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Comment by simion314 | Hacker News Reader

That is not true, we disagree here on HN on many topics like software freedom, is Apple a monopoly, is Tesla autopilot good or bad etc but persons that disagree with my view points can disagree without becoming toxic. For me toxic comments are comments that are int the first place illogical, use false facts or speculation as truth, use personal attacks or aggressive language, generalize one or a few data points to the whole and mainly they are not people that can have a coherent, reasonale logical discussion.

My point toxic != someone that I disagree, your are generalizing.

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Fair enough, the implication doesn't go both ways. My point was that all things considered "toxic" are just things that are not being agreed with. Of course, things can also not be agreed with without being considered "toxic".

>Fair enough, the implication doesn't go both ways. My point was that all things considered "toxic" are just things that are not being agreed with

Can you give an example because you make no sense or you are stating something obvious, yeah communities do not agree with toxic things because they are bad.

The toxic meaning is clear in the context of each community, if you don't agree then don't join, if you want to join follow the rules, if you just want to join and not follow the rules and you want to create harm then you are toxic.

Reddit is notably not a community. I can accept a community deciding that it doesn't want certain opinions to be expressed because they don't fit the communal culture, but this doesn't apply to Reddit, which is explicitly a platform for people to start their own communities.

I think there's some room for common sense as to what communities should be given a platform and which shouldn't, for example I don't tihnk /r/coontown should be given a platform in western society which is overwhelmingly anti-racist. But the moment you start banning communities based on criteria that go beyond basic common sense of your society, especially of you do so based on vague and ill-defined rules, you're no longer being a neutral platform. If Reddit wants to be a community as such that's fine, but from my perspective that's explicitly not their branding, and it doesn't seem to be the opinon of Reddit users as agood whole either.

I was referring to sub-reddits and the moderation that happens there where "toxic", trolling , offtopic ares clear terms.

Not the full reddit platform, it is a private thing and a business, if keeping toxic sub-reddits on would make them money and good PR then they would keep them , it was a business decision and if it is legal then it is nothing you can do then move your community elsewhere.

I also don't like when business ban perfectly legal things like adult content but what can you do? Make a law forcing business and private people host things that they don't want, if you had a forum and someone would spam it with disgusting images don't you want the freedom to remove that? Reddit is not a monopoly, we have forums and they even work better for some content type

You're right that people are more likely to use words like 'toxic' when they disagree. But your generalization goes too far, and the cases where it fails are important. I moderate posts on HN all the time whose views I personally agree with. That's probably the most important capacity a moderator needs. Some of those posts I would definitely call toxic.

To pick an example that won't upset any people (ok, not many people), if someone shows up in Common Lisp threads on HN with the sort of chauvinism that destroyed comp.lang.lisp, that's toxic and I'm going to moderate even if I share their views about Lisp. This is a real example btw. I found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9813527, but there have been a bunch of cases.

The word "toxic" has no meaning anymore, because it's all relative to the person using it.

For example, in the game Overwatch, "toxic" got mostly used as "this person does not play with the characters currently recognized as the most optimal". Just playing the game differently than the pros/current metagame was literally considered toxic by a non-negligible amount of people.

When someone says "ban this person for being toxic", one has no idea what they actually mean. To some people, even respectful trash talk is "toxic". By catering to people calling things "toxic", one encourages witch hunts by people.

Your own post is an example of toxic <posts,comments,behavior> not having a standard accepted definition: "For me toxic comments are comments that ...".

You are still using some extreme example and generalizing.

Say the word online, troll it has a well known definition, I don't care if you or that dude there is using it wrong, the definition is clear and the majority of humans are using it right.

Second if a community decides that behavior X is not allowed then that community will ban X and fck your freedom of speech or whatever , on the community forum,sub-reddits, IRC the community rules apply, you don't like it don't join the forum,sub-reddit

It is not trolling. If it was trolling, I would have said "trolling". The reason I used that example is because in someone's arbitrary definition of "toxic" they extended it to mean "not playing exactly how I think someone should play".

A normal word with an accepted definition doesn't get randomly abused like this.

No, within games and on twitter "toxic" is used in a variety of ways by a variety of people. I used one somewhat common example but not everybody agreed on that, because they had different arbitrary definitions of what being toxic is.

It has no standard meaning anymore. What's toxic to me isn't toxic to a random person on reddit or on twitter, and that's what the problem is. I'm not discussing "trolling".

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