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Comment by cypherpunks | Hacker News Reader

I read reddit, but I would never buy a gold account. The site has too much hate speech, and it is hard to support that financially. Between the misogyny and the atheist anti-Christian bigotry, it's pretty bad. You don't have to be either a woman or a theist to see that's wrong.

The question of how to address this issue while maintaining free speech is a more complex one. The reddit founders, however, have shown no interest in finding ways to improve site quality from this perspective, and indeed, appear to support the bigotry.

Anyway, I bear a huge grudge against the site because they banned my account for sockpuppeting and harassment, so take all of the above with a grain of salt.

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The site has too much hate speech, and it is hard to support that financially. Between the misogyny and the atheist anti-Christian bigotry, it's pretty bad. You don't have to be either a woman or a theist to see that's wrong.

The site doesn't promote hate speech, it allows free speech. Also I think you're overstating things.

The question of how to address this issue while maintaining free speech is a more complex one.

Free speech and censorship are mutually exclusive. Reddit already has mechanisms to allow community censorship (report posts, post deletion by moderators, banning, invite-only subreddits, etc.), but paid reddit employees only step in when things get out of hand.

Also the community is very fickle. Any perceived censorship by reddit employees that seems suspect and they get out the pitchforks. This has happened a few times (e.g. the Sears incident).

I do think the front page could be better filtered, though. Right now the default reddit front page is pretty... weird.

To make it less weird, run something (e.g. RES) to filter out all posts linking to imgur. You'll be amazed at the difference.

RES, for anyone not in the know: http://reddit.honestbleeps.com/

I was not proposing censorship. Reddit, as well as slashdot, HN, digg, etc. have a community process developed with the intent that the best comments make it to the top. The structure of that process determines what makes it to the top. Changes to that process can, very substantially, cut down on amount of certain classes of degenerate content. When bigotry began to appear on reddit, the reddit founders did nothing to combat it (and, indeed, slightly encouraged it). At the time, I think it would have been fairly easy to contain.

At this point, I'm not sure what can be done, since now bigots form a substantial portion of the reddit community.

For example, there was this guy named Lou Franklin who was probably the biggest bigot in the history of the site, and they took YEARS to finally ban his account.

I'd be interested in seeing any actual evidence you have for any of this, if any. The specific subreddits (such as /r/atheism) might sometimes be construed as a circle-jerk, but I've yet to see out-right hate speech against any sect of person that wasn't down-voted to hell.

That said, if you're a Christian on a site full of free-thinking and free speech such as reddit, you're going to have to be thick-skinned. Most, if not all, mainstream religions have never been kind to free-thinkers of their time, so you have to understand any resentment we may or may not have towards theists.

Notice how you automatically assume that the person pointing out bigotry is in the oppressed minority. This is not always the case.

If you expect a Christian on a site full of atheists to have to be thick-skinned, then by the same logic, you should expect an atheist in a high school full of Christians to be thick skinned. I don't think either of those conclusions is acceptable.

Actually, the similar situation would be an atheist in a high school full of christians in a region that's predominantly atheist, and he's not forced to be there: he has thousands of high schools to choose from, and doesn't have to go to school at all unless he wants to. Also, the only reason he was interested in this particular christian high school in the first place was the inquisitive, intellectual, creative atmosphere generated by all those christians.

> inquisitive, intellectual, creative atmosphere generated by all those christians

Are you thinking of the same reddit? It's a web site of funny videos, pictures of cats, rage comics, memes, and stupid jokes, and the occasional groupthink. 18 of the 25 front page links are imgur. Of the remaining 7, four are dumb discussions on reddit. One is a news article about the reddit founder (random crime story; otherwise uninteresting). One is a news link on youtube of actual news (if somewhat biased), and one is a link to an interesting study. Depending on how you count, that's 4-8% useful content. When you get into comments, it's even dumber.

reddit had a community of inquisitive, intellectual, creative individuals when it was formed at Harvard. Over time, the idiots and the bigots moved in, and right now it's a web site for wasting time on stupid amusements.

I was listening to right wing talk radio on a long car drive a few months back. What struct me was that the host, who mostly spewed venomous lies, would constantly refer to his viewers by some term (I forget the exact wording) like "the best and the brightest." I feel like reddit users are the left-wing equivalent of that. Clueless groupthink, combined with a very high opinion of themselves.

As an atheist, you're also free to move to a different country if Christianity bother you. US is 76.8% Christian. China is officially atheist. The only reason you're interested in this country is because it was founded on the Puritan work ethic, and has a very high level of social capital coming from Judeochristian values. But you shouldn't stay here and bitch about it. Same thing with blacks trying to go to the (better) white schools in the South prior to Brown vs. Board of Education -- they had their own place where they'd be accepted. Have fun with that logic.

Bigotry doesn't belong anywhere, even if people are free to leave. Intolerance hurts atheists more than it does Christians, and you're an idiot for endorsing it.

If it's been said once it's been said a thousand times over: if you're looking at the reddit frontpage for anything beyond slightly humorous cat pics or rage comics, then you're doing it wrong.

The stuff that gets to the frontpage is there because it's the most commonly appealing thing in the largest original subreddit communities (r/pics, etc). The intelligent discussions happen behind the scenes, on the small to medium sized subreddits. Anyone that's been on reddit for more than a week understands this.

There certainly are intelligent people in any community beyond a given size. You'll find intelligent Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheist, and Hindus. You'll find intelligent evolutionists and creation scientists. You'll find intelligent Republicans and Democrats. There are smart people who listen to Mozard, and smart people who listen to Limbaugh. You'll also find idiots in each of those communities as well. The ratios will be a little different in some cases, but in all cases, there will be both smart and dumb.

By that token, there are, without a doubt, plenty of smart people on reddit. They are, as your comment implies, a tiny minority, confined to a few subreddits (and those are mostly characterized by groupthink -- e.g. any conservative comment on most liberal subreddits will get voted down, no matter how intelligent and well thought out). The front page is defined by what most people vote for, and that's rage comics, misogyny, with the occasional sprinkling of anti-Christian bigotry (this used to be more prominent, but the average IQ has dropped to the point where r/atheism is beginning to look smart). That's representative of the average reddit user.

All that said, I'm not looking for anything on the front page beyond a way to waste a bit of time. When I first joined reddit, I looked to it for intelligent articles. Later, I looked to it for amusement. Now, I look to it less and less, since memes aren't the same thing as wit.

Again, as I stated in my original post, I'd like to see evidence of any of this.

I can't really agree with that- it's hard to really define Reddit's "community"- one of it's strongest features is the 'subreddit' compartmentalisation. Personally, I have long since unsubscribed from the atheism and politics subreddits, so they aren't a part of my personal Reddit experience.

In case it's not obvious, someone logged into the cypherpunks account, edited the above comment, and changed the password.

cypherpunks is a generic account shared by many people on many websites. The username and password is cypherpunks/cypherpunks where allowed, and cypherpunks/cypherpunks1 where the username and password must be different. E-mail is usually cypherpunks@mailinator.com. It allows you to use websites while maintaining a semblance of anonymity.

This is now broken on HN. redditors rise to new heights in their debating ability.

I'm not going to repost all comments from the discussion, but the original comment was along the lines of:

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