The move has therefore managed to reduce the exposure that non-active participants have to toxic behaviour, and the normalization of said behaviour as something acceptable/tolerated.
When various less-desirable groups existed on reddit, it was easy to monitor and gauge their size and their beliefs. It was possible to engage with them on some levels. Now they are scattered across various difficult to observe channels and are fully enclosed in an echo chamber that amplifies their beliefs that much more.
The early days of large social platforms like Reddit was the only time in the last several hundred years when it was possible to get a reasonable estimate of what segment of the population held what beliefs, including the less popular ones. Being able to get an objective view of that distribution was the first step in qualifying and addressing the underlying issues.
Instead we are sweeping those demographics under the rug again, and destroying the ability to study and interact with them.
We have a lot of evidence that marginalising sufficiently large groups leads to tremendous backlash when they reach critical mass, e.g. almost every revolution in history. I think we can agree that doing exactly that which failed every time before is not a productive avenue.
> having hateful views
Let's not conflate hateful views with 'toxic' views. The term toxic refers to any unpopular view. In addition to hate speech, this includes various sexual preferences, political views, anti-science movements, mens rights groups, etc.
Is this a terminological distinction you just made up? In the usage I'm familiar neither "hateful" nor "toxic" is a term of art.
Not sure how the distinction between 'hateful' and 'toxic' could possibly be contentious.
Harder to track also means harder to find. Sounds great to me. Let's make sure anyone who worms their way into those dark places knows without doubt that they're detestable, that civil society stands united against them. Maybe with some time, the boredom of the next generation can be directed to less evil ends.
Seems like a lot of comments here don’t want to do anything because it won’t completely eliminate the idea.
I don’t expect these ideas will ever be eradicated but my issue has always been that these platforms, especially Twitter and Reddit and especially YouTube, present these “underground” ideas alongside “mainstream” ideas and amplify it and suggest it to people that otherwise would have never stumbled upon it. And they present to the user as content of equal quality to ideas that are actually based in science and real research, not manipulation and cherry picked data.
The internet has plenty of space for everyone, but we don’t need to raise bad ideas to the same table as good ones. Just as we shouldn’t be covering “intelligent design” alongside evolution to our kids as an equal alternative.
The nirvana fallacy seems like a very popular defense for gatekeeping changes to something.
>we don’t need to raise bad ideas to the same table as good ones. Just as we shouldn’t be covering “intelligent design” alongside evolution to our kids as an equal alternative.
If you don't find it surprising that people can be influenced by their social environment (spoiler: you shouldn't), this seems like an unavoidable conclusion.
The "marketplace of ideas" is an idea that puts a little too much faith in rationality. It seems as dysfunctional as other markets in that a lot of people make irrational decisions, which have consequences, without caring about (or noticing) the externalities.