37976541-bad-blood

I... kind of agree with you, actually, with the caveat that I see decentralised platforms being the solution rather than laws. I think moving to a different platform is better than staying on the known-manipulator, but moving to a platform without a potential-manipulator is better still. Proper decentralised solutions would be and are prohibitively expensive at the moment, in a number of senses, but if we valued free (as in freedom) discourse more this wouldn't be the case, and the costs should decrease over time anyway.

Also, when they created comments and manipulated their timestamps to make it seem like they were created far earlier than they actually were, for advertising purposes.

They also obfuscate the real upvote/downvote numbers, purportedly to stop vote manipulation but I don't really see how it does anything but provide a mask of plausible deniability for editing the up/down figures for advertisements, subversive posts, etc.

It ensures batters cannot tell if their account has been shadow banned.

What incident is this referring to? I can't find anything via a quick search...

It didn't blow up like the comment-editing incident, but I was referring to https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/7a2mle/possible_...

I'm a proud atheist, in part thanks to early Reddit. /r/Atheism at the time it was removed from the default subs list was a toxic cesspool filled with a lot of the same kinds of hateful rhetoric and magical thinking they criticize religious groups for. Removing it as a default was the right call.

>I’m a proud athiest

Might we say you are a religious athiest?

Not really. I don't claim to have proof that there is no god. I merely assert that not existing is the default state in the face of evidence-less existence claims. There could be a god, but that possibility has no bearing on how I live my life. If you want to ascribe a set of beliefs to me, the closest might be secular humanism.

Perhaps you might consider yourself to be agnostic?

Would you call yourself agnostic simply because you didn't believe Russel's teapot existed?

No, because that doesn't make sense.

r/atheism was made no longer a default because it became notoriously toxic

There was a actually a meta-game of where you'd (1) take a horrible quote, (2) mis-attribute it to Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson or Stephen Hawking, (3) put it on an image of space and (4) post it to r/atheism to see how many up-votes it got.

It was a very easy game.

You didn't need to be religious to find /r/atheism obnoxious. Anybody remember that "faces of atheism" meme years back? Possibly the most obnoxious, pretentious and self-congradulatory thing I've ever seen become popular on reddit. At first it was funny, but reddit is pretty good at pushing jokes long after they've become stale.

It was a place meant as a consolation/safe-space for people being hated on for not believing in stuff without proof.

It became a place to hate on everyone who didn't believe in atheism.

Isn't that how every online community devolves? It starts as a place for a group to feel accepted, and then evolves to demonizing the other?

Evangelical Atheism

I welcomed that change. They had handpicked a few left-leaning subs like that one. I also remember there was one about feminism. I believe that was a bad idea, to position themselves like that. Maybe it was a good idea when reddit was a niche website. Now, as far as I know, they simply have an algorithm that shows the most popular posts of all subs, except a few ones that are banned (like the popular the_donald, a sub for supporters of Donald Trump). I'm not saying that I like the idea of a blacklist or that it is the best solution, but it's better than a whitelist.

/r/the_donald should have been closed a long time ago, due to their users and their mods breaking the rules (hate speech encouragement, mainly) that the rest of subreddits have to respect. Reddit has a dark incentive to keep it open, because it's a very popular community that helps Reddit make money, via ads and Reddit Gold.

Go read r/politics comments for 5 minutes and then go read r/the_donald comments for 5 minutes, then come back and tell me which subreddit has the most hate speech. Also let's not forget that r/politics mods sold the subreddit to Shareblue for $2 million.

Do you have a citation for the $2M figure? I tried searching a bit. All I found were random sites saying roughly the same stuff conspiracy subreddits or sites were saying.

I’m not saying something didn’t go on, but if something did happen, where did that number come from besides “anonymous source[s]”

Cite?

Challenge accepted.

The current top comment on the current top post on /r/politics [1]:

>David Frum said it best this morning on NPR, his call for unity isn't actually a call for unity, he's demanding that everyone to support him and his policies.

The current top comment on the current top post on /r/The_Donald [2]:

>Schumer looked disgusting. Glasses at the end of his nose. Very disrespectful.

The politics comment might be biased but it is a least a political opinion worth discussing. The comment on The Donald is at best a childish insult and while I personally wouldn't call it "hate speech" I wouldn't be shocked if it was some form of antisemitic dog whistle. I think you are showing your own biases if you think those two subs have a similar level of discourse.

[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/anf6vn/trump_will...

[2] - https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/anf6ov/i_see_sc...

It's a reference to a classic Trump tweet: https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/14958910416893952...

(Edit to the guy below: I'm not saying I disagree with you, just adding some context.)

The disgusting and disrespectful portions might be a reference, but it was the "Glasses at the end of his nose" line that jumped out as a potential dog whistle. The response with 25 upvotes that talks about Shumer's "sniveling nose" also doesn't help.

I know that politicians getting criticized for their looks is just part of the equation and Trump is a big victim of that. However it is a little different when you are criticizing a Jewish person's "sniveling nose", especially in a community that is routinely accused of being hateful and antisemitic.

EDIT: This comment is being heavily downvoted, but I am not sure why. Like I said in my original post this wouldn't meet my personal definition of hate speak. However is it really outlandish to suggest that a community that has been accused of antisemitism might be signaling their antisemitism when their criticism of a Jewish person is the most stereotypical physical characteristic of the Jewish people?

The antisemitism accusation is completely over-the-top ridiculous. Trump's own daughter is a Jew. Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, and not one democrat showed up for the ceremony. There are a couple openly antisemitic members of congress now, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. Louis Farrakhan hasn't even been disowned.

This is a case of projection if there ever was one.

Yeah Trump broke people's brains. Look at this anti-semite: http://i2.cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/170522092440-02-tru...

There is a lot wrong with this comment.

To start with, nothing I said here was directed towards Trump so Ivanka isn't relevant. Even if she was, aren't we past the whole "some of my friends are black" excuse for bigotry? Plenty of people otherize a group while thinking the people they know in that group are "one of the good ones".

The next big problem is the equating Jews with all of Israel. It is entirely possible for someone to be antisemitic and pro-Israel or anti-Israel and not antisemitic. Israel is an independent nation with its own politics and there are plenty of Jews there with any number of political ideologies. Over recent years the political climate of Israel has been skewing right (in part due to the support of the American right/Evangelicals who are pro-Israel and not necessarily pro-Jews). It is therefore natural that members of the political left in this country are reacting by distancing themselves from the political actions of Israel.

I am not going to get into a debate about Palestine, Farrakhan, or anything more political than than what I mentioned above. HN is not the place for that discussion and I don't think that discussion has any relevance to the original question of whether mocking a Jewish person's nose is potentially antisemitic.

> Trump's own daughter is a Jew.

She's also a woman, but I don't think anyone would see that as sufficient to refute the claim that Trump is a misogynist. Not that Trump was even referred to here except as a victim of the popular act of mocking politicians appearance.

> Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem

Being a Christian Zionist, or politically pandering to Christian Zionists, isn't incompatible with anti-Semitism.

Ok so what exactly has he done that IS anti-semetic then?

How many Trump tweets can be classic? I’d wager you’d try to give this context for any reference to any Trumpian thing. Which dilutes it meaning anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com